Isn't Migration Natural?

I spent last weekend spooning with members of the group as we tried to stay warm in our tiny tent parked in the Grand Canyon National Forest’s Mather Campgrounds. We took the trip hoping to chronicle immigration issues on our way to one of the nation’s most astounding natural wonders. We stopped by “Montezuma’s Castle”, an old native ruin, on our way to the canyon. The ruin was a multiple story building “nestled” into the side of a cliff. I say “nestled” because to me, it looked like it was hanging on for dear life. The structure itself was amazing. The sheer fact that an architecturally sound structure could be built into the side of a cliff in 1100 A.D. was incredible. The intellect, skill, and liveliness of this village construction amazed me and changed my perspective on the native concept of community.

Many of the signs in the national park, though usually loaded with mundane information, mentioned that this particular tribe, the Sinaguas, disappeared without reason. The signs asked, “Did they flee overpopulation? Fire? Famine? Lack of water? Invaders?” Who really knows? Perhaps they fled their river valley for all of the above. Human nature is to flee what is hurting us, what is not working out. I began realizing that migration and change is natural. My ancestors fled Ireland to come to the United States. My parents fled the North and the Midwest for education. My grandparents flee the harsh New York winters and retreat to Florida every year. Migration and movement is perfectly normal and often even encouraged in the United States. Although our hunting and gathering ways are long gone, the human race still moves and migrates between different sedentary lifestyles.

The weekend passed by quickly and the backdrop of Grand Canyon sunrises, and the cheesiest Imax I’ve ever seen, left me time to ponder the concept of migration. Before I knew it, it was time to return to the desert heat of Tucson. On our way back we stopped by the remnants of a Japanese internment camp close to Phoenix. The internment camp was located on a local tribal reservation. We did not have permission from the tribal council to visit it, so we resorted to viewing a small memorial dedicated to those who had lived there. The memorial told of the hasty construction of the camp in just two months, the presence of two high schools, and the population that lived there. It also told of the Native American’s reluctance and disagreement to the presence of the camp on their land. The sign remarked that we should learn history so as it will never be repeated and the travesties that were Japanese internment camps shall never be again.

This thought, my visits over the weekend, and the current situation in Arizona started to come together. America has a history of embarrassingly sporting blemishes in places where we before had so proudly boasted triumph – the trail of tears, reservations, Japanese internment camps. We are that awkward middle school tween relishing in our own beauty only to awake the next morning to find a serious bout of acne. We boast of causes because they are “right”, because they are “American”. The Native Americans threatened our land, our superior traditions, so we fenced them in reservations out west and kept them from their ancestral homes. We condemned the Japanese, boasted superior morals, superior military power and confined them to desert internment camps.

There is a clear trend here. America, though I love her, builds walls, fences, camps, reservations to keep people out. To lock people up, only to later regret and publicly apologize for her naïve decisions. In some ways that is what is happening on the border here. We are preventing a natural migration process – a process that many of us take advantage of in the United States. We are shaming it, condemning it. We are keeping people out, but also keeping them in. We are not only preventing natural migration to the United States, but we are preventing travel from the United States as well. Why do we feel the incessant need to prevent something that is so human? Why do we condemn something so natural as being so wrong? Why are people no longer allowed to flee depression and desolate conditions? Why do we see it our duty to establish permanency?

These are questions I have been struggling to address for the past couple of days. It is hard for me to think that migrating 2,000 miles to Tucson, AZ is an acceptable path for me to choose. It is harder for me to think that migrating one mile from Nogales, Sonora, Mexico to Nogales, AZ for a day trip without a visa. What dictates one as acceptable and the other as not? What makes one encouraged and the other criminal?