I was awoken late last Monday night by a man opening my car door and demanding I produce what he wanted. “I need documents. From all of you,” he demanded. I was startled awake and clumsily fumbled through my things in the backseat to produce what he was looking for. I was not being robbed at gunpoint or approached by a criminal. In fact, I was not being victimized at all. Instead, I was being interrogated by an attractive young man in a green uniform which clearly read “Border Patrol” and was being demanded to produce identification in the form of a passport.
If you had asked me a year ago whether I would spend my Memorial Day weekend being asked to produce proof of my citizenship I would have told you that you were crazy, delirious, or perhaps abusing hallucinogenic drugs. A year ago I would have looked at you doe-eyed and exclaimed, “Illegal immigrants are just that – illegal. They shouldn’t be here.” I would have run through a laundry list of conservative viewpoints chronicling how undocumented immigrants are soaking up our social services, claiming our jobs, and failing to contribute to the government the way loyal taxpayers do. That is how we saw it in Georgia. Sure, immigrants may clean our gutters, paint our houses, or mow our lawns, but you couldn’t get much further from the border than an urban east coast city. So, how did immigration really impact our daily lives?
However, this much has changed. In the fall of 2009 I watched a documentary called “La Sexta Seccion”, or “The Sixth Section”, as part of a Spanish language class at Duke University. As men chronicled their lives as undocumented workers, I felt myself overcome with a feeling I had never experienced toward undocumented workers. Most people like to call it compassion. These men work to be paid below minimum wage equipped only with hopes and dreams to better the lives of their children and families in Mexico. This newfound sensation was not an epiphany by any means, but the beginning of a struggle to see immigration for what it was – a multifaceted issue. I became more intrigued as class discussion continued. Exactly where are my opinions coming from? What is my personal experience with immigration? Why are immigrants coming to the US? How can I learn more about this issue, which I once thought was so straightforward?
Thus, I found myself applying to a selective program called DukeEngage. Through this program I would travel to Tucson, Arizona to examine immigration firsthand and learn to make my own judgments. Little did I know that soon Arizona would become the spotlight of our nation and its new Senate Bill 1070 the topic of discussion. I found myself entering a political battlefield with an already shaky opinion and struggling to stay afloat in a sea of well established opinions.
This is how I ended up in a 15 passenger van being interrogated by the Border Patrol. I have only been in Arizona for about a week now, but I have visited champions for migrant rights, border patrol offices, Arizona courtrooms, and the Mexican border. I still find myself questioning some of my new found opinions, but mostly I find myself questioning my identity as an American. How could laws so inherently “American” be so oppressive and harmful? Why did I so vehemently defend laws which allowed border patrol to question my citizenship? To what extent am I to tolerate this? Where do we draw the line on infringing on rights, both of citizens and immigrants?
For now I am left struggling to discover my voice in this issue, how I feel, why immigration problems arose, where I fit in, and what I believe. However, this much is true: never judge an issue before you experience it for yourself. Always be skeptical of the information you receive. Look around you. Pay attention. Immigration is complicated, complex, and confusing. The border is all around us. It is in Durham. It is in Atlanta. It is in Tucson. You owe it to yourself to discover why you feel the way you do.
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