[Post 3] - Art & Activism: Immigration

Today we're biting off a BIG chunk of the American politics sandwich to dissect. Really, it's a topic that's flooded the world stage as major countries all seem to be citing 'issues' with immigration and overpopulation, the effects of which are creating a hostile place to come home to, both for people born in that country and those who venture there for a new life, undocumented or not. And the problem with immigration is the size of the issue.

I'm going to stick to speaking towards just the immigration we see in the United States since I only have ever lived here, rather than other places in the world. Generally speaking, the majority of countries count immigrants as a strength to their society rather than a burden, but the rhetoric from politicians and news outlets seems to be hell-bent on creating tensions between neighbors, co-workers, friends, and family around this issue. I want us to observe the facts of this topic versus what we're told, and then explore it through the eyes of some historic visionaries who had something to say on the matter with their artwork.

Lithograph of 'Liberty Enlightening the World' by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, 1886

In America, there is no work of art that stands taller or more prominent in all of our minds than the Statue of Liberty, titled 'Liberty Enlightening the World' by sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. Our country hosts just over 19% of the world's migrant population, which makes up 28% of our overall population within the country. We have always been a land of refuge, for people escaping land failures, work shortages, political or religious persecution, or seeking improved life opportunities. On the centennial celebration of America's independence, 'Liberty' was gifted to our country by France and Bartholdi, in recognition of the millions of immigrants we welcomed to our shores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Pause with me, if you will, for just thirty seconds to read the inscribed plaque that 'Liberty' stands upon, and consider each of these select words, purposely chosen from the poem that was written to help raise funds for the construction of our nation's treasure. The poem is called 'The New Colossus', written by Emma Lazarus (1883):

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Immigration is a terrifying experience even in the best of financial and legal circumstances. Moving to a new country, which has new languages, new people, new customs and culture, is a complete rewrite of how you live your life and express yourself. What is considered normal 'here', may be foreign and strange 'there'. Now consider that 71% of refugees are low or middle income individuals or families who risk losing any last shred of land or property or work that they have, in order to flee to a safer place. Imagine the conditions in which they live that would convince them that the only reasonable option left to them is to make a sudden, illegal, perilous journey to a foreign country with people that perhaps will look at them in disdain or physically and psychologically harm them. Yet they still choose this option; this is because the alternative is violence, death, or worse.

'Asilo' (Asylum) by J. Leigh Garcia, 2016

Garcia's 'Asilo' was a piece that gripped me, as I imagine it would for many others, due to the subject matter. In Texas, hundreds of migrant bodies are found along the little-known pathways that people attempt to use for crossing into America, and there have even been discoveries in Texas cemeteries of mass graves of unidentified migrants, sometimes several corpses within one body bag. As I researched these findings, I was met by truly terrible images of people - that's the key here, not that this was just a body or skull found, but a person - who died slowly and terribly all for just a chance to escape the terrors of their own home-countries. If the fate of where they come from is considered worse than a death by slow dehydration or heat exhaustion, terrible as it is to imagine, then it is really important that we reconsider what our world is doing and why these people are coming to the States.

'Legal Tender' (Moneda corriente) by Narsiso Martinez, 2022

I don't mean to suggest that it is solely the United States' responsibility to solve the problems of the entire world; my opinion is given that the immigrants of our nation provide necessary deflationary effects on our economy by being consumers and paying taxes, given that they perform some of our most crucial, but seldom desired occupations such as agriculture, manufacturing, or construction, I think that there is an opportunity for our government and the migration system we provide to improve. If processing applications is taking years and asylum seekers have weeks, maybe days, to make a decision in order to survive, then it's up to us to provide direction or assistance as human beings, rather than as employees or representatives of a system.

How did we arrive here, at such a time of crisis? Even other countries like the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada receive a large influx of refugees from places like the Middle East, Haiti, Somalia, Mexico, and a host of other places that are experiencing conflict. First world countries, or countries that are highly industrialized with advanced economies, are struggling with empathy. But why? Why do we fear so much more than we used to, when the research shows that each time immigrants are blamed as major sources of crime, the claim is disputed and then disproved (1869, 1909, 1931, 1994, and the present)? Why do we think they pose a greater terrorist threat, when the risk of being murdered by a foreign terrorist from 1975 to the present stands at 0.000027777777777777776%, with 99% of that total percentage attributing to the events of 9/11?

My theory, which perhaps requires further consideration and discussion, is the evolution of how we ingest information, particularly current events/news, and a long-term social failure that we each need to overcome in different ways.

First, information. I was born in 1989, as computers were becoming home computers, and their capabilities were increasing at break-neck speeds. To go from dial up internet connection and web pages loading for seven or eight minutes, it feels as though in less than a decade we were given instant worldwide access as soon as our devices were turned on, near-instant load speeds, and now constant, dynamically generated content that has been algorithmically trained to speak directly to every person as an individual, completely catered to their tastes, spending habits, opinions, and friend network.

Fear has been a driver of consumer habits, social group formations, and so many other things, but historically speaking, humans only ever had news as close as it could get to them: a radio, a newspaper, or a TV screen. Now, there is not one moment of our day that we are 'away' from accessing the news. We have smartphones, radios in our cars, social media and desktop reminders and emails from sources all around the world constantly vying for our attention. No wonder fear has increased. And in this age of resource-lacking misinformation and AI generated nonsense, no wonder our critical thinking has diminished. Combining a lack of emotional intelligence with an onslaught of doom (as that's what gets the most engagement and money flowing), our society is spiraling into a strange isolation.

'Strangers' by Edel Rodriguez, 2018

This leads into my second point, which is a social failure that is simultaneously not to blame on any one individual, and yet it is every individual's responsibility, and the ONLY way that we reverse course on the crumbling sense of human connection. Racism and xenophobia are concepts which are old and as worn out as our country and its fraying seams. Edel Rodriguez, a Cuban American who emigrated in 1980 to the United States, provides a frank rendition of the fear that exists within many Americans' minds: the 'boat people', faces hidden beneath the masks of monsters and ghosts, unfamiliar and full of terrifying prospect. But the sadness and pain reflected in 'Strangers' is not subtle. The painting is more like a mourning, a procession of heartbroken, bewildered and traumatized groups trying desperately to make it. The least of their concerns should be what they look like to other people, so long as they can make it to their new home alive, with the chance to actually live. But of course, they must consider how they look, carefully, if they mean to make it through the arduous journey ahead. To address this issue of fear, though, let's talk about how an immigrant 'looks'. If we look at the history of immigration, we'd be surprised to find that our fears and hostilities towards migrants and refugees is like looking into a mirror of self hatred, rather than staring at the unknown.

Again, sticking to just the experience of being born and raised in America, we can see clearly our confused journey through xenophobia starting with the 'Know-Nothing' party in the mid 1800s. From Catholic immigrants from Ireland being targeted as destroyers of Protestantism, to Chinese and Japanese immigrants seeking to dominate and control western civilization in the early 1900s, to an influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans that inspired the 'Emergency Quota Act', from which we never recovered. Revised into the 'Immigration Act of 1924', the laws placed a hard cap on numerical limits of immigrants allowed into the country, and a system for establishing limits among those numbers. We can see some of the worst results of this set of laws during World War II, where Jewish refugees were not given any additional aid to escape Nazi Germany. It was only AFTER the war's end that quotas were adjusted to allow more of them into the USA, but without increasing our immigration totals allowed overall.

The reality is that nearly every person alive in the United States today is of immigrant blood, whether it was a recent relocation or whether you trace your ancestry all the way back to settlers of the country. Only our American Indian cultures can claim any actual grievance to these things, and historically speaking the only grievances they've provided have been the lack of care, material support, and treaty obligated work they're owed by the same government that treats immigrants with such disdain. Theirs is a history of newcomers bringing destruction, colonization, violence, pestilence, and worse. When our true-native citizens speak up on the topic of illegal immigration, it is an eye-opening opportunity to listen, to learn, and to reframe our perspective on the ideas of borders, the human plight, and how this all is translated into law by the government.

Let's consider who we are right in this moment. What are our ethnicities? Would they have, at one point, been looked at differently or judged for simply being of that race? I invite each of us to do this research, especially those with conflicted views of immigration. If I were to ask you to imagine an 'illegal immigrant' in your mind, what do they look like? The harsh truth of it is this: no matter what image you conjured in your head, there is an unintentional fear feeding that visualization, a misunderstanding of a person, a culture, and of the country that they come from. There is no such thing as a distinctive 'look' for an immigrant of any legal status. They look like you, me, and anyone else you see around you throughout your day.

'Children in the migrant caravan are lifted over a gate at the Guatemala-Mexico border on October 19' by John Moore, 2018

Our country -- no, our world -- is a place of imagined borders. Governing powers decided over history what place is where, who belongs to what place, and our societies have upheld this order for the sake of civility and prosperity in those places. It's clear that while this worked in some places, it failed horrendously in others. It could even be argued that the places experiencing 'success' are just on a slower slope of failure because of the resources they'd lucked out on finding. But no matter how we look at it, the issue of immigration must be held under the same lens that we should use to address crime and poverty: pragmatism. It's become clear through hundreds of years of trial and error that our reactivity to things continues to lead us to frightening realities where we consider, at the drop of a hat, who we can blame and look down upon at any given time, to explain away our problems. The truth of our world is that we all live in it and must share in it together, both the good and the bad.

We must understand that our planet is big, but it is only so large to hold so many people and to house so many major conflicts which endanger the life that lives within the area of conflict. We must accept that in order to take care of one another, we must be ready to accept and aid each other, in this case refugees or illegal immigrants, with haste. This means that our immigration process must fundamentally change. It must not take years to process applications, but weeks. All countries should adopt this mindset, but the United States as a country that represents the plight of those longing for true freedom, should be the first to initiate a sincere effort towards expanding our immigration system with resources, new hires, and new legislation. If we need funding for these things, please look no further than the billions and trillions of dollars our government spends to bail out banks, or the un-auditable military budget that allows 'old' tanks to be sold to local law enforcement.

As we await this action from our government, what can we do as individuals? The most obvious of opportunities is one that you'll hear constantly, but it really is paramount: vote, and especially vote local. In order to create a system that reliably represents us, we must use our power as citizens to vote for candidates who not only make promises, but follow through on them. As it stands, we can clearly see that neither of our major parties in the States are reliable. We must MAKE them reliable. This will take a concerted effort from all of us by utilizing our votes and our dollars and our attention. Not just for politicians either, but for media outlets. Voting is...a huge topic really, an entirely separate post I'm going to be doing at some point so that we can look at more detailed strategies. In the meantime, please trust, or research, that your vote is of the utmost importance. Use it. Do not let anyone convince you that it is not worth your time and energy to vote.

For more immediately digestible approaches to addressing immigration:

Have conversations. Approach them with genuine curiosity and compassion, and take the facts with you. More than anything, help people to put themselves into the position of someone fleeing their home for a chance at safety.

Research what the current process is for immigrants. Look into what rights people have, and help to share those resources around. Look up organizations or foundations that are helping immigrants become legalized, or at least be represented as they seem asylum.

Donate to important causes, such as Immigration Advocates, the ACLU, or the ILRC. Search for our own as well, there are many local organizations that could use your help, especially if you live by a border or in a sanctuary city! Whether it's $1 or $100, it doesn't matter. Every single penny stretches so much farther than you think.

Attend protests and sign petitions. It's extremely important to be heard in any way possible, even outside of your vote and your wallet. Many people who need or want to speak up can not for fear of retaliation from local authorities or from the government; we must listen to what they can and will say, and ensure that those things are addressed.

One last option from me: MAKE. ART. You've seen just through reading this article that the messages shared through pieces of art can have world-changing effects. Art can take a complex subject, such as this looooong read you've just gone through (thanks!), and present it as digestible, with immediate emotional impact. Photography, sculpture, painting, felt craft, whatever you can possibly imagine can be used to create meaningful work. The internet allows this work to be instantly accessible to everyone. So please, even in dark times, even if you create something small, or make it slowly, please still create art and share it with the world. The Violent Environments of the Mexico-U.S. Border Which industries employ the most immigrant workers? 7,000 migrants with one goal: Head north Uncovering America: Immigration and Displacement

HOMEWORK: One thing that can help people understand one another is by sharing our unique cultures. As I was writing this, I read a lot of fascinating articles and watched small documentaries on Youtube about different aspects of culture in Mexico. One thing that I learned about that I LOVE and wish more people knew about: alebrijes. They are folk art creatures, similar to a chimaera; an animal made up of many parts of existing animals. The difference here is that it is made up of four animals, one from each element of nature. So earth, air, fire, and water. Like sharing food, stories and mythologies from other places give you a vision of the creative minds of different cultures, helping to inspire new ideas, new stories, and new culture trends. Let's take part and create something new together!

Originally, alebrijes were made from paper mache or wood, but for the sake of this project being as accessible as possible, let's keep it open to any medium. Create your own alebrijes. You can choose any four animals you like, figure out how to combine them, then draw it out, sculpt it, collage some photos together, however you'd like to make your new buddy!

Example: Water animals could be some kind of fish, air animals can be birds, fire animals can be reptiles, earth animals can be rodents. But be creative and open-minded with your reasoning for the animals you choose! If you check out the Wikipedia page, or do a google image search, you'll see the interpretations are varied and wild, the possibilities are endless!