The Human Dignity at Stake in the Immigration Debate

Click here for a Washington Post (May 11) story on the human aspects of immigration and immigration enforcement.  It starts like this:

A bus pulled into the garage of the Tucson courthouse and unloaded about 15 Mexican border crossers, all sweaty and dusty from their failed attempt to cross the desert. The courthouse guards stood in a line across from us. One of them made a joke: “Smells like chicken.” They all laughed. Then they put on rubber gloves and searched us, patting around our ankles and belts. They put chains around our waists and cuffed our hands to the chains and then cuffed our ankles, too. As they cuffed the ankles of the Mexican man standing next to me, he started to sob. In a firm but gentle voice, the guard cuffing him whispered in Spanish ” Calmate ” — be calm — but the man couldn’t control himself and kept on sobbing. The other guards were not so kind. They gave us hard stares, laughing among themselves. I was the odd man in the group, a white, middle-class journalist from New York arrested while covering a protest over a lion hunt. But I had to admit there was a certain rough justice to my presence. Every year when the leaves get thick on my lawn, I go down to the day-laborer waiting zone in the next town and hire a few Latino men to help me. I always ask their stories, and they always tell me the same tale of fleeing poverty or political oppression and slipping across the border and living for years away from their families, afraid to go home. But it had all been abstract until that moment. As the guards herded us into the building, we all quickly learned that the leg chain made it impossible to take a complete stride — the chain came up short and jerked, cutting the cuff into your ankle. It took only a step or two to learn to shuffle, but something in that awkward shuffle broke the soul. I realized that this is what animals feel like when they are hobbled. Reduced to that helpless crippled motion, they know what it is to be dominated. That was my tiny glimpse of what the protesters who have been turning out in so many American cities are talking about — the loss of human dignity. And the loss got deeper with each hobbled shuffle. As the guards herded us toward an elevator, we saw a small wire cage in the back. The formal purpose of the cage was clear, to separate the prisoners from the elevator controls and the guards. But there seemed to be another reason, too. “Pack it in, pack it in, pack it in,” the guards said, over and over. Again, it was hard not to feel like so many cattle, and that seemed to be the point. It would have been easy enough to wait for the next elevator.

KJ