All-American Crime: Reflections on Welcome the Wretched by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
In April, I had the privilege of participating in the UA Little Rock Ben J. Altheimer Symposium focused on Welcome the Wretched by immprof César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández (the Ohio State): Immigration Law, Access to Justice, and Rethinking the ‘Criminal Alien’. My written contribution to the symposium is titled All-American Crime: Reflections on Welcome the Wretched by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández.
Here is my introduction:
My mom was a newlywed when she was injured in a drunk driving accident. Her back was broken, her knee shattered. She used her arms to drag her body to the side of the Bay Bridge, out of traffic. She had trouble with those injuries for the rest of her life. My own earliest memory is of her on crutches, in a full leg brace, racing down a hallway towards me as I cried— an incident I can date to at least seven years after the Bay Bridge accident.
The drunk driver was neither arrested nor prosecuted. He went on to live a full life. He had two biological children and raised two more. He worked as a computer programmer, both freelance and in-house, even contracting with the federal government for work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a gig that almost certainly required security clearance. He never got in trouble with the law—apart from many, many speeding tickets. As for drinking, he mainly enjoyed a glass of (cheap) chardonnay at the end of the day while reading a novel. I know all of this because the drunk driver was my dad.
In Welcome the Wretched, Professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández observes “the United States is a country where crime is commonplace and criminals come in every form.” While “[m]ost people try to comply with the law most of the time,” he writes, “[a]ll of us fail to do so some of the time. Some of us own up to it. Most of us don’t.” Those words provide the jumping off point for this Essay.
Section I considers the pervasiveness of crime in America through the lens of my own lived experiences. In confronting my own criminality and that of my family, friends, and acquaintances, I build on the narrative foundation in Welcome the Wretched and ask the reader to consider how different (or not) we are from “criminal aliens.” Then, Section II considers the country’s current response to “migrant crime.” This section begins by acknowledging the racial disparities inherent in the identification and prosecution of “migrant crime,” and this section goes on to acknowledge how the country’s disproportionate response to “migrant crime”—expulsion from the United States— contributes to the sense that this is a unique form of criminality as opposed to, in Professor García Hernández’s words, “the product of the United States, flaws and all.” Finally, Section III makes the argument for eliminating statutory bars to relief from removal based on criminal conduct to allow room for the All-American second chance. Unlike Professor García Hernández’s push for reimagining citizenship, this Essay continues to see criminal conduct as relevant to immigration law, just not dispositive.
My husband was the first to read this essay. His immediate reaction was “when will you share this with the kids?” I was surprised. I assumed the kids would learn about my family secrets in the time honored way–from someone else, 20 years after my death. Or, at the very earliest, by finding this essay among my things … after my death. I have never shared much about my personal history with the kids.
I sat with my husband’s suggestion for a while, and, ultimately, I printed each kid their own copy of this essay, explaining that it included a fair number of family stories. And you know what? NEITHER KID READ IT. Proving, definitively, that no one reads law review articles.
True story.
But I love this essay. I conceived of it the second I read César’s book–on my flight out to a crimimm conference at Lewis & Clark nearly a year before the UALR symposium. Every word of his book sang to me. I hope my essay does it justice.
-KitJ