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July 19-25, 1996
| Front Page | In
This Week's Issue | Subscribe | Special
| Archive | About
AsianWeek |
July 19-25, 1996
By Frank Wu
I am a native-born citizen of the United States of America. Under current constitutional law, because I was born here I automatically became an American.
Like most Americans, I usually take my status for granted. But like many people of color, I know that occasionally my right to remain in the country of my birth, along with my right to participate meaningfully and equally in its culture and government, depends on my ability to assert that status. I have had my citizenship challenged enough to believe that in a multiracial society, birthright citizenship is vital to ensuring that our nation of immigrants lives up to its ideal that anyone can become an American.
I am a Midwesterner. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in Detroit, Mich.
When I was growing up, I enjoyed visiting Windsor, Ontario, in Canada, for Chinese food. Many Chinese American families, and Detroit residents of various backgrounds, travel across the Ambassador Bridge on weekends for dim sum or bargain shopping.
When entering the territory of our northern neighbor, Canadian border guards generally asked a few routine questions and sometimes made a friendly comment about the cuisine. Returning to my homeland can lead to a somewhat different encounter.
A few years ago, I was stopped by the Customs Service. I was in a car with two other Asian Americans. We also were with another friend of mine, who happened to be Caucasian.
After we were told that we would have to answer a few extra questions, we went inside the office and waited with ten other people - all but two of whom looked to be non-Hispanic whites. The officers asked each of us where we had been born and what we did for a living.
For some reason, the agents decided to inquire further with me. They wanted to know, for example, how I had met my white friend, how long we had known one another, and what was the nature of our relationship. They seemed satisfied by my answers and released us. The entire incident lasted a quarter of an hour; it was not anything terrible.
Afterward, though, I wondered who the Customs Service thought we were and what they thought we were doing. So I wrote to them.
A month later, I received a reply from my government. The official response stated, "Contrary to belief, law enforcement officials, including Customs and Immigration inspectors, cannot distinguish between honorable, law-abiding citizens and violators on the basis of their physical appearance alone."
Of course, they are right. Indeed, that is just the point. You cannot tell the difference between people who are law-abiding and people who could potentially be law-breaking by the way they happen to look. That is why you shouldn't guess, especially when you might be focusing on race, either consciously or unconsciously.
Other than race, I cannot think of any difference the Customs Service would be able to identify between me and my white friend that raise suspicions. We have similar social, economic and educational backgrounds. We speak the same language. We even were dressed alike.
The letter continued, "Many attempts at alien smuggling are made by people posing to be friends to a ‘non-suspect' traveler.... Even though the questions may seem irrelevant or out of place to you, there is a purpose for asking them."
Unfortunately, that reasoning makes sense only if you accept assumptions about individuals based race. While the letter refrains from referring to race, there isn't anything else it offers for distinguishing between the "suspect" friend and the "nonsuspect" traveler. The letter makes no effort to explain why I was suspect and my friend was not. Whatever the reason for asking about the "authenticity" of relationships between people of color and whites, the same purpose should exist for asking similar questions of two whites, if anyone should be asked at all.
Based on my own experiences, I believe that I saw a small part of a much larger problem. The Customs Service approach reveals that problem, which consists of doubting the citizenship of nonwhites and then trying to excuse racial stereotyping as reasonable. People who assume that their own American identity is assured may be puzzled by the phenomenon, but I know too many other people who share memories of that embarrassing episode of being asked, "Where are you from?" only to answer, and be asked again, "No, where are you really from?"
Due to the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment dividing our society further into "us" and "them," more Americans can be expected to be interrogated about their identity in this manner. Birthright citizenship - the rule that ensures everyone born here is an American - provides an essential response. Birthright citizenship keeps the promise of equal opportunity for immigrants.
In America, our immigration epic has always consisted of two stories. The positive plotline is our tradition of celebrating the arrival and the contributions of innumerable racial and ethnic groups and individuals. Its metaphors are the melting pot, salad bowl, and mosaic. The negative counterpart is our habit of fearing immigrants, warning of their customs, and blaming them for economic difficulties. Its metaphors are a floodtide, an invasion, the Tower of Babel.
Our immigration laws represent a struggle to reconcile these conflicts. Immigration laws are bound up together with other laws. The rules of citizenship have been shaped by the struggle for black civil rights, notably the Fourteenth Amendment which contains the guarantee of "equal protection" of the laws for all of us.
Just recently, birthright citizenship has come under fire because of illegal immigration. In myth, the illegal immigrant is depicted most often as the migrant worker from Mexico who treks back and forth regularly between his family and his job, sometimes as hundreds of Chinese laborers smuggled professionally in the cargo hold of a ship that has run aground, an entire fleet of Haitian boat people fleeing a repressive regime only to be met by U.S. gunboats on the high seas, or the Arab terrorist who masterminded the bombing of the World Trade Center.
The portrayal of all illegal immigrants as Latinos and other people of color has created the image that all Latinos and racial minorities are illegal immigrants. When people such as the vigilante posses patrolling airports these days say that they see foreigners all around them, they may well be looking at Latinos and Asians who are fifth-generation Texans or Californians. They know no better than the Customs Service agents who is a citizen.
The illegal immigrant has become the welfare queen of the 1990s. The expecting Mexican mother who sneaks into the country to give birth to a citizen child is a symbolic sister to the unwed African American woman who becomes pregnant to increase her welfare benefits. She is a fictional figure. The single spectacular case engenders a stereotype.
We must consider whether we are prepared to accept the consequences of ending birthright citizenship. Innocent children would be left in limbo if they could not demonstrate the legal status of their parents. We will have accepted that we must prove our citizenship, and acquiesced in challenges to it.
Birthright citizenship has developed out of a history of diversity. It brings us together. Far from being based on an "accident of birth," it is based on a worthwhile tradition of welcoming immigrants. The accident would be abolishing it.
Frank Wu is assistant professor at Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., and Washington correspondent for AsianWeek.