Free Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) by Aviva Chomsky

Preface
    As I began to give interviews and talks about my book
“They Take Our Jobs!” And 20 Other Myths about Immigration
, published in 2007, I became more and more convinced that a key, central issue that’s hampering those of us who support immigrant rights is the absence of a basic, fundamental ability to say “immigrant rights are human rights.” Immigration simply should not be illegal. No politician or talk-show commentator is going to risk saying this, but we have to.
    I stand by my arguments about the myths I deconstruct in the book (Immigrants DON’T take American jobs! Immigrants DO pay taxes! Immigrants ARE learning English!), but I also, deep down, think these arguments miss the point. Immigrants are human beings who have arbitrarily been classified as having a different legal status from the rest of the United States’ inhabitants. The only thing that makes immigrants different from anybody else is the fact that they are denied the basic rights that the rest of us have. There is simply no humanly acceptable reason to define a group of people as different and deny them rights.
    How can we claim to oppose discrimination based on national origin when our entire body of citizenship and immigration law is founded on discrimination based on national origin? When people ask me, “Why don’t they just apply for citizenship?” or “Why don’t they just come here legally?” they are betraying a fundamental ignorance of our immigration and citizenship laws. People don’t apply for citizenship or don’t obtain proper documents to come here, because the law forbids it. That’s right: the law forbids them to come to the United States or to apply for citizenship. US immigration law is based on a system of quotas and preferences. If you don’t happen to be one of the lucky few who falls into a quota or preference category, there is basically no way to obtain legal permission to immigrate. If you are already in the United States without proper documentation, you will never, ever be allowed to apply for citizenship.
    Given the choice, nobody would risk his or her life walking through the desert to enter the country illegally, and nobody would risk the constant fear, discrimination, and threat of deportation that comes from being undocumented. Of course, everybody who comes to the United States would rather enter the country legally, and everybody who is undocumented would rather be documented. If only the law allowed them to do it!
    The purpose of this book is to denaturalize illegality. I want to show it as the social construction that it is. I want to show when, why, and how it came to be, and how it came to be socially accepted as a fact. I want to show how it works and what purpose it serves. Or maybe whose purposes it serves. My goal is to unveil the complex, inconsistent, and sometimes perverse nature of US immigration law that makes some people illegal.

Introduction
    When people say, “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” they imply that they, in fact, understand everything about it. They take illegality to be self-evident: there’s a law, you break the law, that’s illegal. Obvious, right?
    Actually, illegality is a lot more complicated than that. Laws are made and enforced by humans, in historical contexts, and for reasons. They change over time, and they are often created and modified to serve the interests of some groups—generally the powerful and privileged—over others.
    Most of the citizens who brag that their ancestors came here “the right way” are making assumptions based on ignorance. They assume that their ancestors “went through the process” and obtained visas, as people are required to do today. In fact, most of them came before any legal process existed—before the concept of “illegality” existed.
    THE INVENTION OF ILLEGALITY
    Illegality as we know it today came into existence after 1965. In the decades before 1965, the media rarely depicted immigration