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Illegal and White [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-02-24  

Some years ago my mother retired to Arizona, and over the years she’s picked up some of the language of the people she lives among. About once a year I visit her, and the last time I was there, I heard her refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegals.” I reminded her that my grandfather—my father’s father—was an undocumented immigrant. She’s knows I’m right about my grandfather, but she tends to dismiss my point because he was white. In her mind, an “illegal” is someone who is both an undocumented immigrant and brown or black. My grandfather gets a pass.

I grew up a block away from my grandpa and I thought I knew him well. After he died when I was away at college, I spent some time with his younger sister in New York. She’s the one who told me my grandpa had been born in Ukraine. She herself had been born in Poland. It slowly sank into me that my grandpa had been keeping a secret from his family, including his own children and grandchildren, for much of his life. Of course, his siblings knew the truth, but it appears that they, all naturalized citizens, kept his secret for him until he died.

A few years ago, when I was transcribing his wartime letters, I became increasingly curious about the story of why he’d hidden his immigration status all those years. The story that emerged was fascinating in its details. He had, you might say, a colorful and complicated life. The answer to my original question, however, was actually fairly simple.

As a teenager, he ran away from home, which at the time was in Pennsylvania, and went out West. After working in the silver mines for a time, he joined up with the infantry in Utah at age fifteen. At the time, he lied about two things. He claimed to be twenty years old, and he put down his birthplace as Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. My grandfather made a career of the Army, and from the moment of his enlistment to the end of his days, he maintained his birthplace was the United States. It was on every census after 1920, and it was on his Social Security application after he retired in 1953 and went to work for American Express in Manhattan.

The reason he kept his immigration status a secret was that he was afraid of what might happen if his enlistment was found to be fraudulent. In his later years, he was especially fearful of losing his pension if his secret was exposed. In a long discussion about this with my aunt, his daughter, she said, “Imagine living your whole life with a lie.” It’s something I’ve had years to contemplate, and I still find the implications of it to be bottomless.

However, the implications of people who are obsessed and fearful of “illegals” is, on the surface, much simpler. As in the case of my mother, it’s not so much that they’re undocumented that bothers them as it is that they’re undocumented and not white. Under all this political talk about illegal immigration and Trump’s threats of detention camps is a secret that is not so secret. It’s not about immigration. It’s about race.

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