Migration as a universal human right | Alvaro Huerta | TEDxClaremontColleges

As the saying goes, there are two things that are certain in life, death and taxes. I would like to add a third, migration. I argue that migration represents a universal human right for all people. While economists want us to believe that people, especially the global poor, migrate due to higher wages and better employment opportunities, throughout history, people have been migrating for many reasons. People have migrated due to climate change, natural disasters. People have migrated due to famine. Like in 1845, there was a potato famine and over 1 million Irish died and another million migrated. Also, due to religious persecution in Nazi Germany, Jews fled Nazism. We also see, because of war, when the United States invaded Vietnam, there was a mass migration of Vietnamese to this country in the 1970s. And we see through free trade agreements with the United States and Mexico and Canada, there's a mass migration of people coming to this country because of the disruption in local markets in Mexico. So, in general, if we realize, if we come to the understanding that migration is certain and is constant, why is it that so many Americans, in particular their leaders, vilify Latinos in general and Latino immigrants in particular when they migrate to the United States? This is something that I do not understand. I am perplexed by this because of the many contributions that Mexican immigrants and other Latinos contribute to this country. We also see, apart from being vilified, that immigrants and Latinos in particular have been labeled illegal aliens, have been labeled threats to national security. And throughout history, what do we know about this? What do we know when a dominant culture, a dominant society objectifies a group? We know that when a group is objectified, it's easy and it's easier for the government of that country and its leaders to imprison, to exploit, and to deport. And we see this dichotomy, this false dichotomy taking place in the United States when we're dealing with immigration, where it's a white-brown dichotomy. It's a false dichotomy. The late Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor, argued in an article called The Hispanic Threat that the Anglo was superior to the Mexican and that the influx of Mexicans in this country was a threat to this country. We see this idea of dividing people, the privileged and the poor, those that have papers and those that do not have papers, the citizens and the undocumented. And these false dichotomies separate us as people. And if immigration, as I argue, is a universal human right, why is it that Americans continue to focus on these divisions? Aren't we all human beings? Don't we all love to watch Dodger games and criticize the Oscars and the commercials? Weren't we all perplexed when Seattle passed the ball on the one-yard line instead of handing it off? So we see that throughout history there has been concrete examples and contradictions in the policy of migration in this country. For example, during the mid-1900s, during the Bracero program, the United States and Mexico had an agreement, a guest worker program, where Mexico would export over 4 million agricultural workers to this country at a critical time towards the end of World War II and thereafter where there was a major growth in the economy. And the Mexican agricultural workers in the United States played a big contribution to the growth of this economy. At the same time, in the 1950s, the United States government deported over 1.3 million Mexican immigrants in the cities, in Chicanos, under Operation Wetback. Also, President Ronald Reagan, over 30 years ago, demanded that the Soviets tear down the wall. And presidents thereafter have poured billions of dollars to fortify our own southern border. In another example, we live in a country that's highly globalized. We live in a country where borders are withering away. We see this happening in Europe with the European Union. We see this with technology, with social media. We see this with the 1% and with multinational corporations. And we see the free flow of capital roaming the world. But at the same time, why is it that the United States continues to punish labor, which is instrumental to production in our southern border? So on the one hand, the world is moving towards more interconnected, free-flowing economy in terms of commerce, in terms of knowledge and services. But on the other hand, in the southern border, to keep these brown people away, the United States is fortifying and building a militarized border where you have drones, where you have multiple security forces. So these are major contradictions that I study and that I have studied while I was at UCLA and UC Berkeley, where I earned my doctorate in city and regional planning. But at the end of the day, I realized that all of the knowledge that I have through my studies, through my reading, through reading newspapers and looking at movies and popular culture and how immigrants are depicted, where I learned the most about migration and the negative impact, not on the American, not on the economy, but on the Mexican, on the immigrant, him and herself, was for my family. I realized that immigrants pay a high price to come to this country, and immigrants contribute a lot to this country. During the 1950s, for example, my parents were living in a rural state called Michoacan. They were in a small rancho, and my father worked as a bracero during this program in the United States, in California, in Texas, and other places, just like my father-in-law and millions of other Mexicans, leaving my mother and my older sisters at home. And I remember him telling me he wouldn't talk a lot. He was really a stoic man. He was a tough guy. And I remember him talking to me about when he was being sprayed with chemicals, when he would be working in the fields in California, how they would not give him breaks, when they lived in these shacks and they were treated like cattle, when their food and their rent were deducted from their check, and when both the Mexican government and the United States guaranteed that they would have some form of Social Security taken from their checks, that it never arrived to them. And it was only later that people filed lawsuits that the government started paying these large sums of money. And when my father, when he returned from the United States, when his contract was up, they ended up moving, my family moved from the countryside to the city. In my family, there was a family feud. It was like the Hatfields and the McCoys. But it wasn't in West Virginia, it was in the Rancho Mexico. So another example, people don't just move because of jobs, they move because there's a disruption. There's family feuds, there's violence, there's famine, there's drought, lack of rain, various reasons. So they ended up moving to Tijuana. And when I say family, I mean family. I have eight brothers and sisters. I have 10 uncles and aunts. And each uncle and aunt has 10 kids. So I literally have 100 first cousins. Fortunately for us, they're all named Maria and Jose. So when I go to a party, I was like, Maria? Gets a little confusing. The PC didn't help me there. So my mother, when she was living with my family, all of my uncles were living in like a shantytown conditions on the hills in Tijuana. She was working as a trans-border laborer. She was going back and forth. She was working as a domestic worker. She was cleaning the homes of the American families in San Diego. She was taking care of their children. And just like African Americans have done since slavery to the present, she treated these children as if they were her own. She didn't discriminate, didn't differentiate between her children and the children she cared for. One time I even, when she was alive, I joked with her, because one time she was taking care of, later in her 60s, she was taking care of one kid that ended up, the family moved to Chicago, and she started crying when they left. And I said, well, you didn't cry when I left. I didn't see any tears when I moved to UCLA. And I saw that, the compassion, I saw how giving she was, not just for her family, but for complete strangers. And what does the country give in return? Treat her with disrespect. Stereotype her in movies. Two-dimensional roles where you see the nanny, the domestic worker, portrayed as ignorant, portrayed as unproductive, being scolded, and where the little American kids treat them. They don't have the, the nanny doesn't even have a name. It's like, it's my nanny. It's not Maria or Carmen. It's my nanny, like it's a Barbie doll, like an iPad. Where's my nanny? I'm hungry. And my sisters at the age of 13 also worked as domestic workers. When one older sister, I have three, one older sister was taking care of my brothers, my older brother and myself, my younger sister, and two others working in the United States as domestic workers. At the age of 13, they weren't stealing any American jobs. They had to quit school to help support the family. So myself and my older brother were able to attend the university, but they were not because their education was cut short. And once again, what does America do for them? How does America pay them back for what they have done, for what they have sacrificed? And to me, these are, you know, profound questions. And this is why I have come to the realization that as Americans, as someone that was born in the United States, because my mother had me here in the United States in one of her, one of her trips. You know, I'm what you call anchor baby. I'm too thin to be an anchor. I don't know why they come here. But she's a rational woman. She was smart. She knew she was a visionary. If Álvaro was born here, then eventually, that's a rational choice. And for me, it was the right choice. Because at the end of the day, whatever this country has given to us, we have given 100 times more. Because she didn't get Social Security. She didn't, the employers, her employers never paid into the system. So she gave into the system more than she took out. So when we think about the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, we have to look at it within this context. That these individuals are working hard and they're putting in more than they're taking out of the system. So when I think about migration, I look at migration within this context. Within, look at the cost to the immigrant and look at how the country is, is paying the immigrant back. So these are important questions that I find that we need to reconsider. We need to view migration as an international human right. Because we all migrate. At the end of the day, we all come from Africa. We all come from Eastern Africa. We have all migrated. If you just think about it for a little bit, how many of your parents live in the place where they were born? How many of you live in the same place where you were born? How many of you have pursued employment or educational opportunities outside of the place that where you were born? How many of you migrated because of love and then when you broke up, you just went back to your home? It's called circular migration. So we have all migrated and we have to imagine the world differently. We cannot view the world the way the Democrats and Republicans have framed the argument. There are scholars out there outside of myself that argue that we should imagine a world without borders. There's a professor at Oxford University, Bridget Anderson, who argues that we should think about how the world would be without borders. And when people counter her, that her view is a utopia, she counters that borders represent a dystopia. And just like Ronald Reagan demanded that the Soviets tear down the Berlin Wall, there's a professor at Berkeley, Michael Deere, who argues that the United States, that Obama should tear down the US-Mexico wall. And that the United States has lost their moral compass by going against history because today we are moving away from borders. And he argues that borders don't work, that eventually they will all come down. And I believe in what Professor Anderson argues, what Professor Michael Deere argues. And when people call them idealists, when they call them dreamers, when they call me a dreamer, I want them to remember the words of Ricardo Flores Magón, precursor to the Mexican Revolution, who once asked, what would the world be without dreamers? Muchas gracias.