Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy Review

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Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy ReviewTwo of the biggest problems in the current debate over immigration reform are the persistence and proliferation of misinformation, and the demonizing of illegal immigrants. This book by the aptly named Bill Ong Hing (if you can't see why his name is appropriate, just say it out loud quickly) is a nice corrective to these widespread problems.
First, Hing addresses the impact of undocumented workers on the economy in a way that avoids the shrill rhetoric that is often involved and addresses the data with great sobriety. Rather than focusing on any one particular study (as we all too often tend to do), he addresses the general trend of the data. In the process, he calls our attention to many neglected ways in which undocumented workers impact the economy. For example, while many people focus intently on the question of whether undocumented workers drive down wages or export earnings to other countries, few address the role of undocumented workers as consumers; Hing does. Few address the long-term contribution of undocumented workers; Hing does. Many people express concerns that undocumented workers are not paying taxes, but rather "draining" resources from the system; Hing reveals the many ways in which they contribute to the system, including, yes, paying taxes.
Hing also does an outstanding job of humanizing undocumented workers. His long experience as a lawyer dealing with immigration issues provides him with a wealth of examples to draw on. This, to me, is the most important part of the book--in it, we come to see undocumented workers not as a poor, violent class of lawbreakers (as they are all too often presented), but as people with the same desires to provide a good life for themselves and their families that we all share. Hing helps us to see through the eyes of the other the daily trials we impose upon illegal, and even legal, immigrants. It would take a cold-hearted person indeed to not be moved by many of the cases Hing provides.
All this is, in the end, aiming at defending a policy of guest worker programs with significant and timely opportunities for citizenship. Hing rightly notes that without such opportunities, guest worker programs amount to little more than exploitation. He also defends a widespread provision of citizenship opportunities for those already here; and unlike those Republican pundits who talk "family, family, family" but rarely act to help actual families (preferring to support some abstractum known as "The Family"), Hing's proposal supports the maintenance of families by making familial relations a central consideration in providing citizenship opportunities.
Hing's book is not without its failings. He fails to address for more than a few sentences the crucial issue of responsibilities we owe to immigrants due to our past foreign policy decisions. (NAFTA, for example, has put many farmers throughout the Americas out of work; and our continual meddling in the political decisions of other American nations has created repeated refugee problems.) I'm also not convinced that he gives enough consideration to the likelihood that undocumented workers will simply be a renewable source of cheap labor. While he recognizes this as a possibility, given the conditions of post-industrial capitalism, I'm not sure that providing easier paths to citizenship is enough to prevent exploitation.
But in the case of this book, its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. Anyone concerned about immigration or immigrants should read this book. Those who are most in disagreement with Hing's proposal have the most to gain from reading this, and owe it to themselves to run the risk of seeing immigrants as people; perhaps by seeing others as more human, they may in turn become more humane.Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy Overview

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