A decade ago, my wife, 16-year old grandson and I took a trip to Nicaragua with a friend. My friend, a fellow teacher at the time who had grown up in Nicaragua, was returning to Managua for a family reunion and asked us along. We had a spectacular trip filled with many adventures, including the chance to meet my friend’s fascinating family.
My friend drove our four-wheel-drive vehicle not only because she knew her way around (she had worked in rural health clinics in the 1970s), but particularly because she felt comfortable dealing with the police.
There were occasional stop points on main highways where police pulled over selected vehicles, usually rental cars with tourists, and ticketed them for some imaginary traffic offense. It was customary for the low-paid police to reduce fines for a bribe, a familiar practice in many nations. On our 10-day trip, we were stopped four times and my friend negotiated bribes and minimized our fines.
The stops were merely among many interesting events in our journey, but for a reason I’ll mention in a moment, I recently have imagined a different scenario for them.
Suppose that a newly elected Nicaraguan president suddenly decided, by chance near the end of our trip, to alter the custom and imprison bribers. And suppose that we were arrested as we checked into our flight home at Sandino International Airport, were prosecuted and convicted of four counts of attempting to bribe a police officer, and were sentenced to prison for 27 years – one year for our first offense, three for our second, eight for our third and 15 for our fourth.
We’ve all read about the imprisonments of reporters, hikers, tourists and others in developing countries, so the scenario is plausible. But it is also unfathomable. It’s impossible to imagine the horror of being caught up in such monumental unfairness or the specter of living out our lives in a Nicaraguan prison.
In my hypothetical, we have a chance to defend ourselves. What do we argue? We might plead ignorance – admitting that we knew that bribing police officers is universally illegal but maintaining that we thought bribes were customary in Nicaragua and were merely following that custom. We might argue the injustice of the sudden retroactive enforcement of a long-unenforced law. We might claim entrapment – that police induced us to commit this crime. We might claim necessity, that circumstances required us to act illegally. Beyond inconvenience, however, I’m not sure this claim would amount to much.
Alternatively, rather than deny our guilt, we might simply admit it and try to reduce our sentence. We might claim that the punishment was cruel and unusual, harsh and excessive given our small crime, and certainly not needed to protect society since none of us is dangerous or likely to repeat our crime. We might urge leniency based on equity or fundamental fairness. After all, except for the bribes, we had been good tourists and had helped the local economy, and we had been upstanding people throughout our lives. We might add the gentle reminder that throwing tourists in prison might not be good for tourism, a major and growing economic sector in Nicaragua.
Certainly, through our ordeal, we would hope that America and perhaps global humanitarian entities would recognize this injustice and come to our rescue.
So here’s what led me to imagine this little scenario in the first place. It offers a personal way to assess the fairness of America’s recent commitment to deport millions of undocumented workers.
No doubt the fate of deportees will be comparable to our imprisonment. They will lose jobs, homes, communities, security, hope. In many cases, families will be torn apart and in many others, deported persons will return to very personally dangerous situations.
In contrast to my bribery situation, how might undocumented folks argue the unfairness of their situation? They too might claim ignorance. Most (at least adults) likely realized that entering the States or overstaying a visa were illegal, but they could claim that they recognized and depended on the longstanding U.S. custom of ignoring that illegality in the case of workers and their families.
A number of years ago, I had an ex-border guard in a class. He explained that there were two types of border crossers, workers and drug smugglers, and they were easily distinguishable. His orders were to stop the drug smugglers and ignore the workers.
Our longstanding custom was merely an accommodation with powerful economic interests (often agricultural, restaurant and hotel interests) that depended heavily on undocumented workers.
Undocumented workers might also raise the injustice of retroactive enforcement. Retroactivity seems particularly unfair in their case where the law often has to stretch back a decade or more to reach their original crime.
Workers have a type of entrapment argument. They weren’t simply allowed into the States, they were welcomed in and in many cases enticed or even recruited.
For example, until it closed a few years ago, a meat-packing plant in Manchester named Jac-Pac employed several hundred undocumented workers. Most were from one particular area in Mexico, and the employer had, in essence, created a cheap labor pipeline from there.
Regardless of whether undocumented workers were recruited or merely welcomed, all have been highly desirable to employers, for most are hard workers who are willing to work for low wages, excessive hours and minimal benefits, and few complain about their treatment for fear of being reported and deported. Over the years, an employer’s threat of illegality and deportation has proven as effective in sustaining worker exploitation as whips were in slave days.
Certainly undocumented workers have a powerful defense of necessity. All broke the law to flee grinding poverty, unemployment, danger (sometimes life-threatening), and hopelessness as they pursued the very human quest to survive and find a bit of opportunity for themselves and their children.
With respect to the penalty for illegal entry, undocumented workers can claim that deportation is cruel and unusual. Its consequences for them – uprooted lives, loss of jobs, return to danger and grinding poverty, loss of hope (few, I understand, will qualify to return even if they get in the immigration line), and so forth – are as harsh and dangerous as decades of Nicaraguan imprisonment would be for me and my family.
And perhaps most powerfully – especially in contrast to my feeble claim – undocumented workers have a claim of equity or basic fairness. For years, most have worked for a pittance in work that others refuse to do; have paid substantial taxes, raised families, and been patriotic, upstanding citizens; and have committed far less crime and used far less welfare than American citizens (see, for example, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2016, Immigration Myths and Facts).
Why are so many of us Americans unable to look behind the label of “illegality” to see inhumanity and injustice – especially when we would have no trouble identifying them if we were treated similarly? Most of us know the answer. It involves a familiar process of turning minorities into “others” and vilifying and demeaning them in order to justify inhumane and unjust actions.
The most common targets over the years have been racial and religious minorities and poor people, and actions have been especially egregious when a group, like undocumented workers, fits at least two of these three categories.
Currently we are seeing an eruption of this othering and its policy repercussions such as cutting food stamps, Muslim bans, police profiling, border walls, refusing refugees and proposals to cut humanitarian relief.
If you recognize and are bothered by this all-too-pervasive phenomenon, it is a vital time to find ways to resist it – and there are rapidly increasing numbers of ways and places to get involved.
(Paul Levy lives in Concord.)