Introduction
The controversy and prejudice that surround the concept of Mexican immigration over the past years have catalyzed a variety of challenges for immigrants in terms of cultural adaptation and social security. According to a fellow volunteer at the Florence Project, one of the biggest non-profit organizations in Arizona, the need for social and emotional support for Mexican immigrants has been of utmost importance across the state not only due to the increasing immigration rates but due to the increasing stigmatization of Mexican population in the US. Hence, the primary goal of the Florence Project is to provide immigrants with gratis help in terms of socio-economic resources, emotional support, integration, and connection to the local immigrant community.
Working with immigrants held in detention in immigration custody, the primary service presented by the organization was the assistance with immigrants’ representation in courts, as often, immigrants lose a court case because they have no option but to represent themselves during a hearing. However, over the years, along with legal counseling and assistance, the Florence Project has started to offer an extensive list of services, including mental health support and a network of social workers who provide immigrants with case management, guidance, and connections to local social services. The guest of the present interview is a social work volunteer who helps immigrants connect to housing services after a release from custody. According to her, social welfare support is currently one of the central services for the immigrant population in Arizona.
Currently, the Florence Project is one of the most well-known immigrant assistance organizations both in the state and nationwide. For this reason, many people seeking help and guidance are already aware of the organization at the time they need to reach out to the employees. However, for the sake of better outreach, legal and social volunteers and employees can be found on the premises of local immigrant judicial facilities. Moreover, there are online and offline advertisements of the organization, with details for accessing the website and contact information to make an appointment. However, one of the most powerful sources of awareness is word of mouth, as the immigrant community is extremely close, and they willingly share contact information when they find out that anyone is at risk of being separated from the family and deported.
One of the absolute priorities of the Florence Project is the extension of available services. Because this organization is one of the few to provide free-of-charge legal and social guidance, the number of people elicited for help is rather limited compared to the demand for security and legal representation in court. For this reason, social workers and solicitors try to go out of their way to help as many people as they can, but such an altruistic desire inevitably leads to poorer quality outcomes for families. For this reason, to address this issue, it is of paramount importance to go to the issue’s roots and allocate more resources to the social advocacy for immigrants on a governmental level. The provision of social support on the national level, hence, is a priority demand of both the organization and the immigrant population across the US.
Since the Florence Project is located in Arizona, the vast majority of immigrants it coordinates are Mexicans. According to the interviewee, the toll taken on Mexican immigrants since Donald Trump’s presidency has been irreversible. Indeed, apart from facing a variety of legal challenges in terms of justifying a legal immigrant status, Mexicans now face severe stigmatization and prejudice. One of the most severe identity challenges faced by Mexican immigrants is criminalization, especially when it comes to minors (Abrego et al., 2017). According to the researchers, such a process was facilitated by discriminatory policies on deportation and legal responsibility charged for minor crimes introduced by the former US president (Chavez, 2018). Currently, even a minor misdemeanor is perceived as a serious crime in case it is committed by an immigrant. As a result, people efface severe charges and deportation for some crimes that could have gone unnoticed when committed by white American residents.
In such a way, many immigrants are labeled criminals, and they are incapable of entering the national labor market, as the US has strict policies in terms of employing ex-convicts. As a result, they become economically and socially vulnerable, and the immigrants’ access to health care, health care, and proper social integration are limited. Although some attempts have been made to reduce the health care access disparities, including the introduction of Obamacare back in 2010, the issue itself has not been resolved (Valle et al., 2020). As far as social security and economic welfare are concerned, Joe Biden’s office has made a series of promising claims for increasing access to education and employment as well as increasing minimal-hour wage, but it is early to tell whether these initiatives proved themselves successful. Hence, it may be concluded that despite a series of interventions, the challenges faced by the Mexican immigrant population remain extremely relevant and alarming.
While the US perceives itself as a multicultural country that outlines diversity and inclusion as priorities in its political agenda, the notion of social justice that stands for equal distribution of wealth and opportunities across social groups remains inaccessible to the population. According to McClain (2021), the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that despite the existing accomplishments in the social welfare of immigrants, there is still no social justice per se, as immigrants face various obstacles in access to economic and social stability. The notion of social justice for Mexican immigrants is of utmost importance for the national context, as currently, there are more than thirty million people of Mexican origin in the US (Valle et al., 2020). Granting no access to equality and welfare to such a population may result in a severe social crisis.
Couple Interview
Teresa and David are Mexican immigrants who moved to the US not long before Trump’s presidency. Now, they laugh about how their intuition helped them move to the US “before the storm.” Currently, they are both 35 years old, and while they are undocumented immigrants, their 5-year-old daughter María was born in the US and was automatically granted citizenship. Teresa’s family has a long history of migration, as her parents were first-generation Mexican immigrants from El Salvador. Since early childhood, both Teresa and David wanted to move to the US, and they are most ashamed of saying that they identify themselves as people affected by the concept of the American dream. Since they got married back in 2006, Teresa and David spent a year preparing mentally and financially for the migration. Teresa recalls:
I remember hearing all these stories about how Latino people are outcasts in the US for not speaking English, so David and I tried out best to learn at least some English before going away. It felt safer that way. However, even with all these warnings about how we would never be Americans, I wanted to believe we would be an exception because we were young, dedicated, and quite witty.
Teresa and Davis also realized how hard it would be for them to make money at first, so they had some savings to get buy after coming to the US. Teresa and David are both undocumented tax-paying immigrants at the moment, and they are now going through the journey of applying for US citizenship. One of the many challenges of obtaining citizenship is a history of an unpaid traffic ticket that almost got David deported back in 2010. David does not have a driver’s license because, as a non-US citizen, he is not eligible for it, but he has official permission to drive a vehicle. Back in 2010, three years after moving to the US, David, although employed unofficially, managed to save some money for his first car. He knew perfectly well that his potential citizenship was at stake, so he tried his best to be a conscientious driver. However, at some point, he received a document that stated he had been invited to a legal proceeding on the matter of an unpaid speed ticket.
The couple was shocked because they had no idea the ticket even existed in the first place. At the hearing, they were told that such a violation might result in deportation, and from that moment on, the family had the most stressful eight months of their life. Since they had no financial stability, their only option was to settle for a public attorney because they were lucky to have one. According to Teresa and David, this story has a happy ending because they were extremely lucky to have a great pro bono solicitor eager to help them. However, even now, a decade after the incident, David still faces many issues when applying for citizenship. Their story of immigration is full of small yet emotional details of how, for example, Teresa was mistaken for a non-English-speaking person, and she was forced to hear many inappropriate comments about immigrants that people thought she would not understand.
As I was listening to the couple’s story, the majority of the time, I was on the verge of tears. Sometimes, it was the feeling of sympathy that moved me, but I was mostly driven to cry out of frustration and injustice thriving in today’s society. Teresa and David are some of the kindest people I have met lately, and the fact that this family, while paying taxes, learning the language, and doing everything to become legal citizens, receives such bad treatment does not make sense to me.
When listening to some of the key events in the couple’s life, I was shocked to find out that such a thing as an unpaid speed ticket may become a rational reason for somebody to get banished from the state. After hearing this, I conducted small research on the topic, and I found many similar stories about the immigrants’ near-deportation experience because of a minor thing. Moreover, while there are many claims that the language barrier is one of the most common reasons for the social isolation of immigrants, I realized that the stigmatization of immigrants goes far beyond the verbal communication gap. This interview provided me with a completely new perspective on immigrant experiences in the modern-day US.
The principle of Gracism, which stands for the combination of racism and grace and promotes radical inclusion of marginalized groups on the grounds of color, class, and culture, is a beneficial way of promoting equality within the population (Anderson, 2010). One of the most important principles of Gracism, in my opinion, is to pace community above personal needs in the pursuit of harmony. In the example of Teresa and David, one can see how the toxic individualism of Americans leads to the gradual polarization of society, marginalizing the ones whose self-identity is different from the cult of assimilation and blending with the rest of the community. As a person willing to advocate for social justice and quality, I can promote inclusiveness as a primary goal of our society, emphasizing the well-being of a community rather than personal considerations of comfort. For example, advocating for such essentials as having a staff translator in medical facilities instead of shaming people for not speaking English fluently is a manifestation of Gracism and, potentially, social justice for every ethnic minority.
Conclusion
Both before the interview and during the communication with the Florence Project volunteer, I felt extremely hopeful about the future of cultural inclusion and social justice in our country. While preparing for the interviews, I stumbled across many statistical facts that indicated notable progress in promoting social security and welfare for immigrants, and I was satisfied with the positive tendency. However, after the first ten minutes of the conversation with Teresa and David, I suddenly realized there would be no actual progress until at least one person is forced to undergo the humiliation this beautiful family had to experience. The very idea of treating immigration as a crime, calling it “illegal,” displays the modern discourse of social injustice. Hence, the primary difference between the experiences I had during the project is how the perception of immigration differs when you do not know the whole story. Sometimes, seeing the deportation and social inequality rates in statistics is not at striking as listening to one’s ten-minute story.
At the beginning of this project, I was interested in exploring the issue of discrimination and inequality through the lens of first-hand experience. However, I have imagined myself being so emotionally invested in the narrative. I was genuinely shocked by how Teresa and David told the story. There was no sign of anger or offense. They told me that such an experience only made them stronger in the long run. For this reason, after the interview, I spent hours contemplating my own experiences with immigration, the situations where I implicitly tolerated biased opinions of others because I felt like it was not my fight and calmed myself with the thought that I was different. After emphasizing so strongly with the story, I now feel like immigration, and social justice will always be our fight and our war to win.
One of the major insights I have gained during the interview with Teresa and David is the fact that it is okay not to understand the experience of an immigrant or a culturally sensitive group. Nowadays, it is widespread to take pride in understanding and identifying with a person while claiming that this is a definition of empathy. However, I have realized that saying someone understands what immigrants are going through without kneeling an immigrant is almost the same as disregarding their experiences completely. The emotional journey immigrants are going through is not something we should understand, whereas the need to stop the harm caused by discrimination and injustice is something we should know and feel.
References
Abrego, L., Coleman, M., Martínez, D. E., Menjívar, C., & Slack, J. (2017). Making immigrants into criminals: Legal processes of criminalization in the post-IIRIRA era. Journal on Migration and Human Security, 5(3), 694-715.
Anderson, D. A. (2010). Gracism: The art of inclusion. Bridgeleader Books.
Chávez, L. (2018). Challenges to integration: The children of immigrants and direct and indirect experiences with the law. In Immigration and the law: Race, citizenship, and social control (Ed. by Álvarez, S. E., & M. G. Urbina, pp. 169-202). The University of Arizona Press.
McClain, B. (2021). ‘Social justice in America’: Where are Latinos and immigrants in the conversation?Schar School of Policy and Government.
Valle, V. M., Gandoy Vázquez, W. L., & Valenzuela Moreno, K. A. (2020). Ventanillas de Salud: Defeating challenges in healthcare access for Mexican immigrants in the United States. Estudios Fronterizos, 21.