‘Homing pigeons’ have landed

FORMER California Gov. Pete Wilson probably wasn’t on too many peoples’ minds at last weekend’s massive downtown march. But that doesn’t mean his presence wasn’t felt. Before Wilson endorsed and legitimized Proposition 187, the anti-illegal immigrant ballot initiative in 1994, too many Mexican immigrants were content not to participate in U.S. civic life. But that year’s anti-illegal immigrant campaign, and the national anti-legal immigrant crusade that followed, changed the way millions of immigrants approached life in the United States.

For most of the 20th century, Mexicans -- who make up 80% of immigrant Latinos in California -- were willing to allow their families to become accidental Americans. Mexicans, along with Canadians, had the lowest rate of naturalization of any immigrant group. This lack of interest in citizenship and politics left immigrants politically powerless and vulnerable to exploitation. Yet in 1994, the nasty rhetoric and the possibility of being sent back to Mexico pushed millions of immigrants off the fence and forced them to admit to themselves that they were never going back.

This realization provoked not only the largest rush to citizenship in U.S. history but the biggest surge in Latino voter registration. In 1996, there was a 212% increase in the number of Mexican immigrant naturalizations over the previous year. In the late 1990s, the annual number of new Mexican-born U.S. citizens remained six times higher than the average between 1980 and 1993. In a 10-year period, California alone gained no fewer than 1 million new Latino voters.

Last week’s demonstration no doubt meant many things to many people. But the one overriding significance of half a million people declaring both their right and desire to remain in the United States is that immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- are no longer reluctant to thrust themselves into the tumult of American civic life. And that’s a good thing.

Throughout the 20th century, this nation used Mexican labor without feeling obliged to incorporate the laborers into U.S. society. That was essentially the basis of the deal made between Mexican workers and American business. In 1926, two years after Congress sharply reduced the quota on European immigration into the United States, S. Parker Frisselle of the California Farm Bureau Federation testified to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization that his state needed more Mexican labor. When asked what effect the migrants would have on society, he said: “My experience of the Mexican is that he is a ‘homer.’ Like a pigeon, he goes back to roost. He is not a man that comes into this country for anything except our dollars and our work.” When pressed to estimate the Mexican population of the state, Frisselle replied that “there is no such thing.”

In fact, the vast majority of Mexican migrants never intend to stay in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean they don’t. In the past, when the border was fairly fluid, mass illegal immigration and return has been tolerated, even sometimes encouraged. It came to serve as a de facto guest-worker program.

The tightening attitudes represented by Prop. 187, and especially tougher border enforcement, have only made it more likely that migrants would stay on -- it simply has gotten too risky to move back and forth. And as more have realized that they won’t or can’t go home again, Mexicans, legal and illegal, have begun clearly to stake their futures north of the border and let political ties to their homeland languish.

Mexico noticed. Over the last decade it has made attempts to fortify its official ties to its emigrants residing in the U.S. -- but it has failed utterly. In 1998, the Mexican government began to allow emigrants who had become naturalized U.S. citizens and the U.S.-born children of Mexican nationals to apply for dual nationality. But in the first five years, only 67,000 applicants responded to the offer. In other words, out of the roughly 1.74 million Mexican-born naturalized U.S. citizens and the 2.5 million U.S.-born adult children of immigrants, less than 2% took advantage of the opportunity to claim Mexican nationality.

Likewise, last June the Mexican government authorized absentee voting for emigrants. But when the deadline arrived on Jan. 15, only 50,000 immigrants had applied for ballots, one-half of 1% of all adult Mexicans residing in the U.S.

None of this means that complete integration of Mexican immigrants into mainstream American society is a done deal. But it does undermine the portrayal of the undocumented as a potential “fifth column,” contemptuous of U.S. law and life.

Because Mexican migration has been virtually continuous over the last century, the process of integration has been ongoing. At any given moment, millions of Mexicans and their Mexican American children are living at varying levels of acculturation and integration. Though the self-definition of European American groups gradually evolved from an immigrant identity to an ethnic identity, Mexican Americans contend with the presence of unassimilated newcomers as well as cyclical waves of anti-Mexican sentiment. Although this dynamic hasn’t prevented assimilation, it has sown confusion and competition in the formulation of political and cultural identities. Witness the competing presence of U.S. and Mexican flags at last week’s demonstrations.

But convoluted iconography notwithstanding, the massive declaration of the desire to become an accepted part of American society puts an exclamation point on what has been shaping immigrant culture in the U.S. for the last decade. Last week, immigrants and their children were telling us that they are no longer willing to be seen as homing pigeons who return to their homelands after a season of work. Now it’s time for the government of the host country to realize that the U.S. can no longer pretend that it can receive much-needed labor without embracing the accompanying laborers.