Neither Here Nor There

THE OTHER FACE OF AMERICA: Chronicles of the Immigrants Shaping Our Future, By Jorge Ramos, Rayo/HarperCollins: 252 pp., $24.95

Shortly after moving to Mexico in 1993, I met a couple in a village in the west-central state of Michoacan. Their house had two stories, marble floors, a satellite dish and a large yard, but it was usually empty. The family lived most of the year in Stockton, where the man worked in a tomato-packing plant. There they rented a home near Eighth and Phelps streets, one of the most violent areas in the entire Central Valley. I’d been a crime reporter there. Shootings, robberies, carjackings, drug sales--every night it happened at Eighth and Phelps.

Immigration is a great story because of the beautiful contradictions you can find within it. My first taste of that was the surprise that this couple would rent a home amid urban chaos and send their children to the second-worst high school in Stockton while building a home in Mexico in which they spent only six weeks a year. Their dream, the couple told me, was to retire there one day.

That began my fascination with the stories of Mexican immigration and its essence: the return home. For many immigrants, the American Dream is not to assimilate but to return home wealthier than they left. Who would want to assimilate into America? It is lacerating to cut ties to home. Yet, for most of the last century, geography, the limits of transportation, war and economic and political turmoil forced immigrants to cut their ties to, say, Italy or Vietnam or China. It wasn’t fair, but it was necessary. This focused them on investing in American businesses, educating their children and leaving areas like Eighth and Phelps.

Mexicans, though, can go home, and they do. Mexico is nearby, travel is cheap and the country is relatively stable yet poor, so their dollars buy a lot. These factors keep Mexicans coming to the U.S. and returning home every year.

Immigration to the United States from other countries has started and stopped, forcing those immigrants to assimilate. Mexicans alone have realized the true immigrant American Dream. This constant return hurts many Mexican immigrants. Proposition 187 in 1994 was possible because many Mexican immigrants, still yearning for Mexico, hadn’t become U.S. citizens. So politicians like former California Gov. Pete Wilson didn’t need to take them into account. (And I don’t believe investing in a house in Mexico is a great idea if you have to rent a home at Eighth and Phelps for 20 years to do it.)

Yet it seems popular now to exalt nonassimilation, despite the harm it does to immigrants. This is one failing of “The Other Face of America” and “Operation Gatekeeper,” two new books dealing with Mexican immigration.

“The Other Face of America” is a series of vignettes about Latino immigrants--Mexicans, Dominicans, Central Americans--written by Jorge Ramos, a Mexican immigrant and prime time news anchorman for the Spanish-language Univision network in Miami. Only a popular television anchorman could have persuaded HarperCollins to print a book this thinly reported. His book is the prose equivalent of television news. Every page shows that the reporter hasn’t spent the time to make his characters come alive and understand their contradictions.

Instead of delving into immigrant stories, Ramos rants and weeps for them. On a woman about whom we learn little, except that she couldn’t get into UCLA because she’s undocumented, he writes: “Where are all the names of the legislators who prevented Margarita of Michoacan from being able to attend UCLA? Who among them would dare to look her in the face and tell her she does not have the right to continue studying? Who?”

Weeping for the downtrodden and preaching to the choir, not challenging it--this is a journalistic tradition in Mexico, where so many people are poor and working-class. Its real goal is to lift the crusading reporter in his public’s eyes. But it makes for wooden journalism.

Ramos praises Mexican immigrants’ deep ties to their native land. Then he bemoans their lack of political power in the U.S. He doesn’t get it: The former causes the latter. Many Mexican immigrants haven’t become American citizens. They can’t vote and thus have no political power in their new country. Many are American citizens and still don’t vote; the 2001 L.A. mayor’s race showed that. But none of this has much to do with American racism, as Ramos implies.

Ramos’ message, he reminds us at least five times, is that the United States “must admit that it is a multicultural society ... [and] must accept that reality and fully embrace its diversity.”

But no other country on the planet has more generously provided poor immigrants with opportunities that lead to self-fulfillment. Moreover, immigrants have the duty and moral responsibility to adapt to the customs and language of this country, not the other way around. Nor does Ramos give us any tips as to how this country should admit its multiculturalism and fully embrace its diversity--more than it’s already done, that is.

Of the two books, Joseph Nevins’ “Operation Gatekeeper”--an indictment of the Border Patrol’s enforcement operation at San Ysidro--is better. However, the prose is thick and splotched with statistics. The border and the attempts to enforce it beg for an invigorating story and an imaginative approach.

Nevins’ main point--that the enforcement of the border gave rise to the concept of the illegal alien--is self-evident. He also seems to think--though dense prose makes it difficult to really know--that patrolling borders is not a good thing, or that it is hypocritical or nativist, or at least Gatekeeper is a bad way to do it.

Nevins has put in time and research. And he does provide some good history of the Tijuana-San Ysidro border. But immigration and the border are living stories. Where are the coyotes, INS agents, border residents and immigrants themselves? None shows up in this book. I wish it were clear that Nevins had spent as much time on the border as in the library.

Immigration is a story in which everyone is right. Can you fault a poor young man from Michoacan for seeking a better life here? I admire his gumption and want him contributing to my country. Can you blame Americans for being angry at the many Mexicans not learning English despite 25 years in this country? If millions of Americans lived in Mexico City, speaking only English, I can tell you that Mexicans would be boiling in a frenzy of xenophobic rage.

Can you fault the restaurant owner who hires only Mexicans because American high school students are lazy and show up late? Can you blame the angry families in San Ysidro who, before Operation Gatekeeper, lived in a war zone, their yards trampled each night, helicopters overhead?

Yet neither book takes on these complexities nor reflects the vitality that makes immigration such an exciting topic. Worst of all, the authors, especially Ramos, believe that those favoring enforcement of the border and immigration law are racists. This is tripe, an ad hominem attack by authors who can’t face the nuances of the issue they’ve taken on.

Mexican immigrants are my heroes, but I believe the laws and borders of my country should be firmly enforced. Our country has the right to let people in or not as we wish. There are decent, nonracist reasons for believing so. And if I believe that the United States wins by accepting immigrants, and Mexico loses, I can also believe that there is nothing “putative” about the costs America shoulders due to that immigration, as Nevins would have it. I can say too that, though ugly, Gatekeeper and the steel wall at Tijuana-San Ysidro cleansed what was once a festering paradise for rapists and thugs.

Much about Mexico’s social and cultural life could enrich the United States. The Mexican town plaza, for example, fosters human interaction in a very quiet, decent way. In Mexico, life takes place more in the home and neighborhood, less in the shopping mall. But little about Mexican politics and economics is worth transplanting. Political and economic traditions in Mexico keep poor people poor and reward the rich.

Mexican immigrant assimilation is necessary to keep these nasty traditions at bay and for the United States to continue being the kind of place Mexicans wanted to emigrate to in the first place. Ramos points to Cuban Miami as an example of Latino political power. I don’t know much about Cuban Miami, though I’ve heard it’s like any other ethnic political machine. I do know that the predominantly Mexican cities southeast of Los Angeles (such as South Gate and Bell Gardens) are disturbing examples of Latino political power. The flouting of rules there, the manipulation of poor Latinos by Latino politicians--these are warnings: Too little immigrant assimilation allows devastating Mexican political customs to continue here.

Finally, these books leave important questions unaddressed: Should America allow entrance to everyone who wants to come? How much immigration is too much? Why shouldn’t we let in immigrants when jobs are plentiful but keep them out in times of recession? What is the alternative to Gatekeeper? Why, if we’re going to offer amnesty to illegal immigrants every 15 years, should we have immigration laws at all?

Unwillingness to confront difficult questions and to draw the full dimensions of immigrants and the complexities of immigration make these two books missed opportunities.

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Sam Quinones is the author of “True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.” He is a journalist living in Mexico City.