Vol. 7 No. 6 (June 1997) pp. 252-254. 

OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOOD: U. S. IMMIGRATION PRISONS IN THE REAGAN DECADE by Robert S. Kahn. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. 265 pp. Paper $20.00.

IMMIGRANTS OUT! THE NEW NATIVISM AND THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT IMPULSE IN THE UNITED STATES by Juan F. Perea (Editor). New York: New York University Press, 1996. Paper $19.95.

Reviewed by William Haltom, Department of Politics and Government, University of Puget Sound
 

California's Proposition 187, the Official English movement, and plebiscitary pushes by David Duke, Patrick Buchanan, and Pete Wilson have alerted Americans that nativism may be flexing its muscles anew. Legal academic Juan F. Perea and one-time paralegal Robert S. Kahn seek to warn us of a return to nativist hysteria. The very sorts of evidence and perspective that their books marshal may best fend off a reprise of reprehensible episodes of xenophobia and chauvinism. Thus, I wonder if all the scholars involved in these two volumes hope that their alarums will be self-defeating¾that by their efforts they may ameliorate the passions and bigotry they so well delineate.

IMMIGRANTS OUT! offers the broader view. Editor Perea has collected essays by eleven legal academics and six social scientists to comprehend agitations and actions against newcomers throughout the history of the United States. In contrast, OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOOD offers a narrower but more caustic view of the imprisonment and mistreatment of Central Americans striving to save their threatened lives, their meager fortunes, and their stubborn honor against the depredations of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and, from my reading, virtually every other opportunist and thief imaginable.

Juan Perea's too-brief introduction to IMMIGRANTS OUT! highlights contradictions in American attitudes toward immigration. Not only do the essays that follow document clashes among cultural, national, ethnic, religious, political, and economic groups and interests, but they also detail conflicts within groups, especially among and within elites. For one example, Joe R. Feagin in his opening essay [Chapter Two] summarizes waves of xenophobic scapegoating: second- or third-generation Protestant Americans target the Catholic come-lately; whites in high places excoriate non-whites who helped put them in high places; zealots this century spread panic about ‘‘un-American’’ activities by the non-Christian, the less capitalistic, and the insufficiently Anglophonic. Professor Perea, to cite a second example, shows the disparate beliefs that huddle behind the Statue of Liberty. This gift of France confounded liberty and equality in a way foreign to many Americans and anathema to elites. Poetess Emma Lazerus constructed ‘‘the Lady of the Harbor’’ as symbol of a welcoming America that not only left the light on for immigrants but stoically held that lantern high; poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich asked Lady Liberty to keep out the ‘‘wretched refuse’’ who would pollute America.

The remaining essays of IMMIGRANTS OUT! discuss themes old and new in nativist thought. While I found the essays thoughtful, succinct, informative, well-documented, and worthy of attention from academics and undergraduates alike, the organization of the compendium confused me a bit. Part One, which consisted of Dr. Feagin's and Mr. Perea's essays, exposed the variety of parallels between our present and our pasts. Those pasts are explored in greater detail in Part Four, after discussions of the nature of contemporary nativism [Part Two] and ‘‘causes’’ of ‘‘New Nativism’’ [Part Three]. Investigations in Parts Two and Three would seem to me to lead directly to the delightful explorations of the language of the ‘‘New Nativism,’’ but those four essays constitute Part Six. Each essay in Part Five concerns boundaries and ‘‘bounders,’’ so it made some sense for these essays to succeed the more historical and conceptual chapters. For such reasons, the arrangement of the essays suggests to me that students and faculty will find it more useful as a reference than as an orderly text.

That cavil registered, I found the essays accessible to nonspecialists, free of jargon, and replete with suggestive turns of phrase and mind. Most are quite critical of novel nativism and nouveau nativists, so scholars and teachers may want to seek ‘‘balance’’ elsewhere. Still, I learned something of value from each essay and can imagine that each might launch dozens of term papers.

I especially recommend Daniel Kanstroom's ‘‘Dangerous Undertones of the New Nativism: Peter Brimelow and the Decline of the West.’’ Professor Kanstroom reads Brimelow, author of ALIEN NATION and an editor of FORBES, alongside Oswald Spengler [THE DECLINE OF THE WEST], Tom Paine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Adolf Hitler to reveal ominous aspects in intellectual [well, relative to David Duke and Patrick Buchanan] nativism. I am not yet as frightened as Professor Kanstroom would have me be, but I now wonder whether I should be. This essay, I believe, would prod students of American political thought to plumb neo-nativism for ideas defensible and inexcusable.

Robert S. Kahn indicts the indefensible and inexcusable activities of the United States with regard to Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees in the 1980s. Mr. Kahn speaks with authority, for he worked in immigration prisons from 1984 through 1987 as a legal assistant. He has amply referenced his chronicle of outrages, so this work is neither memoir nor diary. Rather, Mr. Kahn has set out to enlighten Americans about designs executed and excised from memory: ‘‘Unpleasant as it is to learn that one's government has committed war crimes, it is shameful and dangerous to pretend it never happened.’’ [p. 3]

Of what crimes does Mr. Kahn treat? Those who sought asylum from warfare sponsored or supported by the United States were imprisoned without trials, deported without due process, betrayed to death squads by those from whom they sought sanctuary, and denied assistance of counsel. Men, women, and children were beaten, tortured, drugged, robbed, propositioned and exploited sexually, strip-searched, and spied on. Checks were intercepted and stolen. Discussions with lawyers were monitored. Testimony was mistranslated so that kangaroo courts could not learn truths that judges would otherwise have had to overlook.

Mr. Kahn attributes the etiology of these horrors by the ideology of the Reagan and Bush Administrations, but I did not find his explanation of mindsets to be very deep or persuasive. Instead, I anticipate that subscribers to this list-server would find Mr. Kahn's book most useful as an admonition to scholars and their students. OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOOD reveals conduct that shocks the conscience and turns the stomach. Shock and nausea turn to anger as Mr. Kahn alleges that these crimes were committed by U. S. administrators high and low, by judges and lawyers indifferent to the rule of law and to justice, by American opportunists who exploit those who have nothing, and even by translators who distort campesinos' words so that death-threats ignored become death-sentences.

Those who introduce their students to the rule of law through such tepid fare as the martyrdom of Sir Thomas More in ‘‘A Man for All Seasons’’ would do well to reconsider and to assign their students to read this book. Mr. Kahn describes a landscape in which the U. S. government has cut down every tree to get at imaginary devils and now confronts real evils with nary a tree to hide behind. Compared to scenes that Mr. Kahn recalls from his own experience, ‘‘Midnight Express’’ teaches students nothing, for they can always blame the youthful smuggler in that film for his own misfortunes and foreign regimes for their illegalities. If American academics would discuss the rule of law, let them first expose their students to the rule of men along our anarchic borders.

I read Mr. Kahn to move too facilely to the unconstitutionality of Proposition 187 from the illegalities, those admitted and those not yet admitted, perpetrated by U. S. officials in the 1980s against powerless immigrants. The former may be reprehensible; the latter are unconscionable. If more citizens knew about the atrocities committed in their name, maybe fewer would vote for measures such as Proposition 187. Maybe they would vote for 187 anyway, for there is a world of difference between a policy preferred by an electorate and exploitation hidden from the electorate.

Mr. Kahn and Professor Perea have revealed the variety of goals, beliefs, and values that may motivate efforts to control or to stop immigration. That revelation makes their books worth reading and pondering. That both books concede so little good faith to political and cultural opponents of the authors must counsel caution, however. That caution makes both immigration policy and critiques of nativism worth inquiry more skeptical and more balanced. Still, these dramatic volumes make such inquiries much more likely.


Copyright 1997