Communities on the Move

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So the idea of Communities Without Borders is to take a look at these communities of people and see that this migration process is a community process; that whole communities participate in it, and that migration creates new communities of people here in the United States.

What will it take for people to view immigrants as families, as communities?

It's important for us to be able to look behind the stereotypes, look behind the hysteria, and try to understand what the reality is -- then think about what our values are as people. Do we believe in equality? Do we want to support families? Do we think that communities should have a certain amount of stability to them so that people can participate in community life here? But in order to figure out how those values apply to reality, we have to understand a little bit about what the life of immigrant communities really is like.

In mid-December, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested more than 1,000 workers at six Swift & Company meatpacking plants. Do you think that high-profile events like the Swift raids might push people to see how damaging current immigration policy is to families and communities?

I think that many people looking at the pictures of workers being led out of the factory in handcuffs, or seeing the reactions of their families, results in human sympathy. That's a good thing. We need to keep hold of our human feelings for each other. But I think that the Swift raids are being used to push forward a political program that the government wants passed. It's a brutal and destructive way to advance that program: To rip families apart and to pull workers out of factories in handcuffs is not a good way to go about doing it. It's an antiperson, antipeople approach.

This is the reality. 'Guest worker' is a friendly-sounding phrase -- people are going to come here, they're going to be guests. Well, this is not the way you treat a guest. What the [Communities Without Borders] project is trying to do here is to look at the reality underneath the rhetoric, so that [citizens] can make a decision about whether this is really something that they want.

One of the plants raided was in Worthington, Minnesota. I was there shortly after it happened and, I'll admit, I was surprised to see a substantial outreach by the white community in the area-a sense that they really considered these workers to be their neighbors now. Have you seen this kind of reaction in other places as well?

Yes, I have. In the book, there are pictures from a classroom in Madison, a small meatpacking town in the middle of the countryside in Nebraska. As a result of the migration of the past decade and a half, there is now a big Mexican community in Madison. Of course, our communities are all complicated; it's not as though there are no people in Madison who are not fearful about the changing demographics of that community. But when I went into the school to take those pictures, I found that the school has bilingual classes for the Spanish-speaking students. When they talked to me about it, the school's principal and teachers treated this as a matter-of-fact, obvious need, not something that they thought was particularly controversial.

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