We all started on the same boat

As of its 2010 national survey, the U.S. Census Bureau states that 0.9 percent of America’s population identifies as American Indian, Inuit, or Aleut. If you, like myself, make up the other 99.1 percent of Americans, that means that at some point, someone in your family was an immigrant.

I urge you to ask yourself whether this initial ancestor of yours, who braved countless hurdles to make it to this continent, was a person. Did they have hopes? Dreams? Did they deserve respect?

I believe the answer to these questions is a firm, resounding yes. I think that humans deserve respect.

Conversations about “what to do with all these damn immigrants” often become heated. Issues resting at the intersection of politics, morals and economics almost always do. But I often see a disturbing trend in these sort of debates: When the word “immigrant” enters the conversation, the people in question are almost immediately dehumanized.

Words are important. The language we use shapes the way we think, which shapes the way we act, which shapes the world around us. Words like “inner-city,” “the gays,” “immigrants,” “conservatives.” Words like these obscure the very people they seek to describe. They cease to be autonomous humans and are relegated to a collection, a category, a faceless group of bodies.

They become objects.

This dehumanization has proved extremely useful, biologically. Humans like to put things in boxes; it’s a mental shorthand that allows us to make incredibly complex calculations and predict what will happen in the future very quickly. It’s also extremely dangerous. As a person of Jewish descent, I am not able to forget what happens when you dehumanize a category of people.

Some of you may be saying “Whoa, dude, pump the brakes.” I am not calling anyone a Nazi, or a fascist, or a racist. I’ve heard many decent, reasonable people who I respect point to a variety of valid economic issues in which illegal immigration plays a role. I am not discounting these. This country is facing a slew of economic concerns, and you have every right to worry about them. You should worry about them.

What I am doing is asking you to set your politics or other personal beliefs aside for a moment. I’m asking you to step outside the life you’re used to, and put yourself inside the life of someone for whom the fear of deportation is very real. I’m asking you to consider what it’s like, briefly, to worry about going into a public place. I’m asking you to wonder if your mother got arrested on her way to pick you up because she’s 10 minutes late and you haven’t heard from her. I’m asking you to imagine knocking on your best friend’s door to find that they were arrested without a warrant last night, and are detained 300 miles away. I’m asking you to picture not being able to call the police to report a crime because you’re more worried about the questions they’ll ask you.

I’m asking you to step outside of the security that being an American citizen guarantees.

Because, after all, there was a time not too long ago when your family couldn’t count on these guarantees. That’s why they came here. The only reason you are sitting where you are, reading these words is because someone in your family had the courage to leave everything and everyone they knew and move to a country where they didn’t know the language or the customs.

You can argue about legality, you can argue about politics, you can argue about work ethic, you can argue about whatever you damn well please. All I ask is that you keep in mind that you’re talking about people. Real, living, breathing people.