Land of Immigrants

Next week, Barack Obama’s administration will present its long-awaited immigration reform, in which Colombia has special interest because it is one of the 12 countries with the highest levels of migration to the U.S.

Although the officials in charge of the project continued working on the final terms yesterday, it was disclosed that the proposal includes the possibility that parents of children who have American citizenship may obtain documents that would allow them to stay in the country legally.

In addition, the initiative would protect undocumented immigrants who arrived as children, so they may obtain residency and enter the job market with the same rights as those who were born there. And in the future, deportations will continue for all those who commit a crime on American soil.

The proposal arrives at a time when both Democrats and Republicans have agreed that the immigration system needs major change, because “it is broken.”

This political consensus is more than necessary, since previous attempts by the governing party have run into the barrier of opposition legislators. What’s more, President Obama himself has stated that if he faced refusal in the House, such as that at the beginning of the year, he would proceed in a streamlined way, which is equivalent to saying that he would issue it by executive order.

In any case, it is an act of reclamation of American history, which since the 17th century has been built with the momentum of the foreigners who populated its cities.

Approximately 1 million legal and 1.5 million undocumented immigrants currently arrive every year in those suburbs, and already amount to approximately 40 million, just slightly less than the population of Colombia. With this trend, the influx of Latin Americans, especially, could create two cultures among a single people, as researcher Samuel Huntington warned in a controversial book.

Perhaps from that ethnocentric perspective, which looks like the mirror image of a fearful society, this nation of immigrants, as Obama himself described it, has not yet admitted that if it has achieved prosperity it was due to the migratory waves that arrived from different parts of the world, which provided it with the talent of scientists, researchers, professionals, journalists and laborers. In addition to sustaining the creative and innovative productivity indicators by which the U.S. has been characterized in the eyes of the world, they also contributed to the expansion of the economy due to high consumption levels.

For those reasons, many still see as incongruous the massive deportations of Mexicans in the 1950s, after the authorities themselves asked them to come and contribute to building the country.

The reform, then, is an opportunity for the U.S. to renew its identity as a country of immigrants, as a destination for many of the world’s inhabitants who look for a space to work and prosper.