移民仍然爱着美国,即使美国并不爱他们
I know all too well how some Americans feel about immigrants: I was undocumented for 25 years, and I am a child of immigrants who remain undocumented. I also wrote a book about the daily lives of migrants during the Trump years.
我实在太熟悉某些美国人怎么看移民了:我在无证状态下生活了25年,我的父母至今无证。我还写了一本书,讲特朗普在位期间移民的日常生活。
At the time, the Trump administration seemed to be the worst possible administration for immigrants and their advocates. Every one of the migrants I met in my reporting had lived through something extraordinary. They were all good people, but they were also flawed like anyone else. If you know nothing else about our migrants, you should know this: They have survived everything God put in front of them, and then some, in the name of freedom and safety, for themselves and their children.
在当时,对移民和移民维权人士来说,特朗普政府已经不能再糟糕。我在做报道期间遇到的每一位移民都在经历某些不寻常的事。他们都是好人,但也都有缺陷,和所有人一样。如果你对我们这些移民一无所知,那么至少应该知道这个:他们挺过了上帝摆在他们面前的一切磨难,然后,又要为自己和他们的孩子去经历一些以自由和安全的名义施加的煎熬。
周五,一名移民儿童在圣迭戈附近的边境墙边。
I will never understand why they, why we, were and are so hated.
我永远无法理解,为什么他们——我们——会招致如此多的仇恨,无论过去还是现在。
President Biden vowed to fix the immigration system, but in many ways things remain as dire as ever. Not only has Mr. Biden failed to deliver meaningful reform, but also his administration has taken a Trumpian approach to the border crisis, issuing what amounts to an asylum ban. He has abdicated his responsibility, leaving room for local governments to act like sheriffs. All the while, Republicans have been steadily marching toward authoritarianism, book ban by book ban and voter suppression tactic by voter suppression tactic.
拜登总统承诺要解决移民系统的问题,但从很多方面看,情况并没有丝毫改善。拜登没能带来切实的改革,不只是这样,他的政府还在边境危机中采取了特朗普式的手段,实际上等于在实施避难收容禁令。他放弃了自己的职责,放任地方政府去以治安官的方式行事。与此同时,共和党人们正在一步步走向专制主义,一本本图书被禁,选民抑制操作层出不穷。
I was a child in Ecuador in the 1990s, a time when Latin America was reeling from the effects of decades of coups, dictatorships and political repression. My parents passed on to me and my brother their full-blooded hatred of authoritarianism and those who abet it — weak-willed people who value their own careers over their country’s constitution, the disengaged and indifferent populace.
上世纪90年代,年幼的我在厄瓜多尔,当时的拉丁美洲满目疮痍,刚刚经历数十年的政变、独裁和政治压迫。在父母的影响下,我和我的兄弟也对专制恨之入骨,包括那些助纣为虐的人,意志的软弱促使那些嗯将自己的前途置于国家宪制之上,他们是不负责任、无动于衷的民众。
White conservative men, the mainstay of the voting bloc that feels itself to be invisible and left behind, whose genius goes unnoticed and valor goes untested, now have an opportunity to be the protagonists they feel is their birthright. But they must know in their hearts that it is not brown, Black and nonbinary children who threaten America’s standing in the world; rather, it is men like them, all stirred up by military cosplay.
保守派白人男性是一个特定选民群体的主要组成部分,他们觉得自己受忽视,被抛弃,他们的才能没得到认可,勇气没经历考验,现在他们觉得有了成为主角的机会,而这是他们与生俱来的权利。但他们心里肯定知道,威胁美国在世界上的地位的,不是棕色、黑色皮肤、非二元性别的儿童,而是像他们这样,玩军人过家家玩得血脉偾张的男人。
Take Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and his anti-immigrant border project, Operation Lone Star, which, among other things, while Title 42 was in effect employed state trespassing laws to arrest migrants when they cross private land. Every week, it hemorrhaged $2.5 million from taxpayers as National Guard members were deployed at his discretion to stop single instances of border crossings. It’s ridiculous. But it sure did make him sound like a cowboy.
比如得克萨斯州长格雷格·阿博特和他的反移民边境项目孤星行动,在《第42条》生效期间,他用本州的擅闯私人地方法律去逮捕进入私人地界的移民。这个项目每周要吃掉纳税人250万美元,国民卫队要在他的号令下去阻止每一宗越境事件。这很荒诞。但也的确让他显得很有牛仔派头。
On Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed legislation that makes it a third-degree felony to interact with undocumented people in a way the governor does not like: pointing them to a soup kitchen, giving them a ride to a doctor, encouraging them to pursue an education. The law requires hospitals to collect immigration information from all patients and prohibits local governments from issuing any form of identification to the undocumented. It nullifies valid driver’s licenses issued to “illegal aliens” by other states. It criminalizes anyone who hires an undocumented worker. It is a huge waste of taxpayer money and antiterrorism allocations. And it is un-American.
周三,佛罗里达州长罗恩·德桑蒂斯签署一项法案,所有以州长不喜欢的方式与无证人士互动的行为,都将犯下三级重罪,比如告知他们发放免费餐食的地方在哪,开车带他们去看医生,鼓励他们去上学。该法要求医院向所有病患收集移民信息,禁止地方政府向无证人士发放任何形式的身份证明。它规定其它州向“非法外来人”发放的驾照无效。它规定雇用无证工人的行为属于犯罪。它浪费大量纳税人的钱财和反恐拨款。这不是美国的方式。
Immigrants believe in the American story about freedom and self-governance. In fact, nobody believes harder than we do. The migrants at the border right now are there because they acted on the belief that we are all born with a God-given right to self-determination. They were willing to risk everything on their belief in liberty, on their belief in the kind of freedom you fight for. Human beings who have known freedom their whole lives cannot fully appreciate it — in the same way that fish cannot really appreciate water.
移民相信的美国故事是关于自由和自主的。事实上,没有谁在这方面的信念比我们更坚定。此刻身在边境的移民,正是为了践行这一信念,即人人生来拥有上天赋予的自主权。为了对自由权利的信仰,为了对你们为之奋斗的那种自由的信仰,他们愿意豁出一切。一生享受自由的人不会真正珍惜自由,就像鱼不会真正珍惜水一样。
It is a cruel twist that the country we fled to can sometimes remind us of the places we left, but the irony is the point. In an attempt to keep nonwhite immigrants out of the United States, many Republican lawmakers have turned against its crown jewel: democracy.
我们逃向的国度有时会让我们想起逃离的地方,这是残酷的反转,但重点是其中的讽刺意味。为了阻止非白人移民进入美国,许多共和党议员已经开始反对这个国家最宝贵的东西:民主。
The good news is that immigrants can be our secret weapon in the fight against authoritarianism. Immigrants love America in a way that America needs to be loved if it is going to survive.
好消息是,移民可以成为我们对抗专制的秘密武器。移民对美国的热爱,正是美国精神存续所需的情感。
Our political disillusionment hasn’t resulted in apathy, but the opposite: We’ve turned it into a longing in the form of the American dream. If love is the choice to hold something dear at the risk of loss and without needing to be loved in return, what else do we call the code of honor by which millions of undocumented people pay taxes and contribute to Social Security every year, knowing they will never see a dime? If faith is the belief in something wonderful without needing to see proof of its existence, how else do we explain the 22-year-long fight of the Dreamers to get a pathway to citizenship?
我们的政治幻灭并没有带来麻木不仁,恰恰相反:我们将之变成了以美国梦为名的渴望。如果爱是一种宁愿冒上失去的风险也不需要回报的珍惜,这说的不就是明明知道自己拿不回一分钱,还每年纳税交社保的数以百万计的无证移民吗?如果信仰是相信某种美好事物且无需看到其切实存在的证据,这说的不就是梦想者们为获得公民身份而走上的22年漫漫奋斗路吗?
The problem is we’ve been treating immigrants very, very badly.
问题是,我们给移民的待遇实在太糟糕了。
Most Americans support meaningful and humane immigration reform that includes a way for the immigrants already here to get legal status, but our elected representatives do not act as if they care about anything other than re-election. Fixing this immigration mess involves unsexy things like expanding eligibility for temporary status, expanding humanitarian parole and hiring more staff at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In order to achieve this solution, we need bipartisan collaboration. But not everyone can lead, not everyone is willing to work hard and not everyone is brave.
大多数美国人都支持合理而人道的移民改革,这包括让已在国内的移民获得合法身份的办法,但我们选出的议员眼里似乎除了连任别无他物。要解决这一移民难题,得去做没那么漂亮的实事,比如扩大临时身份的适用范围,增加人道主义假释,并为美国公民及移民服务局增加人力。为了落实这些办法,我们需要两党通力合作。但不是每个人都可以领导,不是每个人都愿意付出,不是每个人都勇敢。
Even in the United States, political corruption, economic collapse and extrajudicial punishment can happen at any time. Maybe that’s an intolerable thought and painting immigrants as fundamentally different from us, bearers of an otherworldly suffering, allows us to pretend they are not like us and that their fate is not intertwined with our own.
即便在美国,政治腐败、经济崩溃和法外惩处同样随时可能发生。或许这是一种无法容忍的想法,视移民为与我们截然不同的存在,是一群承受难以想象的苦难的人,让我们得以假装他们和我们不一样,他们的命运与我们也并非息息相关。