I love how all of a sudden we don’t understand that something being legal doesn’t mean that it isn’t unjust. Raising rent when salaries are not increasing proportionally is legal, payday loans are legal and predatory, immigration brokers can be legal and exploitative.

I completely understand the impulse to want to exonerate your parents because you’ve seen the suffering they’ve endured. And also what of the *legal but still exploitative* harm that others endured at their hands? That’s okiter by the semantics of “are they human traffickers y/n”

We can and should simultaneously hold the following:
- the racist immigration system is eager to criminalize those facilitating what it deems “illegal immigration,” especially non-whites
- the US is very happy to import less costly foreign labor even if workers enter “illegally”

cont’d:
- there are classed dynamics amongst immigrant communities which drives respectability politics and contempt for undocumented people, and people can and/or are glad to profit from the exploitation of others based on their familiarity with immigration & labor systems

cont’d:
- people struggle to honestly grasp their loved one’s capacity for/complicity in harm because of the suffering they’ve endured at the hands of the state
- there is a slippery slope in conflating a personal/confessional/memoir essay as authoritative reporting

I am unnerved by a certain white immigration reporter who, on one hand, threw her support behind this exculpatory post and then on the other, pops into someone’s mentions to say “it’s so hard to know what to think when good people are making points on both sides.” Excuse me?

My personal knowledge of the immigration system is particular because my folks’ process was relatively straightforward if not just long. But I’ve met, spoken to, loved so many people whose experiences vary wildly. There is no simple story to tell about immigration, full stop.

“Legal” is not an antonym for traumatic, dangerous, violent, exploitative, sinister, cruel, or classist where imperial borders are concerned. What are the conditions of and that compel/facilitate movement? What/who do migrants leave behind, how are they tethered to home?

I’m not sure if this conversation has done much but reveal many of the personal and political priorities-motivations of those who’ve waded into it. And unfortunately, I’m not sure either foreground the most vulnerable people who are harmed by so many different parties.