Immigration and Sexuality

There is an intangible bond between mother and offspring, a bond that has been commented on by everyone from Sigmund Freud to Leonardo Da Vinci. This bond is apparent in any species, and is an invaluable ideal in understanding the dichotomy that is the human being and its processes. The current immigration debate can be better understood if placed into the theoretical parameters that America is the mother to the millions of citizens that call her home. America’s femininity can be derived from her fertile soil from which life on the continent was originally conceived, her beautiful rolling curves that take breaths away from the people who gaze upon her, and her birthing of freedom. However, immigration has suddenly threatened the citizens of America. These are not fears of the citizens to protect themselves; rather, they are protecting America, their mother. The issues that citizens of America are concerned about as it relates to the immigration debate are disease, littering of the gene pool, and economic effects. Therefore, to fight immigration is to protect their mother, the source of their well being.

“The skin is the border, isn’t it? And the border is essential. It reflects the health and the preserves and protects the health of the body. The same is true for the border of this country.” This is a quote from former U.S. Assistant Secretary Alan Keyes. It helps to demonstrate not only the personification that citizens give to the United States of America, but helps to exemplify one of the first arguments that people make for the regulation of immigration: Disease. When the Old World was discovered and settled by Europe, the native people found themselves ravaged by disease, disease that was brought over by the foreign Europeans. Keyes helps demonstrate this long held belief that ultimately, immigration equals disease. The way the border protects us from immigrants is the same way that the skin protects the body from disease. Essentially, our border is our skin.

This idea of immigrants being dirty is nothing new. In her book, Eugenic Nation, Alexandra Minna Stern describes an earlier example of this belief. She tells a story about how in 1915, a chief sanitary officer Claude C. Pierce was sent to Laredo, Texas, where he was to investigate several incidences of typhus fever on the border. She explains his voyage as, “ …an inquiry that eventually led to the imposition of a harsh quarantine against Mexico that lasted more than two decades and perpetuated stereotypes of Mexicans as dirty and lousy.” (Page 48) Although this is not the primary reason for the idea that immigrants are dirty and therefore carry disease, it is an important one for one reason. The reason is that it happened on the border of the U.S. and Mexico. This meant that American citizens were given reason to be immediately concerned not only about what undesirable effect that Mexicans could have on their family, but the effects that it could have on their motherland. This is the same idea that has lead to very extreme measures being taken back then and today to keep immigrants, mainly Mexicans, out of America.

Between the years of 1917 and 1983, Oregon had sterilized as many as 2600 people in the name of Eugenics. As if the later date of 1983 or the sheer number of people was not surprising enough, how about the fact that North Carolina admitted to the sterilization of 7600 people in the years between 1929 and 1974, and that 33 states had sterilization laws on the books at one time?(Stern pg. 1 and 2) It would seem that, as a people, the nation would be smart enough or tolerant enough not to fear the idea of one race ‘infecting the gene pool’ of another race. But the contrary is true. Americans feel the need to protect their mother and her future offspring: The infection of a gene pool is a fear that transcends time.

It wasn’t until WWII that miscegenation laws were taken off the books in this country. Miscegenation laws “…Forbade unions between whites and persons of color, as identified by a hodgepodge of classifications including mulatto, Malay, Mongolian, and Negro.” (Stern pg. 21). Although this passage says nothing about Mexicans in particular, the text does point out that Mexicans were subject to “aggressive rituals that were based on exaggerated, nearly hysterical, perceptions of them as dirty and diseased.” (Stern 29). These rituals consisted of quarantining Mexicans as soon as they crossed in to the U.SS., where they would be deloused with