What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Immigration 6 comments

By Bradford Winters

For years I had been incubating ideas for a project set in the world of immigration—first a drama series, then a mini-series, a feature film, a documentary, a book of profiles, and finally, back to a one-hour drama, this format being my bread-and-butter medium.

But having traveled far and wide both in imagination and research, one thing was certain when I returned to the platform of a series: it would have at its heart a concern for family.

For in my mind, at the risk of sounding simplistic, that was and is the heart of the matter when it comes to immigration: people doing what needs to be done for their families, all debates on federal policy aside.

Soon, though, a second thing became just as certain as the first: I would have a hell of a time trying to pull off such a series on American television (at least network television) without falling prey to these raging debates. In the post-9/11 climate, how would such a series straddle the partisan divide without appearing to pander to either side?

Personally, I stood on the liberal side of the debate, favoring doors more open than closed, in the spirit of Leviticus 19:33:

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

The Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, in which churches nationwide provided refuge to a wave of undocumented Central American immigrants, found itself regenerated in the New Sanctuary Movement following the draconian aftermath of 9/11, and the stories were as compelling as the cause.

My sympathies were most definitely not on the side of ICE, the federal immigration agency renamed under George W. Bush, apparently for tactics often as chilling as the acronym implies.

Such open-door sympathies as inspired by Scripture, however, were properly challenged by minority arguments made in “A Biblical Perspective on Immigration Policy” and other backgrounders at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies website. The crux of those arguments:

“While movement of people spans the Old Testament from Adam to Abraham to Moses to Ruth...Scripture provides no uniform immigration policy mandate intended to apply to every body politic throughout human history.”

So while I developed a perhaps less facile point of view on the matter, the rub that remained was this: the often strident chorus on the conservative side of the debate—the one often heard upholding the “family values” agenda—failed to recognize the central element of family in the law-breaking risks that immigrants often took on behalf of desperate loved ones back home.

In any case, the more personal (rather not political mandates) in Scripture remained in my thoughts and they allow for no such failure of imagination.

After all, it states in First Chronicles: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as all our fathers were; our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no abiding.”

In short, we’re all immigrants in an existential sense, “seeking a homeland” as the Letter to the Hebrews makes clear.

This past year I’ve had a slight glimpse of what this latter version is like for millions around the globe.

The job market for screenwriters in New York being a sliver of what it is in Los Angeles, last winter I had to leave my wife and three children behind to take a job on a new series. (I know, sounds rough.)

Fortunately, an exceptionally efficient writers’ room made for a shorter time away from home than expected, but it was not an experience that my wife and I were eager to repeat. Should a second season pick-up of the series (“Boss” on Starz) come to pass, a family move to L.A. was all but inevitable.

For various reasons, such a move has turned out not to be so inevitable.

So off I went again to L.A. on the recent Feast of Epiphany, the symbolic light of that day contending with the shadow of separation from my wife and kids for an indefinite stretch this winter and spring.

I grant you that the gap between my experience and the extremities that countless immigrants endure on a daily basis is astronomical. To compare them in any way is ludicrous: while I crossed the desert by borrowed car from my grandmother’s house in Arizona (so as not to have to rent one in Los Angeles), Mexican immigrants were crossing it by foot south of me, perhaps with little water left and a corpse in their wake.

In the coming months I will fly home to see my family, and fly them out to see me; but who knows if and when those south of me would see their loved ones back home again.

Even so, despite my comparative luxuries the situation hurts.

It hurts not to be there at night to put my son to bed in his crib with his ritual swill of water, or my daughters with their favorite bedtime stories. And it hurts not to share that frequent laugh with my wife when our heads hit the pillows like twin trees felled by the chainsaw of early parenthood.

In a word, my lot now makes the far harsher realities of immigration truly unimaginable.