How 'they' become 'us'

BY HIROSHI MOTOMURA

My family came from Japan to the United States in 1957, when I was three years old. Even in the rich diversity of a San Francisco childhood, kids with "foreign" names — like Ziad, Juanita, and Hiroshi — found that the early 1960s world of "Ozzie and Harriet," "Leave It to Beaver" and "American Bandstand" prompted deep and unsettled questions about what it means to come to America and what it means to say that it is a nation of immigrants.

These questions arose against the backdrop of immigration laws that treated many of us in ways that didn't reflect our attachments to America. My own family was a perfect example. My father came to America as a young man. Because he had been born here, the law treated him as coming home. Yet he felt, acted and was treated like an immigrant.

My mother was born in Japan in 1924, the same year that U.S. law made her ineligible, on account of race, to immigrate to the United States. I was stateless until I became a naturalized U.S. citizen at the age of 15. My brother, Akira, was born in San Francisco three years after my mother and I immigrated. He and I were both children of immigrant parents, but as a citizen by birth, his legal status was quite different from mine.

The legal line between citizens and noncitizens — between "us" and "them" — often doesn't fit how families come to this country. Families like mine start as "them" and end up as "us," even if the process sometimes takes generations.

For much of its history, America treated lawful immigrants as "intending citizens," reflecting the view that immigration is a transition to citizenship and that lawful immigrants are Americans in waiting. This confers on them a presumed equality that helps them take full advantage of the opportunity to integrate into America.

Today, the key to sound immigration policy is realizing that it is also immigrant policy. But such a view of immigration only works if newcomers are given the chance to become Americans. It is by welcoming immigrants that we can expect them to make a commitment to this country.

But today's lawful immigrants face perverse obstacles to citizenship. The federal government has increased fees by almost 70%, to levels very onerous for working families that have children. The citizenship test is tougher. And the processing backlog has reached ridiculous proportions — measured not in months but years.

Even more troubling — and tied to the failure to see immigrants as future Americans — is the role that immigration is playing in presidential politics. The conventional wisdom that draconian enforcement is the only position that helps at the polls reflects the worst kind of tunnel vision because it fails to acknowledge and foster the contributions that immigrants can make.

A sensible approach to immigration and immigrants must reflect the understanding that many of "them" will become part of "us." The worst policy is one that keeps immigrants from becoming Americans.

Motomura is a professor of law. This op-ed is based on his book, "Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States" (Oxford University Press, 2006).

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