On Being Biased and Opinionated, the Immigration Debate, and George Lakoff's Frames

I had an unsuccessful weekend in Northern California working on a documentary I began last month with friends. For me the gist of our project had been simple: immigrants are a vital part of our economy. Undocumented immigrants are not terrorists and shouldn’t be equated with them. They clean our houses, weed our gardens, grow and harvest our fruits and vegetables, and cook the food we eat in restaurants. They are essential members of our economy and the elemental role they play is completely unrecognized in the national debate on immigration. Well, to my surprise, my two childhood friends have adopted different frames of this issue and they are both concerned that I may be too opinionated and biased to accurately document this story. Meet BC and PBAH:

In his recent analysis, George Lakoff clarifies the complexity of the immigration issue and how framing the debate as an “immigration problem” has excluded the broader social and economic concerns that define the issue. In the paper, Lakoff puts my two friends in two separate frames. One friend he calls “The Bean Counter.” The Bean Counter’s opinion is: We can’t afford to have illegal immigrants using our tax dollars on health, education, and other services. BC has children in local public schools and is concerned that immigrants not paying taxes are destroying his children’s education and bringing down the quality of care at local hospitals. My other friend is what Lakoff calls “Progressivism Begins at Home.” His perspective is: The immigrants are taking the jobs of American workers and we have to protect our workers. PBAH works in construction and feels threatened by undocumented workers who work for half his pay (“That is when they get paid,” PBAH admits!). Both BC and PBAH draw on the invasion frame popularized by the Minutemen and right-wing bloggers, a frame that employs images of mass people crossing our borders and destroying America. 

That evening I had to restrain myself from calling PBAH and sharing another of my opinions, that the BA he earned in college might be better used in a job that requires a degree the unskilled worker seeking construction jobs doesn’t have. Once it registered for me what BC and PBAH thought about immigration, I couldn’t help but feel that George Bush and his call for “comprehensive immigration reform” had won the immigration debate. How could my two friends overlook the billions our president has cut from education since he’s been in office? And how could they miss the economic reality that low-skilled, low pay workers are what make the American economy go round, and that if we want to change that, we’d better start getting used to paying a lot more for the cheap products and services we enjoy? The number of low-wage workers who have been coming to America for so many years so that Business can flourish has no place in the frame that BC and PBAH and the American public have so credulously adopted. This proves, yet again, the brilliance and effectiveness of frames and the cunning ingenuity of those who continue to develop and take advantage of them.

Comments

[Rowshan]

Gracias por su punto de vista. The article from Lakoff was quite informative. While you considered the weekend in N. California "unsuccessful", I am sure that it was successful in opening a forum for constructively sharing & learning about differing perspectives. I do hope that the documentary includes both sides to this sensitive topic, while acknowledging & dispelling common myths.

[Nicole]

Kate,
Don't get me started about the real drains on our country: the wars, tax shelters for the uber-wealthy, and corporate greed that is taking tax dollars away from our basic services; health-care, education, etc.
What kills me most about all the propaganda against illegal immigrants is that it is the same rhetoric we have heard about every immigrant group that have been the backbone of our country. Steinbeck astutely describes this, and the importance of unionization, in a 1930's circa essay, In Dubious Battle in California: First it was fear against Chinese immigrants cheap labor, until they unionized into Tongs. The Japanese were the next wave of immigrants and cheap labor, until they too unionized. Next the Filipinos, who also unionized. The "Okies", then the Chicano immigrants, who as we know all unionized. Illegal immigrants (and third world laborers) cannot unionize, and they are not afforded basic civil rights as other ethnic minorities; hence we see free reign to the same age old exploitation of cheap labor, and the same bigotries and abuses. Bush's "guest worker program" is a frightening concept for exactly that reason, and it reeks of indentured servitude, without the promise of citizenship.
However, I think the larger issue afoot here is how our economic policy with Mexico has created dysfunctional immigration between our two countries.
If you, for being critical of the offered "plans" to illegal immigration- The Minutemen raging of 'walls' and 'deportation' and Bush's Guest Worker Program- are "biased and opinionated", then amen to you for it.

NH