Waiting to go: outside Tijuana, Mexican men and boys prepare to illegally cross the border into the U.S.

© Danny Lehman/Corbis

Even as corporations are attending to these demographic shifts and planning their marketing strategies accordingly, most citizens are not well informed about the reasons people are moving to this country and the bureaucratic challenges involved in pursuing citizenship.

"Everyone has an opinion about immigration, but not many people I know understand anything about it," says Melinda Wiggins M.T.S. '94 and longtime executive director of Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF), a nonprofit organization that grew out of early service-learning projects conducted by Duke students with migrant workers in Florida and North Carolina in the 1980s and '90s. Now housed at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, SAF is a nationwide program that engages students in organizing and service activities to improve housing, health care, education, and working conditions for migrant agricultural workers.

"Most people don't really understand why people come to this country, what our immigration laws are like, who they prevent from coming in, who they allow in, and how difficult it is to get legal permanent residency--especially for poor workers from Mexico," Wiggins explains. "People say to me, 'They're coming in and taking our jobs. They are getting benefits and welfare and don't deserve it. They don't pay taxes. Their children shouldn't be allowed to go to school. Why don't they just learn English? Why don't they just get a green card?' "

Noah Pickus hears the same questions. On a recent public-radio talk show, Pickus agreed with an irate caller that illegal immigration is breaking the law, but he encouraged his listener to consider how Americans are complicit in the system. "A lot of people have been very happy to benefit from the presence of illegal immigrants--go to any restaurant, any kitchen in Durham, go to any construction site, and count the number of immigrants working there. We are not about to send these 11 million people out of the country. We've accepted the gift of immigrant labor, and that gift is going to stay here, it's not going to go home." Pickus is fond of quoting Swiss novelist Max Frisch, who once said of German guest workers, "We asked for workers, and we got people." People, Pickus notes, who come here for a variety of reasons, form attachments, and end up putting down roots.

Contrary to popular opinion, immigrants--legal and illegal--do, at the least, pay federal excise taxes, and many have government I.D. numbers in lieu of Social Security numbers, Pickus says, but the problem is that the majority of their tax dollars go to the federal government. Yet state and local taxpayers must pick up the tab for infrastructure enhancements--new schools, more language teachers, and other social and medical services. Pickus argues that comprehensive immigration reform should take this situation into account, perhaps by offering a federal chargeback to local governments hard hit by the influx of newcomers. He also favors a bigger federal investment in integrating immigrants into society through more readily available English instruction, more rigorous citizenship education, and greater clarity about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

"You go into any community--a country, a university, a club--and you know that there are rules, even if it's not written down," says Pickus. "You know what you have to give to get what you receive in return. In our immigration policies today, that bargain is very unclear. "

After giving the keynote address at a Kenan Institute dinner at the Washington Duke Inn last fall, Pickus says he was approached by the captain of the wait staff--a recent immigrant from South America. She told him that he was exactly right: Trying to conquer the maze of paperwork and regulations to achieve legal status in this country is an enormous and confusing challenge.

Pickus believes that it has become harder for immigrants to assimilate, in part because all of those organizations that used to shepherd newcomers into the fold--labor unions, civic clubs such as Kiwanis, and ethnic political machines--are much less vigorous today. Pickus' own grandfather, an Austrian immigrant, landed in Galveston, Texas, but was soon taken by train to Kansas City, where, the story goes, he was led to a voting booth, courtesy of the local Teddy Pendergast political machine. "His not being a citizen did not stop them from finding a way to get his vote counted," Pickus says. "It was years later that he actually formally became a citizen. It wasn't the textbook civics way of thinking about citizenship, but it worked for my grandfather."

"The single most important organizations today for incorporating immigrants are the evangelical churches," says Pickus. "They are civically engaged, partly because they want to save souls. They want to take a lot of Hispanic Catholics and make them evangelicals. So while a lot of liberal organizations are not engaged or they are engaged in a legal sense, other groups have fallen away, and there's a vacuum."

While some churches may welcome newcomers from across the border, there is also a profound streak of xenophobia in our culture toward immigrants whether they arrive legally or not. Gita Gulati-Partee '91, an organizational consultant, is the daughter of immigrants from India. Though she was born in North Carolina, she says she was often considered "other" by her grade-school teachers and some fellow students growing up. Reflecting on her work with marginalized groups, Gulati-Partee has come to the conclusion that knee-jerk fear and criticism of immigrants should be understood as a deeper conflict within ourselves as Americans that we need to resolve. "Maybe, deep down, we are in awe of immigrants--the initiative and courage they show to get here, their willingness to work hard against so many odds, their embodiment of the 'American dream.' Perhaps we feel inferior by comparison," she says.

Row upon row: migrant farm workers plant yellow squash on farm in rural North Carolina

© Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis

Today through her company, OpenSource Leadership Strategies, Gulati-Partee has assembled a multicultural team of leaders and facilitators. They work as partners with nonprofit organizations around the country who want their boards and staff to consider more fully, and tap representation from, the constituencies they serve, which often include recent immigrants and other minorities. From this vantage point, Gulati-Partee likens the process of assimilation to a fraternity hazing. "Whether it was the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, or the Chinese, it's as if the Americans who have been here longer seem to be saying, 'We've all been through this rite of passage as a group, and now it's our turn to initiate the newcomers.' "

The hazing metaphor is apt, says Duke sociology professor Suzanne Shanahan, who studies group identity, membership, behavior, and the interplay among various components of individual identity, including ethnicity, religion, and nationality. "The hazing process is about making a commitment to the group," she says. "It's the idea that you are going to subject yourself to ridiculous things to establish your solidarity, prove your willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the group, and to show loyalty. I think the way we treat immigrants is often like that."

At the same time, in examining when and where certain identities become more important to groups of people, Shanahan has seen a trend toward diminishing national allegiance among native-born Americans and residents of other highly developed nations. "Increasingly," she says, "it seems that identity and citizenship are decoupled. A person's national citizenship, political identity, and social/cultural identity were once tightly fitted, but today people have rights as human beings that transcend our citizenship rights. It makes the identity component of citizenship less salient."

The diminishing relevance of citizenship is also less salient in an increasingly globalized society where the divide continues to widen between rich and poor, Pickus says. "One of the ways in which we are coming apart as a nation is the extent to which those people with money and education are increasingly living lives separated from the rest of their countrymen and women. If I have a home in Tuscany and a bank account in Bonn and a consulting firm in Bangkok, what do I really care about what happens here?"