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opinion
Also in this section: Rodríguez, The Panamanian political parties
Immigration, here and there Control over who gets into a country and who does not is a fundamental attribute of national sovereignty, so nationalists of every stripe in every country will tend to be annoyed with this power is lost, whether by cession to another power or by inability to enforce border controls. Surely for a lot of US nationalists, the sight of hundreds of thousands of immigrants marching in the streets, many of them waving Mexican flags, has been discomforting. Down here, a lot of Panamanian nationalists get similar feelings when they hear Chinese accents at the corner store or Colombian accents at the mall. The US Congress is caught in an election-year brawl over immigration laws, with politicians of both major parties and across the political spectrum looking none too pretty in the postures they are affecting. In Panama the National Assembly was supposed to take up immigration reform in its last session but didn't, and says that it will do so in the current session but hasn't so far. One big differerence between here and there is that those with the greatest stakes in Panamanian immigration reform have been almost entirely silent on the issue, to the extent that what's being discussed here is almost entirely unrelated to anything that's real. Let us take note of certain realities: 1. In both Panama and the United States, there are so many foreigners living and working illegally that it's imperative to have a massive amnesty just so that immigration authorities can get ahold of their respective situations with the limited resources they have. 2. Panama is a young and relatively poorly educated country, which has no great need for more unskilled workers but needs talented individuals from around the world to raise its professional and technical standards, while the United States is an aging and relatively well educated society that needs young workers in order to do the menial jobs that nobody will take and to expand the labor force so that the country doesn't end up with a social security system that has more people drawing retirement benefits than it does workers making payroll contributions into the system. 3. The biggest US linguistic minority was originally incorporated into the country by conquest (the taking of northern Mexico, the purchase of Florida, the occupation of Puerto Rico) and later augmented by immigration; while Panama's English- and Chinese-speaking minorities are the products of immigration patterns that began about 150 years ago. There is a far better argument for making Spanish an official second language in the United States than for giving English official status here, but in each country the assimilation of the children from linguistic minorities into the majority language and culture is a reasonable aim of public educational policy. 4. Much of Panama's current immigration, both legal and illegal, is driven by three factors: Colombia's never-ending violence, the lack of individual freedoms and opportunities in China and America's current bout of intolerance, suspicion and hysteria. A large part of the US illegal immigrant population is there because the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations supported death squad terror that prompted many Central Americans to flee their homes, and because the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have insisted upon a free trade deal with Mexico that drove countless small farmers who couldn't compete with US imports off of their land. The Panamanian government has thus had little control over the external factors driving immigration pressure here, while the US government largely has itself to blame for its current immigration problems. 5. In every society there are elements of militant ignorance and organized intolerance, and these feed upon xenophobia. The redneck vigilantes taking up arms on the US side of the Mexican border and those Panamanians who insist that they are harmed by the presence of ethnic Chinese kids in the public schools because they are obliged to study by their parents and thus pose unfair competition for "real Panamanian" kids are two sides of the same worthless coin. The politicians who curry to such people need to be identified as such and called to account for their demagoguery. 6. Among the many unsustainable aspects of economic integration on the NAFTA / CAFTA model is the notion that countries can have the free flow of capital and management personnel, but not labor. No free trade agreement between the United States and Panama that doesn't pull down the barriers to labor migration would be worthwhile in the long run. Of course this is a radical idea that hasn't been and won't be on the negotiating agenda for the Bush and Torrijos administrations, but it's not that far out --- the European Union, for example, has labor mobility of that sort. There should be nothing odd or discomforting about a Mexican living and working in the United States yet retaining his or her Mexican identity. 7. Because of the long association between the United States and Panama, there are many families of mixed citizenship. When some siblings hold Panamanian (or US) citizenship and others don't, humane considerations should lead both countries to make allowances for family reunification, allowing those with family ties to live and work in the countries where members of their immediate families hold citizenship.
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