An Inhumane Immigration System

Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman in "The Visitor"

Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman in "The Visitor"

Film Friday

Indie films can do a lot of good when they reach the right people.  I saw this demonstrated with I watched Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor (2007) with my mother-in-law Jeanette this past week. (Warning: This post contains spoilers.)

Jeanette is an 89-year-old social conservative, one of those Iowans who voted (successfully) to recall the judges who ruled in favor of gay marriage last year.  A former teacher and farmer’s wife, she believes that big government is constantly giving away money to undeserving people of color.

The Visitor challenged some of her basic assumptions.  After all, it portrays illegal immigrants of color in a sympathetic light.  Walter, an economics professor in emotional freefall over the death of his wife, attends a conference in New York and finds a Syrian musician and a Senegalese artisan living in his long-vacant apartment.  (A conman has rented it to them.)  After first throwing them out, he is attracted to the Tarek’s drumming and begins to learn from him.  No sooner have they established a bond, however, than Tarek is picked up as an illegal alien and threatened with deportation to the country that killed his father.

The professor finds a lawyer for him and, in the course of the case, finds himself falling for Mouna, Tarek’s mother. If this were a Hollywood film, they would end up in love and Tarek would get a green card.  Or if it’s a grand Hollywood tragedy, then the transcendent but tragic love between two stars would be the focus and real life immigration issues would be relegated to explanatory background.

But this is an indie film so they don’t and Tarek is deported.  The professor must watch Mouna board an airplane to Syria to rejoin her son.  “You won’t be able to come back,” he says.  She knows it.

A Hollywood ending would shield a viewer from a tragedy that is re-enacted hundreds of times daily in detention centers around this country. Through the normal mechanisms of the American immigration system, people are regularly deprived of their American dream.

Jeanette, who has twice experienced the emotional devastation of losing a spouse, became enmeshed in the film, so much so that she rebelled against the ending.  Here was new love ripped away from a man because of politics. She wanted Hollywood reassurance that all would be well.

In other words, she identified, as did I, with the professor’s wail to the sympathetic but powerless staffers who deliver the bad news:

You can’t just take people away like that. Do you hear me? He was a good man, a good person. It’s not fair! We are not just helpless children! He had a life! Do you hear me? I mean, do YOU hear ME? What’s the matter with you?

So much of the political rhetoric about immigration occurs in a realm of abstraction where people are turned into faceless threats.  Give them stories and show the immigration system at work and maybe, just maybe, humane immigration reform can occur.  I like to think that, because of a film she saw by chance, Jeanette will be less likely to listen to those who demonize illegal immigrants.  Her fundamental decency now has a counter narrative that she can turn to.

 

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