César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and an immigration lawyer. He has appeared in the New York Times, CNN en Español, NPR, The Guardian, and many other venues. The author of ”Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants” as well as “Crimmigration Law,” he lives in Denver, Colorado. Learn more at ccgarciahernandez.com.
SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory – what’s it about and what inspired you to write it?
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández: It’s common to hear that Republicans and Democrats can’t agree about anything when it comes to immigration policy. That’s not true. For decades, Republicans and Democrats have agreed that people who commit crime shouldn’t be allowed to make a life in the United States. And yet the United States has always been home to imperfect people.
I wrote “Welcome the Wretched” to push ordinary people in the United States to pull back the layers of our pasts and our family history, where there is almost always something troubling hiding, and then ask ourselves whether the flaws and failures that led to us living here are all that different from the flaws and failures of migrants living here today.
SunLit: Place the excerpt you selected in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole and why did you select it?
García Hernández: Political debates about immigration are often depressing and infuriating, but Wynnie Goodwin’s story is the opposite. It’s an example of what could happen if we had an immigration law system that gave people the time to move beyond their worst moments.
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SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
García Hernández: I was born into a family of migrants, raised in a community filled by migrants, and have spent my adult life listening to politicians and judges talk about migrants. The people who I’ve known my entire life are exactly the imperfect people who politicians and judges paint as dangerous. And yet for me they have just been friends, relatives, and neighbors, warts and all. I wrote “Welcome the Wretched” to show that imperfection has nothing to do with our citizenship and everything to do with our humanity.
SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?
García Hernández: Research and writing are a series of dead ends, but the years that I spent putting together “Welcome the Wretched” taught me that I learn more and write better when I ask archivists, editors, and colleagues for help. It’s not as romantic as an image of a lone writer tapping away at a keyboard, but it’s far more effective.
SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?
García Hernández: “Welcome the Wretched” is built around the stories of real people whose lives are anything but perfect. Several of those people or their close relatives are still alive and were willing to speak with me about their lives, legal problems, and fears. I had to be sensitive to the legal risk and emotional burden that I was asking people to take on.
SunLit: What do you want readers to take from this book?
García Hernández: There isn’t much of a gap between immigration policy and immigration politics. Since the politics of immigration are constantly evolving, when it comes to immigration policy, nothing is impossible – for better or worse.
SunLit: Why shouldn’t the United States deport migrants who commit crimes?
“Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the ‘Criminal Alien'”
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García Hernández: It’s appealing to think that deporting migrants who commit crimes makes us safer, but often it doesn’t work out that way. First, migrants are part of families that are impacted hard when a loved one is deported. Since deportation laws generally don’t consider whether a migrant has children or a spouse who are U.S. citizens, deportation tears apart families. Kids suddenly are forced to live without a parent and spouses without an income earner. That’s a recipe for instability that no one should want.
Second, deportation creates problems that eventually show up in the United States. Back in the 1980s, a small number of teenagers who had fled the civil wars in Central America started a gang in L.A. Working with Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, Congress made it easier to deport them for gang-related crime. They wound up in countries like El Salvador that had no ability to support young people left to fend for themselves in a war-torn country. That little gang, MS-13, eventually became a transnational menace that destabilized most of Central America, leading a new generation of people to head towards the United States.
If we keep trying more of the same strategies, we shouldn’t be surprised that nothing changes.
SunLit: Tell us about your next project.
García Hernández: Borders aren’t just places that people cross. Sometimes they move and other times they’re misplaced. I’m currently researching a book project about the many forms and locations that the border that the United States shares with Mexico has taken.
Along the western half, government contractors have built walls in the wrong place, while on the eastern end the Rio Grande River has frequently shifted course, muddying citizenship and immigration law enforcement as much as the river’s churning waters. I’m hoping that this project, which I’m calling “When Borders Move,” helps readers understand that borders, like people, are constantly evolving.
A few more quick items
Currently on your nightstand for recreational reading: “Sinsajo,” the Spanish translation of the final book in the “Hunger Games” series, plus a stack of “London Review of Books” and “New York Review”
First book you remember really making an impression on you as a kid: A history of the Titanic. I was in third grade and when I finished it, I walked into the school library the next morning and told the librarian, Mrs. Graham, “I read a hundred-page book!”
Best writing advice you’ve ever received: Pick a topic you know and people you care about.
Favorite fictional literary character: The narrator of “Transit” by Anna Seghers, a novel about life as a migrant attempting to flee Nazi-controlled France, who other characters call either Weidel or Siedler, but whose real name we don’t know
Literary guilty pleasure (title or genre): Harry Potter
Digital, print or audio – favorite medium to consume literature: Print
One book you’ve read multiple times: The Bible
Other than writing utensils, one thing you must have within reach when you write: Headphones so I can listen to Billie Holiday
Best antidote for writer’s block: Taking Pano (the Panoramic Express lift) to the top of Mary Jane and looking across the snowy Fraser Valley
Most valuable beta reader: My wife