NEW HAVEN – On June 7th 2007, Fair Haven, CT, had the air of Fallujah. It was one day after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the town’s Latino enclave for the first time in nearly thirty years and rounded up thirty-two people. The streets were quiet. The local clinic was deserted, and many residents, afraid to leave home, lived on eggs and canned goods, and lurked by their windows.

Along with the Latino members, the rest of the deeply diverse Greater New Haven community was reeling from the experience. The intervention of the federal agents had not fixed anything that was broken here. Rather it caused a break in the affairs of a city in which, within the legal framework of the autonomy granted to municipalities, everything has been working quite smoothly.

The raid was the federal government’s retaliation against the mayor’s decision to issue municipal ID cards to undocumented workers. The IDs are meant to lower the rate of crime in the city by enabling the workers to open bank accounts and thus preventing them from carrying large amounts of cash which makes them robbery targets. Two days after the Mayor’s announcement, the ICE men charged in, invaded homes and apartments at dawn, did not even pause to ask the names of those whom they swept up and herded into buses in handcuffs.

Unlike many of my neighbors, I, having lived through the early years of the Iran-Iraq war, supported President Bush’s notion that the world would be a better place without Saddam. By virtue of belonging to the Iranian diaspora, some of whom have been assassinated, I knew long before 9/11 the threat that dangerous outsiders posed living among us. As such, I welcomed the invention of the Department of Homeland Security to root out men who wanted to learn to fly but not land.

But the authorities whom I entrusted with the task of fighting the terrorists terrorized my own community. The raid was a betrayal: To be asked to bear the costs of a brutal war, then watch our resources be squandered on fighting the local busboy, pedicurist, pizza-maker, and carpet-installer. If the detainees were indeed undocumented, as ICE alleges, they would still constitute, according to Secretary Chertoff himself, the lowest priority of concern for a department that ought to focus its efforts on fugitives who are national security threats or have a history of violence or crime. Besides, the arrest of thirty two individuals cannot possibly address the problem of twelve million undocumented workers living in the United States. Instead, it makes functioning communities suffer for the policies that politicians are failing to craft.

The suffering that befell New Haven, tales and images of poor, hardworking immigrants being hauled out of their apartments in their nightgowns, their hands chained around their waists, will be heartily hailed by the public relations managers headquartered in Tora Bora. Those mountains that harbor our enemies are also the archives of every American mistake or misconduct from the moment the Mayflower dropped anchor till today. The Japanese may forgive Hiroshima, and the Vietnamese may move past the war, but Osama bin Laden, who accuses President Bush of “following the mentality of his ancestors who killed the Native Americans to take their land and wealth,” will not.

If it is the rial that keeps Al Queda’s economy running, then it is symbolism, expressed through metaphors, that keeps its ideology in circulation. Symbolism is what drove Bin Laden to bring down the tallest towers in New York City. In a culture that is both inspired and intoxicated by poetry, it is not a coincident that Bin Laden quotes ghazals and Ayatollah Khomeini’s name appears in poetry anthologies. Far more than their weaponry, it is their rhetoric that is damaging America. Not by physical force but by a repertoire of twisted ideas and resonant metaphors that Bin Laden and his men recruit. “Merciless crocodiles who can’t hear the cries of a helpless child, the unethical and vulgar Americans,” he proclaims, “deserve their lack of safety and security because they have been unjust.” The images from Abu Gharib, the orange ghosts ominously shimmering under the heat of Guantanamo sun are the promotional posters of his cause. Must we add the image of the small-boned Latino housekeeper to this bleak national album? Isn’t leadership about knowing when to push forth into uncharted realms as much as it is to intuitively know when a nation has had its share of grief, and thus to hold back? At a time when we are so burdened by war abroad, must our leaders not minimize the smaller, avoidable wars within?

No matter how the politicians formulate it, the issue of the undocumented workers in our country will mark yet another monumental moment in American history, like the Civil War, or the Civil Rights Movement. Just as Lincoln articulated in 1860 that the government cannot endure permanently half-slave, half free, or Dr. King demanded equality at all costs, we are at a similar crossroads with yet another group that has entered the inner sanctum of our lives by caring for our homes, gardens, children and the elderly. How we reform immigration, and how we go about dealing with alleged violators, will define us for ourselves, to be sure. But unlike Kyoto, the Missile Defense Treaty and other 20th century issues that face America, immigration, the genesis of our nation, will also define us for the world. Will we choose a merit-point system, forgo compassion and Lady Liberty in the interest of a Mumbai-born geek lighting the world via a wired waist? Will we forsake her inspired message for the ethereal medley of zeroes and ones?

Yesterday, I met several of the raid victims who are out on bond. I asked if their experience has embittered them toward America. They all shook their heads and said they were sad but not angry. One uttered a single response: La Lucha! I asked my translator what “La Lucha” meant. The struggle, he said, life is a struggle and not for naught: “To advance ourselves, we will suffer and get through this.” “La Lucha,” I thought, was what had brought so many others to this country. “La lucha” is what places these immigrants within the American canon, extends their destinies to those of their predecessors. A poem came to mind by a Chinese immigrant, who, while being held on Angel Island immigration station in San Francisco in the early 1930’s, articulated her own version of “La Lucha:”

This is a message to those who live here not
to worry excessively.
Instead, you must cast your idle worries to
the flowing stream.
Experiencing a little ordeal is not hardship.
Napoleon was once a prisoner on an island.

By Roya Hakakian
The Hartford Courant
July 7, 2007