The Audacity of Hope (33 page)

For most Americans, though, concerns over illegal immigration go deeper than worries about economic displacement and are more subtle than simple racism. In the past, immigration occurred on America’s terms; the welcome mat could be extended selectively, on the basis of the immigrant’s skills or color or the needs of industry. The laborer, whether Chinese or Russian or Greek, found himself a stranger in a strange land, severed from his home country, subject to often harsh constraints, forced to adapt to rules not of his own making.

Today it seems those terms no longer apply. Immigrants are entering as a result of a porous border rather than any systematic government policy; Mexico’s proximity, as well as the desperate poverty of so many of its people, suggests the possibility that border crossing cannot even be slowed, much less stopped. Satellites, calling cards, and wire transfers, as well as the sheer size of the burgeoning Latino market, make it easier for today’s immigrant to maintain linguistic and cultural ties to the land of his or her birth (the Spanish-language Univision now boasts the highest-rated newscast in Chicago). Native-born Americans suspect that it is they, and not the immigrant, who are being forced to adapt. In this way, the immigration debate comes to signify not a loss of jobs but a loss of sovereignty, just one more example—like September 11, avian flu, computer viruses, and factories moving to China—that America seems unable to control its own destiny.

IT WAS IN this volatile atmosphere—with strong passions on both sides of the debate—that the U.S. Senate considered a comprehensive immigration reform bill in the spring of 2006. With hundreds of thousands of immigrants protesting in the streets and a group of self-proclaimed vigilantes called the Minutemen rushing to defend the Southern border, the political stakes were high for Democrats, Republicans, and the President.

Under the leadership of Ted Kennedy and John McCain, the Senate crafted a compromise bill with three major components. The bill provided much tougher border security and, through an amendment I wrote with Chuck Grassley, made it significantly more difficult for employers to hire workers here illegally. The bill also recognized the difficulty of deporting twelve million undocumented immigrants and instead created a long, eleven-year process under which many of them could earn their citizenship. Finally, the bill included a guest worker program that would allow two hundred thousand foreign workers to enter the country for temporary employment.

On balance, I thought the legislation was worth supporting. Still, the guest worker provision of the bill troubled me; it was essentially a sop to big business, a means for them to employ immigrants without granting them citizenship rights—indeed, a means for business to gain the benefits of outsourcing without having to locate their operations

overseas. To address this problem, I succeeded in including language requiring that any job first be offered to U.S. workers, and that employers not undercut American wages by paying guest workers less than they would pay U.S. workers. The idea was to ensure that businesses turned to temporary foreign workers only when there was a labor shortage.

It was plainly an amendment designed to help American workers, which is why all the unions vigorously supported it. But no sooner had the provision been included in the bill than some conservatives, both inside and outside of the Senate, began attacking me for supposedly “requiring that foreign workers get paid more than U.S. workers.”

On the floor of the Senate one day, I caught up with one of my Republican colleagues who had leveled this charge at me. I explained that the bill would actually protect U.S. workers, since employers would have no incentive to hire guest workers if they had to pay the same wages they paid U.S. workers. The Republican colleague, who had been quite vocal in his opposition to any bill that would legalize the status of undocumented immigrants, shook his head.

“My small business guys are still going to hire immigrants,” he said. “All your amendment does is make them pay more for their help.”

“But why would they hire immigrants over U.S. workers if they cost the same?” I asked him.

He smiled. “’Cause let’s face it, Barack. These Mexicans are just willing to work harder than Americans do.”

That the opponents of the immigration bill could make such statements privately, while publicly pretending to stand up for American workers, indicates the degree of cynicism and hypocrisy that permeates the immigration debate. But with the public in a sour mood, their fears and anxieties fed daily by Lou Dobbs and talk radio hosts around the country, I can’t say I’m surprised that the compromise bill has been stalled in the House ever since it passed out of the Senate.

And if I’m honest with myself, I must admit that I’m not entirely immune to such nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.

Once, as the immigration debate began to heat up in the Capitol, a group of activists visited my office, asking that I sponsor a private relief bill that would legalize the status of thirty Mexican nationals who had been deported, leaving behind spouses or children with legal resident status. One of my staffers, Danny Sepulveda, a young man of Chilean descent, took the meeting, and explained to the group that although I was sympathetic to their plight and was one of the chief sponsors of the Senate immigration bill, I didn’t feel comfortable, as a matter of principle, sponsoring legislation that would select thirty people out of the millions in similar situations for a special dispensation. Some in the group became agitated; they suggested that I didn’t care about immigrant families and immigrant children, that I cared more about borders than about justice. One

activist accused Danny of having forgotten where he came from—of not really being Latino.

When I heard what had happened, I was both angry and frustrated. I wanted to call the group and explain that American citizenship is a privilege and not a right; that without meaningful borders and respect for the law, the very things that brought them to America, the opportunities and protections afforded those who live in this country, would surely erode; and that anyway, I didn’t put up with people abusing my staff— especially one who was championing their cause.

It was Danny who talked me out of the call, sensibly suggesting that it might be counterproductive. Several weeks later, on a Saturday morning, I attended a naturalization workshop at St. Pius Church in Pilsen, sponsored by Congressman Luis Gutierrez, the Service Employees International Union, and several of the immigrants’ rights groups that had visited my office. About a thousand people had lined up outside the church, including young families, elderly couples, and women with strollers; inside, people sat silently in wooden pews, clutching the small American flags that the organizers had passed out, waiting to be called by one of the volunteers who would help them manage the start of what would be a years-long process to become citizens.

As I wandered down the aisle, some people smiled and waved; others nodded tentatively as I offered my hand and introduced myself. I met a Mexican woman who spoke no English but whose son was in Iraq; I recognized a young Colombian man who worked as a valet at a local restaurant and learned that he was studying accounting at the local community college. At one point a young girl, seven or eight, came up to me, her parents standing behind her, and asked me for an autograph; she was studying government in school, she said, and would show it to her class.

I asked her what her name was. She said her name was Cristina and that she was in the third grade. I told her parents they should be proud of her. And as I watched Cristina translate my words into Spanish for them, I was reminded that America has nothing to fear from these newcomers, that they have come here for the same reason that families came here 150 years ago—all those who fled Europe’s famines and wars and unyielding hierarchies, all those who may not have had the right legal documents or connections or unique skills to offer but who carried with them a hope for a better life.

We have a right and duty to protect our borders. We can insist to those already here that with citizenship come obligations—to a common language, common loyalties, a common purpose, a common destiny. But ultimately the danger to our way of life is not that we will be overrun by those who do not look like us or do not yet speak our language. The danger will come if we fail to recognize the humanity of Cristina and her family—if we withhold from them the rights and opportunities that we take for granted, and tolerate the hypocrisy of a servant class in our midst; or more broadly, if we stand idly by as America continues to become increasingly unequal, an inequality that tracks racial lines and therefore feeds racial strife and which, as the country becomes more black and brown, neither our democracy nor our economy can long withstand.

That’s not the future I want for Cristina, I said to myself as I watched her and her family wave good-bye. That’s not the future I want for my daughters. Their America will be more dizzying in its diversity, its culture more polyglot. My daughters will learn

Spanish and be the better for it. Cristina will learn about Rosa Parks and understand that the life of a black seamstress speaks to her own. The issues my girls and Cristina confront may lack the stark moral clarity of a segregated bus, but in one form or another their generation will surely be tested—just as Mrs. Parks was tested and the Freedom Riders were tested, just as we are all tested—by those voices that would divide us and have us turn on each other.

And when they are tested in that way, I hope Cristina and my daughters will have all read about the history of this country and will recognize they have been given something precious.

America is big enough to accommodate all their dreams.

The Audacity of Hope

Chapter Eight

The World Beyond Our Borders

INDONESIA IS A nation of islands—more than seventeen thousand in all, spread along the equator between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, between Australia and the South China Sea. Most Indonesians are of Malay stock and live on the larger islands of Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Bali. On the far eastern islands like Ambon and the Indonesian portion of New Guinea the people are, in varying degrees, of Melanesian ancestry. Indonesia’s climate is tropical, and its rain forests were once teeming with exotic species like the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger. Today, those rain forests are rapidly dwindling, victim to logging, mining, and the cultivation of rice, tea, coffee, and palm oil. Deprived of their natural habitat, orangutans are now an endangered species; no more than a few hundred Sumatran tigers remain in the wild.

With more than 240 million people, Indonesia’s population ranks fourth in the world, behind China, India, and the United States. More than seven hundred ethnic groups reside within the country’s borders, and more than 742 languages are spoken there. Almost 90 percent of Indonesia’s population practice Islam, making it the world’s largest Muslim nation. Indonesia is OPEC’s only Asian member, although as a consequence of aging infrastructure, depleted reserves, and high domestic consumption it is now a net importer of crude oil. The national language is Bahasa Indonesia. The capital is Jakarta. The currency is the rupiah.

Most Americans can’t locate Indonesia on a map.

This fact is puzzling to Indonesians, since for the past sixty years the fate of their nation has been directly tied to U.S. foreign policy. Ruled by a succession of sultanates and often-splintering kingdoms for most of its history, the archipelago became a Dutch colony—the Dutch East Indies—in the 1600s, a status that would last for more than three centuries. But in the lead-up to World War II, the Dutch East Indies’ ample oil reserves became a prime target of Japanese expansion; having thrown its lot in with the Axis powers and facing a U.S.-imposed oil embargo, Japan needed fuel for its military and industry. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan moved swiftly to take over the Dutch colony, an occupation that would last for the duration of the war.

With the Japanese surrender in 1945, a budding Indonesian nationalist movement declared the country’s independence. The Dutch had other ideas, and attempted to reclaim their former territory. Four bloody years of war ensued. Eventually the Dutch bowed to mounting international pressure (the U.S. government, already concerned with the spread of communism under the banner of anticolonialism, threatened the Netherlands with a cutoff of Marshall Plan funds) and recognized Indonesia’s sovereignty. The principal leader of the independence movement, a charismatic, flamboyant figure named Sukarno, became Indonesia’s first president.

Sukarno proved to be a major disappointment to Washington. Along with Nehru of India and Nasser of Egypt, he helped found the nonaligned movement, an effort by nations newly liberated from colonial rule to navigate an independent path between the West and the Soviet bloc. Indonesia’s Communist Party, although never formally in

power, grew in size and influence. Sukarno himself ramped up the anti-Western rhetoric, nationalizing key industries, rejecting U.S. aid, and strengthening ties with the Soviets and China. With U.S. forces knee-deep in Vietnam and the domino theory still a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy, the CIA began providing covert support to various insurgencies inside Indonesia, and cultivated close links with Indonesia’s military officers, many of whom had been trained in the United States. In 1965, under the leadership of General Suharto, the military moved against Sukarno, and under emergency powers began a massive purge of communists and their sympathizers. According to estimates, between 500,000 and one million people were slaughtered during the purge, with 750,000 others imprisoned or forced into exile.

It was two years after the purge began, in 1967, the same year that Suharto assumed the presidency, that my mother and I arrived in Jakarta, a consequence of her remarriage to an Indonesian student whom she’d met at the University of Hawaii. I was six at the time, my mother twenty-four. In later years my mother would insist that had she known what had transpired in the preceding months, we never would have made the trip. But she didn’t know—the full story of the coup and the purge was slow to appear in American newspapers. Indonesians didn’t talk about it either. My stepfather, who had seen his student visa revoked while still in Hawaii and had been conscripted into the Indonesian army a few months before our arrival, refused to talk politics with my mother, advising her that some things were best forgotten.

And in fact, forgetting the past was easy to do in Indonesia. Jakarta was still a sleepy backwater in those days, with few buildings over four or five stories high, cycle rickshaws outnumbering cars, the city center and wealthier sections of town—with their colonial elegance and lush, well-tended lawns—quickly giving way to clots of small villages with unpaved roads and open sewers, dusty markets, and shanties of mud and brick and plywood and corrugated iron that tumbled down gentle banks to murky rivers where families bathed and washed laundry like pilgrims in the Ganges.

Our family was not well off in those early years; the Indonesian army didn’t pay its lieutenants much. We lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town, without air- conditioning, refrigeration, or flush toilets. We had no car—my stepfather rode a motorcycle, while my mother took the local jitney service every morning to the U.S. embassy, where she worked as an English teacher. Without the money to go to the international school that most expatriate children attended, I went to local Indonesian schools and ran the streets with the children of farmers, servants, tailors, and clerks.

As a boy of seven or eight, none of this concerned me much. I remember those years as a joyous time, full of adventure and mystery—days of chasing down chickens and running from water buffalo, nights of shadow puppets and ghost stories and street vendors bringing delectable sweets to our door. As it was, I knew that relative to our neighbors we were doing fine—unlike many, we always had enough to eat.

And perhaps more than that, I understood, even at a young age, that my family’s status was determined not only by our wealth but by our ties to the West. My mother might scowl at the attitudes she heard from other Americans in Jakarta, their condescension toward Indonesians, their unwillingness to learn anything about the country that was hosting them—but given the exchange rate, she was glad to be getting paid in dollars rather than the rupiahs her Indonesian colleagues at the embassy were paid. We might

live as Indonesians lived—but every so often my mother would take me to the American Club, where I could jump in the pool and watch cartoons and sip Coca-Cola to my heart’s content. Sometimes, when my Indonesian friends came to our house, I would show them books of photographs, of Disneyland or the Empire State Building, that my grandmother had sent me; sometimes we would thumb through the Sears Roebuck catalog and marvel at the treasures on display. All this, I knew, was part of my heritage and set me apart, for my mother and I were citizens of the United States, beneficiaries of its power, safe and secure under the blanket of its protection.

The scope of that power was hard to miss. The U.S. military conducted joint exercises with the Indonesian military and training programs for its officers. President Suharto turned to a cadre of American economists to design Indonesia’s development plan, based on free-market principles and foreign investment. American development consultants formed a steady line outside government ministries, helping to manage the massive influx of foreign assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank. And although corruption permeated every level of government—even the smallest interaction with a policeman or bureaucrat involved a bribe, and just about every commodity or product coming in and out of the country, from oil to wheat to automobiles, went through companies controlled by the president, his family, or members of the ruling junta—enough of the oil wealth and foreign aid was plowed back into schools, roads, and other infrastructure that Indonesia’s general population saw its living standards rise dramatically; between 1967 and 1997, per capita income would go from $50 to $4,600 a year. As far as the United States was concerned, Indonesia had become a model of stability, a reliable supplier of raw materials and importer of Western goods, a stalwart ally and bulwark against communism.

I would stay in Indonesia long enough to see some of this newfound prosperity firsthand. Released from the army, my stepfather began working for an American oil company. We moved to a bigger house and got a car and a driver, a refrigerator, and a television set. But in 1971 my mother—concerned for my education and perhaps anticipating her own growing distance from my stepfather—sent me to live with my grandparents in Hawaii. A year later she and my sister would join me. My mother’s ties to Indonesia would never diminish; for the next twenty years she would travel back and forth, working for international agencies for six or twelve months at a time as a specialist in women’s development issues, designing programs to help village women start their own businesses or bring their produce to market. But while during my teenage years I would return to Indonesia three or four times on short visits, my life and attention gradually turned elsewhere.

What I know of Indonesia’s subsequent history, then, I know mainly through books, newspapers, and the stories my mother told me. For twenty-five years, in fits and starts, Indonesia’s economy continued to grow. Jakarta became a metropolis of almost nine million souls, with skyscrapers, slums, smog, and nightmare traffic. Men and women left the countryside to join the ranks of wage labor in manufacturing plants built by foreign investment, making sneakers for Nike and shirts for the Gap. Bali became the resort of choice for surfers and rock stars, with five-star hotels, Internet connections, and a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. By the early nineties, Indonesia was considered an “Asian tiger,” the next great success story of a globalizing world.

Even the darker aspects of Indonesian life—its politics and human rights record— showed signs of improvement. When it came to sheer brutality, the post-1967 Suharto regime never reached the levels of Iraq under Saddam Hussein; with his subdued, placid style, the Indonesian president would never attract the attention that more demonstrative strongmen like Pinochet or the Shah of Iran did. By any measure, though, Suharto’s rule was harshly repressive. Arrests and torture of dissidents were common, a free press nonexistent, elections a mere formality. When ethnically based secessionist movements sprang up in areas like Aceh, the army targeted not just guerrillas but civilians for swift retribution—murder, rape, villages set afire. And throughout the seventies and eighties, all this was done with the knowledge, if not outright approval, of U.S. administrations.

But with the end of the Cold War, Washington’s attitudes began to change. The State Department began pressuring Indonesia to curb its human rights abuses. In 1992, after Indonesian military units massacred peaceful demonstrators in Dili, East Timor, Congress terminated military aid to the Indonesian government. By 1996, Indonesian reformists had begun taking to the streets, openly talking about corruption in high offices, the military’s excesses, and the need for free and fair elections.

Then, in 1997, the bottom fell out. A run on currencies and securities throughout Asia engulfed an Indonesian economy already corroded by decades of corruption. The rupiah’s value fell 85 percent in a matter of months. Indonesian companies that had borrowed in dollars saw their balance sheets collapse. In exchange for a $43 billion bailout, the Western-dominated International Monetary Fund, or IMF, insisted on a series of austerity measures (cutting government subsidies, raising interest rates) that would lead the price of such staples as rice and kerosene to nearly double. By the time the crisis was over, Indonesia’s economy had contracted almost 14 percent. Riots and demonstrations grew so severe that Suharto was finally forced to resign, and in 1998 the country’s first free elections were held, with some forty-eight parties vying for seats and some ninety-three million people casting their votes.

On the surface, at least, Indonesia has survived the twin shocks of financial meltdown and democratization. The stock market is booming, and a second national election went off without major incident, leading to a peaceful transfer of power. If corruption remains endemic and the military remains a potent force, there’s been an explosion of independent newspapers and political parties to channel discontent.

On the other hand, democracy hasn’t brought a return to prosperity. Per capita income is nearly 22 percent less than it was in 1997. The gap between rich and poor, always cavernous, appears to have worsened. The average Indonesian’s sense of deprivation is amplified by the Internet and satellite TV, which beam in images of the unattainable riches of London, New York, Hong Kong, and Paris in exquisite detail. And anti- American sentiment, almost nonexistent during the Suharto years, is now widespread, thanks in part to perceptions that New York speculators and the IMF purposely triggered the Asian financial crisis. In a 2003 poll, most Indonesians had a higher opinion of Osama bin Laden than they did of George W. Bush.

All of which underscores perhaps the most profound shift in Indonesia—the growth of militant, fundamentalist Islam in the country. Traditionally, Indonesians practiced a tolerant, almost syncretic brand of the faith, infused with the Buddhist, Hindu, and animist traditions of earlier periods. Under the watchful eye of an explicitly secular