Breaking Up With My In-Laws Over Immigration
I haven’t talked to my in-laws for some time. A period of mutual silence stretched, glacial and peaceful, for seven years. Then just before the election, in late October, I received a letter from my mother-in-law, written on behalf of them both, asking if there was a path to reconciliation.
My in-laws are white, from the South and Midwest. My father-in-law, now retired, was a pastor in a Southern Baptist church. My mother-in-law was a nurse. They are dramatically conservative. I learned this over many years, gradually and in starker moments. One afternoon in 2017, when my husband and I were ten years into our marriage and we were sitting with his parents at our dining-room table in our apartment in California, my father-in-law began to lecture me about my lack of deference to him — how a woman owed obedience to her husband and her church and all the men in her life. I remember tilting my head to the side in disbelief. My mother-in-law sat, attentive, nodding, holding her hands. Sitting next to me, my husband put his hand on my leg, letting me know he was there and waiting for me to signal if I wanted him to intervene.
I grew up in Colombia. My mother was a curandera, a medicine woman. My father was an engineer. We are of Indigenous descent. While I was brought up in the Catholic Church, I was also raised in a feminist household. My mother, who had a leader’s mind and charisma, made most of the decisions; my father did the cooking and took directions, replying lovingly, “Yes, my general.” My in-laws had long tried to make me conform to who they felt I should be. I insisted on remaining exactly as I was.
Through the years, I made an effort to maintain my relationship with them for my husband, who, as liberal-minded as I am, stood his own shaky ground. He had left the church, though his parents tirelessly warned of sin and hell. He held out hope that if we continued to extend love and understanding, they might someday return it without caveat. When we went to visit them, we would whisper to each other in private, “How do you do, Black Sheep?”
Eventually, his parents became vocal about their opposition to immigration across the southern border, and my husband and I conferred about how exactly to manage our relationship with them. Once, when I was talking about the plight of asylum seekers, my father-in-law asked if the reason I cared so much was because I was “illegal” myself. I was not. I had talked about my anxiety over visas and documents for years, and I had gained my green card through marriage to his son. It seemed I was hard for them to hear — vaguely shaped in their eyes.
Our relationship finally broke down at Thanksgiving dinner in 2018 with the attempt of a gift — from them to me. It was an anti-immigration book I would later learn had been banned by Canadian border authorities as hate literature. The book’s basic premise was upsetting — it was called The Immigration Invasion — but I already knew where my in-laws stood. The shock came when I looked up the title and learned that one of the authors, John Tanton, was the founder of a pro-eugenics organization, believed in white racial superiority, and felt that immigrants of color were a threat to American culture. He also wanted to keep those who were “less intelligent” from reproducing. I was speaking all of these facts aloud as I found them. When I asked my in-laws if they could not see why giving me this book was wildly inappropriate, offensive — violent, even — my father-in-law said “no,” he could not see why they couldn’t just give me a book.
Their October letter sits unanswered in the little box where I keep incoming mail, gathering dust, as I wonder what it means not to be in conversation with them anymore. My husband has understood and supported my decision. He is still figuring out what his relationship with his parents can and should be. Increasingly, this is the story of many families in the United States.
This fall, Americans watched Donald Trump repeat his familiar slogans of fear — a border besieged, a liberal class run amok privileging minority causes — but his promises reached new belligerence: cutting federal funding to schools that don’t comply with the Republican agenda, protecting women “whether they like it or not,” mass deportations beginning on day one, and, as part of that plan, interning undocumented immigrants in detention camps. For many of us, the last of these was so heinous, so direct an echo of the worst events of the 20th century — including the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, still in living memory — that it felt impossible it would ever gain traction.
Roughly four weeks before the election, however, a study from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute found that Americans were almost evenly divided on the question of “rounding up” immigrants who are in the country illegally and placing them in militarized camps: 47 percent were in favor and 50 percent in opposition. Among Republicans, 79 percent were for such encampments, as were 47 percent of independents and 22 percent of Democrats. For those who trust far-right news outlets, the support was close to total: 91 percent. Among groups divided by race and religious affiliation, white Evangelical protestants were at the forefront: 75 percent in favor.
Seeing these statistics, I felt I was sinking. These moments, when the ground beneath me seems to shift and I have to get my bearings, have become commonplace. I can remember the same feeling seizing my body on January 11, 2018. I was at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, where the rows were full of at least 300 immigrants, dressed up and smiling, all of us raising our right hands and repeating the citizenship oath. By the time we sat down, we were Americans. Still smiling, I reflexively looked at my phone. There was a news alert: “Trump: Why allow immigrants from ‘shithole countries.’” Anger flashed, but I looked around. There we were, all of us new Americans from each beloved corner of the world, making a home here: Our presence was a fact. The collision of cultures we represented was a fact. We were irrefutable. Or were we.
Many of us have now become inured to Trump saying that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation.” And the idea has become mainstream: According to the PRRI study, one-third of Americans believe those same words.
I do not know how we can move forward. But I know the answer is not to pretend there is some middle ground on the question of my humanity.
I am not sure about my response to my in-laws. I composed a reply; I have printed it out, placed it in an envelope, and set it alongside their letter in the little box where I keep the mail. Their letter to me was short, a line asking to reconcile, a line promising to avoid politics, a hope to hear from you. There was no apology and, as far as I can tell, still no understanding of what caused our rift. The envelope came without a return address, which I imagine means they thought I wouldn’t open it if I knew whom it was from.
In my response, I quoted Robert Jones Jr. I couldn’t help it: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” I described, once more, what they have done, what they did. Why, I asked, had they not recoiled at the thought of eugenics? I wrote that my trust has been broken. That I hope their lives are as full of beauty and love as mine is, sincerely, but that I can no longer be a part.
With them, I was always arguing for my own existence, explaining my worth. I wonder if the end of our relationship means they will forget it altogether.
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