What case of an Arizona business owner held in Eloy says about the 'ideal immigrant' myth

An Arizona district Republican Party Chair Lisa Everett was censured by her own party this month for advocating for a local restaurant owner and mother who is being held in ICE detention, pending deportation. She told Phoenix New Times that while she’s "all for getting the worst-of-the-worst” — she doesn’t support “separating good people from their family.”

Kelly Yu is the owner of Kawaii Sushi and Asian Cuisine in the West Valley. She’s also a mother, and she’s been in the U.S. for more than 20 years. But now, she’s being held at Eloy Detention Center after being detained during a routine immigration check-in in May. She could be deported to Hong Kong soon.

She came here fleeing China’s one-child policy 20 years ago when she was pregnant with a baby girl, according to The Arizona Republic. She has no criminal record.

Her story — and the local reaction to it — is a reflection of what our next guest calls the myth of the “ideal immigrant” — someone worth celebrating and keeping in our country — unlike so many other immigrants who are denigrated.

Perla Guerrero directs the U.S. Latina Latino Studies Program at the University of Maryland. She spoke more with The Show about the myth and who’s hurt in the process.

University of Maryland

Full conversation

PERLA GUERRERO: I mean, I think it's a sort of normal reaction when a community finds out that someone that they actually like, love, or care for is one of the people that, that the administration is trying to remove.

I think that's part of the, the vexed position of immigrants in the United States, especially if they are undocumented or entered without authorization, that people make lives, they make community, they build bonds, and the U.S. government can come in and say, you're not wanted here anymore.

And the irony is that the, the local community might actually want that specific person. That's the tension. You know, they're, they're not willing to give up someone like Kelly Yu, but they are willing to give up unnamed folks.

LAUREN GILGER: It is manifesting itself here right now as a sort of bipartisan moment often where you're seeing people from opposite sides of the aisle sort of say, oh yes, we disagree on mass deportations in general, but we agree on this one person.

Because there's also this narrative that the Trump administration had promised to deport criminals, right? But there, there seems to me like a very vast gap between criminals and, and these kind of model ideal immigrants.

GUERRERO: Right, I mean, I think that's another tension. The idea of who is a criminal or what is a criminal act, I think is something that is also unexplored. So in many states, it is now legal to consume small quantities of marijuana. So having marijuana is no longer a criminal act or a criminal offense. And yet there are still people who are in jail for having had a quantity of marijuana.

So I think in some ways, the local issue is in some ways disjointed from the national issue, right? National policy can say we're going after criminals, but what does that actually mean? And when was a supposed criminal act committed is sort of what makes this quite messy.

GILGER: How far back in U.S. history does this kind of myth of an ideal or a good immigrant go?

GUERRERO: It has very long roots, at least to the 1920s when there was much more discretion to say, well, a person has established ties with the local community. An immigrant has a family in the U.S. They have children and so we're going to use our discretionary power to say that this is a good immigrant, and we're gonna, we're gonna cancel their deportation.

Historically though, the idea of who's a good immigrant deserving of relief is rooted in also ideas around race. For a long time, Asian immigrants were excluded from the narrative of being a good immigrant. There was a bar against Chinese immigrants. Mexican people were also often excluded.

It was in the 1920s and 1930s it was largely Europeans and Canadians who benefited the most from discretionary powers that said, you're a good immigrant and the U.S. wants you here. In the 100 years since then, the idea of good immigrant, bad immigrant has morphed.

It can include Latinos now, but it also is, it's an idea that's very sensitive to the political moment and to economic strife. So anytime that there's a bit of a downturn in the U.S. economy, most immigrants get the brunt of like, well, immigrants are taking American jobs.

And so then the idea of a good immigrant doesn't go as far as it, as it does when it's a prosperous time and there's plenty of jobs and immigrants do, you know, do the work in fields that require that labor power.

GILGER: Yeah. What does assimilation have to do with this as well in certain populations of immigrants being held up as sort of being better at assimilating into American culture than others?

GUERRERO: Yeah, the idea of assimilation is also quite powerful in immigration law. The idea that historically, Asian immigrants were excluded from that idea. They were actually considered to be unassimilable, that they, they could not learn English, that their ideas around, even government and democracy were too different from their countries of origin.

And so, assimilation is also one of those tools that the U.S. government has used to, to decide whether you have done enough as an immigrant to incorporate into the United States. But that gets tricky because it's a very amorphous idea.

If an immigrant speaks English, if an immigrant votes in local and national elections, as we have seen, that is not enough for Latinos to be exempt from being stopped in the street and questioned about their citizenship status because they were heard speaking Spanish or because they're working a low wage job, which the government assumes is only done by people without documentation.

So assimilation is never really as clear of an idea as we think it is, and there's always ideas about race that underpin whether we think someone has assimilated enough into the United States.

GILGER: Who, who's harmed in this kind of idea? It seems like kind of harmless, right? Like saying, well, this person is really great and, and an example of what an immigrant could be or should be.

GUERRERO: Yeah, I mean, I think everyone has heard, to be quite honest, no matter what you do, no matter how much English you learn, how well you speak it, maybe how much education you have, you can always be questioned. Are you really a U.S. citizen? Do you really belong in the nation? Do we want people like you here, right?

I think it, it, it creates a lot of suspicion of our friends and our neighbors and our peers in school. And I think it's not a good way to, to navigate immigration in a country that has had it for such a long time.

GILGER: Let me ask you lastly, Perla, I know you're, you're currently writing a book on deportation and this idea that, you know, someone might get deported and then has to return to life in the old country in their home country maybe often without knowing it very well.

There's certainly a lot of that going on right now. I wonder like what common threads you're finding for folks who go through this.

GUERRERO: Yeah, so I'm writing specifically about Mexicans who end up back in Mexico and one of the greatest things that they experience is alienation, especially young people, right?

If you entered the United States as a child, 2, 3, 4, 5 years old, although Spanish was your first language, you probably don't speak it very well, but in the case of young people, often they don't speak Spanish at all. They're not familiar with Mexican cultural norms in Mexico, gender norms, and labor practices are quite foreign to them.

So, they go through a long process of feeling out of place, in, in a country that they're told is their home when it is not their home, their home is the United States. They just didn't have the legal status that allowed them to remain.