Syd Mandelbaum: Immigrant Son

If a dialogue, like oral historian Alessandro Portelli says, reflects on both sides and the interview is a learning situation for the interviewer, especially if the motivation is political then my interview with Syd Mandelbaum for all intents and purposes, taught me a huge and important lesson – there are both good and bad immigrants in the United States of America. The good immigrant waits her turn, respects the law, and receives her reward –entry to America. The bad immigrant shouldn’t break laws to come to the U.S. in the first place, and if she’shere, she needs to go back to her country. This message is usually couched in a paternalistic tone, with a touch of pragmatism.

Take for example, Barack Obama’s White House address on immigration in response to the Central American refugee crisis in which he said, “We’re a nation of immigrants, we’re also a nation of laws.” In this same address, he also acknowledges that the same laws that he defends and enforces, and that Americans and the rest of the world should respect, are broken and need major overhaul, yet he offers no solutions other than detention, deportation and two pieces of legislation (DACA and DAPA) which provides deferred action for a limited number of undocumented immigrants. Under his administration, more than 3.5 million immigrants have been deported and thousands of refugees seeking asylum are jailed in detention centers across the U.S. in direct violation of international law. Furthermore, our government officials and the general public have failed to recognize that since 9/11, U.S. immigration laws have become increasingly connected with national security and criminal enforcement, which disproportionately impact people of color, especially immigrants from Latin America and Muslim countries.

I interviewed Syd Mandelbaum just ten days before the 2016 election. During our interview he shared that he is neither a Democrat nor a Republican and that his vote is not in support of Donald Trump for the presidency, but against Hillary Clinton because “she’s such a corrupt politician” and cannot be trusted. As the interview moves forward, Syd’s support of Trump became less relevant to me. It was his views on immigration and the way that he presented them that left me troubled. Syd identifies himself as being the son of immigrants. His parents came to the U.S. as “legal” immigrants in the early part of the 1950s from Poland having survived Nazi camps and after a five-year period in a displaced person’s camp after liberation from WWII.

Syd’s parents applied for refugee status after release from concentration camps but they were denied entry. Under the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the United States restricted immigration from Europe out of fear that Nazis could smuggle spies amid the refugees. Screening of all immigrants intensified and this forced Syd’s family into displacement camp where they lived for five years before they could apply for refugee status again. Refugee application requirements included having a family member already living in the U.S. (if possible with American citizenship) and they had to prove they would not be a burden on the state. These two rules for migration seem ridiculous when one considers that entire families were decimated during the holocaust, often leaving only one member of the family alive, and that survivors were severely malnourished and experiencing the effects of psychological trauma. Moreover, the application process was long and complicated and required extensive documentation that was virtually impossible to obtain. (link goes to not found page)

According to the United States Holocaust Museum, most displaced person’s camps like the one Syd’s parents ended up in after the war were administered by The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the armies of the United States, Great Britain, and France. Organizations like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee provided food and clothing for the refugees while the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT) was tasked with providing vocational training. Both of Syd’s parents were trained as tailors while in DP camp. They also received medical care and other types of psychosocial support and services. What’s more, vast numbers of people and organizations in the U.S mobilized to lift the refugee quotas that prevented Syd’s parents from being accepted entry into America when they initially applied.

When they finally made it to America, his parents settled in Brooklyn. First in the Brownsville neighborhood and then Canarsie, where Syd says his parents experienced anti-Semitism from their strict Italian Catholic neighbors who called them “Christ Killers.” Not even the Jewish American community accepted them. They looked at his parents with suspicion and often asked how they survived the concentration camps – implying with their questioning that they must have done something immoral or illegal to survive.

As a result of this immigrant identity and the struggles his family went through during and after WWII, Syd considers himself an empathetic and generous person and throughout his life has embarked on a professional career that has often taken altruistic paths. After graduating college he was a teacher at the same high school he graduated from, served on the Human Rights Commission of Nassau County, Long Island, started an oral history project that conducted some of the first interviews for what would later become Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, and later worked as a Harvard University consultant in the field of DNA genetics and cancer research. All the while working to start a non-profit think tank to combat hunger and poverty in America with his organization Rock and Wrap it Up!

During our conversation, I asked Syd to comment on Donald Trump’s derogatory remarks about Mexican immigrants, he said he wasn’t bothered but he does not approve of them. However, as a person who fights poverty, he believes that illegal immigration into the United States needs to be curbed because they “are taking jobs away from the people that I’m trying to get jobs for.” He contradicts himself however, when he says he supports a humane response to illegal migration but supports President Barack Obama’s policy of deportation, which many human rights groups have condemned.

In sharp contrast to how the United States handled the influx of refugees during the 1930s and 1940s, the response to a refugee crisis in recent years is incarceration or prolonged detention. Most recently in 1991, more than 30,000 Haitian refugees were detained for short and long periods of time on Guantanamo Bay following the overthrow of the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And still more recently, the U.S. responded to the Central American Refugee Crisis in 2014 by building for-profit detention centers in Artesia, New Mexico and Karnes and Dilley, Texas that have the capability of housing thousands of migrants seeking asylum. The vast majority of which are women and children seeking safety or protection from violence in Central America. These detention centers are not displacement camps like the ones set up to house refugees during and after WWII —they are prisons run by staff with titles that reference military rank. The migrants housed within are not allowed to leave, they don’t receive any type of vocational training, medical services are subpar, and initially many were denied legal representation for their asylum claims until non-profit organizations like the CARA Pro Bono Project and the American Immigration Lawyers Association began to provide legal assistance to detainees.

Furthermore, family detention is not cost effective. A recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union shows that the cost of detention per person is $266 per day and that the detention facility in Dilley, Texas costs taxpayers approximately $261 million annually. The private prison corporations contracted by the U.S. government manage detention centers that hold thousands of migrants. Following the election of Donald Trump as president, shares in the country’s two major private-prison companies soared. One of them is Corrections Corporation of America, which manages the detention centers where thousands of migrants are detained. This prompts the question, why can’t this money be spent to process and resettle migrants into the U.S. where they can become integrated into society in the United States and contribute to the economy?

The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Photo by Ilana Panich-Linsman for the New York Times.

The fear lies in the idea that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans and legal immigrants. Aviva Chomsky’s book 2007 book They Take Our Jobs!: And 20 Other Myths about Immigration calls the notion that immigrants take American jobs a fallacy. She argues that the U.S. economy is globally integrated and that what’s really hurting the American economy is the common industry practice of reducing cost by hiring the poorest and most vulnerable people, whether at home or abroad. By default they also support policies that create poverty and inequality at home, sometimes this includes immigration policies that keep immigrants coming, and keep them vulnerable. The National Free Trade Agreement, for example, caused the loss of more than 700,000 mostly from states in California, Texas, Michigan and other states known for their manufacturing economies.

Much of the conversation that Syd and I had about the election and immigration were centered on the notion that America is unified and should be protected against foreign and domestic invaders. This is essentially the nationalistic attitude behind Donald Trump’s key message “Make America Great Again.” Syd believes strongly that anyone who comes to the U.S. illegally should go back to their country of origin. He is calcified in his belief that in order to help others, America must be fixed. What Syd and many other Trump supporters don’t realize is that if America has ever been great it has been at the expense of vulnerable nations and people at home and abroad.

During my second interview with Syd, I disclosed that I had come to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant and that if I had not done so, I would have been able to contribute as much as I have to the United States. Since I arrived at age ten with my mother, I have worked in social justice organizations providing services to underserved populations from all ethnic and class backgrounds, graduated college with honors, and I am now doing research at prestigious Ivy League university. Although I sensed that he respected me, it was clear that none of this mattered. I asked him what he would say to someone like me. Syd answered pragmatically, “I would have to say to you, please go back to your country.”