What do calculators have to do with immigration?

Friends,

There is way too much to say when it comes to immigration, our economy, and America’s workforce. I’m overwhelmed. I’m betting you might be, too.

Some of you know, the way I picked the topics for this 52 week essay project began in Kettle River. Last November, I took myself to a tiny house for 2 nights to think. I packed food, warm clothes, and a clipboard with pens and copy paper. For 3 days and 2 nights I listened to music, read short stories, walked in the woods, and wrote. The first 26 (half year) of this project made itself known over that time.

To avoid the distraction of wasting time each week trying to decide which topic to write on, I have chosen to simply forge ahead. I have not fiddled with the order of topics since I first put pen to paper. Week 12 is “immigration.”

From that trip I have multiples pages of notes on immigration and the American workplace. For you see, less than a decade ago I was the Interim Executive Director at Immigration Equality. I had the honor of leading the national organization providing free legal services and federal advocacy for LGBTQ+ immigrants. I split my time between New York and Washington, DC, and I got to work alongside some of the smartest people I have ever known.

Learning about the complexity of immigration law, the interdependence of international rules with our own, and the harrowing experience of asylum-seekers and detainees was akin to drinking from a fire hose.

There were acronyms everywhere that I needed to learn quickly, so I made myself flashcards and studied them on the subway to and from work. I visited immigration detention – dumbstruck by the sheer number of American flags outside this shitty, barbed wire surrounded, jail in an industrial part of New Jersey.

All this to say - there is too much. But I want to say something. And of course, all hell is breaking loose at the U.S./Mexico border at the moment, so the timing also feels apt. Remember that line from Mandy Patinkin playing Inigo Montoya in “Princess Bride” – “There is too much. Let me sum up.” That’s what I’m going to try to do here. Perhaps in the back half of this project I’ll say more.

Today I’ll share one story: my meeting with Texas Instruments.

Heading into 7th grade for me, and 10th grade for my sister, my family and I moved. Less than 20 miles, but that was enough to change schools. Because of the order of curriculum from one school district to another, I arrived to middle school “ahead” in math. That meant that my first hour of school each morning was spent being bussed to and from the high school with six other kids – mostly sports phenoms who needed special schedules to do their after-school sports stuff.

I attended Algebra with Mr. Sarles – whom I loved – and felt like a whiz kid who was also in the midst of an anthropological experiment. The difference between 7 th and 9 th grade, from a hormonal perspective, can feel like a lot! Some of these kids were growing mustaches, and were filling up and out in ways that were wild to a still gangly middle school girl.

This short but memorable time was when graphing calculators came into my life. The TI-85 – remember that? That thing weighed a ton! It sort of looked like one of those label making machines you would use at Walmart if you worked the shelves. The grey scale cursor blinking sort of like a teeny tiny Pac Man screen. These new-fangled calculators were designed for complex calculations where you could track x’s and y’s and even z’s.

Flash forward.

Algebra for me was the mid 1990s. In the 2010s I found myself walking to Texas Instrument offices not that far from the U.S. Capitol. I rode up the elevator of a fairly non-descript office building and got my name badge from some assistant who offered me water and put me in a windowless room. In came a lobbyist for Texas Instruments. Did you know calculators had lobbyists? I’m just kidding. Kind of. In that meeting I learned that way more than calculators, their company specialized in computer chips. And that immigration reform can make for strange bedfellows.

I was having this meeting because Texas Instruments, among many other tech and professional industries, were working as part of a vast coalition to revise and reform current U.S. immigration law to make actual sense in our global economy. You probably know there are all sorts of different kinds of visas, depending on why you are coming to America. Work visas are a subset. “Highly skilled” work visas are a subset of that subset. And they have time limits. Texas Instruments was working on making – the very logical case – that having to fire qualified staff members simply because their visa deadline hits and there is no option for renewal was asinine. We agreed.

I don’t want this essay to accidentally turn into a full treatise, so I’m going to close by listing some current truths related to immigration and working in the U.S., followed by what you can do to be readier to welcome top talent onto your team – people who happen not to have been born here.

Current truths:

 Migration to the U.S. – both forced and chosen – is ongoing

 There is an enormous backlog to immigration cases – keeping people and families in limbo, often for years

 Immigrants who are People of Color and/or not-Christian and/or from countries like George W. Bush’s “the axis of evil” have a much different experience than white, European immigrants

 Many U.S. workers are part of mixed status families – meaning some members of the same nuclear family might be documented, undocumented, or documented differently

 Immigration detention (which is one helluva reframe for “jail”) is primarily owned by private companies that are for profit with bed quotas – meaning there are daily incentives to round people up and jail them because they get money per head per night. This is a business, not a humanitarian effort.

 Lastly, none of us had anything to do with how borders got created and where we were born relative to those borders. Despite the long reaching “Manifest Destiny” laced narrative of heroic colonizers sent by God to tame this land, immigration and forced migration have long been a “who does and doesn’t have the right to be here” philosophical argument.

As a workplace, what you can do to be readier to deal with the reality of ongoing immigration:

 Proactively communicate that you can keep confidentiality – immigration info can be very sensitive, so if you are learning about mixed immigration status families and concerns through a hiring and/or benefits application process, keep appropriate confidence.

 Be a good partner to employees needing your help to wade through an often complex and laborious visa process. To sponsor, support renewal, and more – a lot may be asked of you from paperwork to interviews. Please do not behave as though your employee is a pain in your ass. Show up. Be kind. And recognize that this is the current trade off required to follow the rules and retain top talent.

 Connect employees to key support services. Immigration experiences can be accompanied by trauma, and other mental and physical health ramifications. Do not assume that immigrants at your organization have had a universal experience. There are likely a lot of nuances to each and every journey. That said, you can help by connecting folks to resources as well as spotting and helping folks steer clear of predatory programs that often target immigrants.

There’s so much more. But I’m hoping this got us started.

If you’d like support around this or any of the other topics I’ve shared in my essays - reach out! One-on-one coaching is currently my favorite way to spend work time, so let me know if you’d like to schedule a handful of sessions.

My commitment to you, is that next week I will share Essay #13 out of 52 about the wrestle U.S. workers are having around the notion of “freedom.”

Yours,