BWW Reviews: THE IMMIGRATION PARADOX Explores the Core of America's Great Controversy

(The 21st Annual Sedona International Film Festival, running from February 21st through March 1st, is featuring 160 documentaries, features, shorts, Academy Award nominees and specialty films. The following is one of a series of reviews of selected films from the Festival.)

Ronald Brownstein, the National Journal's Editorial Director, in a 2011 opinion piece, framed the immigration paradox in a nutshell: "For years, in good economic times and bad, polls have consistently found that most Americans believe immigrants who are in the United States illegally should be provided a pathway to legal status if they take steps such as paying a fine or learning English. And yet, no matter how many times pollsters return that verdict, most Republican and Democratic elected officials alike remain convinced that providing illegal immigrants any route to legal status is a losing cause politically. It's difficult to think of another issue on which so many political leaders are so flatly, reflexively dismissive of a consistent finding in public opinion polling."

Why, if there is reasonable common ground among the general public about the architecture of a solution, do the available remedies remain elusive and ignored or delayed? What and who are driving the noise of polarization? What will it take to resolve the issue?

The Immigration Paradox, the 2012 documentary written and directed by Lourdes Lee Vasquez, takes aim at these questions but not without hinting at a predetermined answer. The probing bullets of her inquiry scatter over a broad landscape of causes, informed by the perspectives of selected informants from a range of interests and disciplines.

Ms. Vasquez's journey to understand "what's going on with people" begins in the Summer of 2004 with the life-changing experience of confronting an immigrant who has endured the ordeal of an Arizona desert-crossing. In reflecting on past injustices against humanity such as slavery, the Native American slaughter, and the Holocaust, she wonders how she might have responded then and how, in the context of such history, injustice can be allowed to continue. In Ms. Vasquez's book, the injustices related to America's immigration problem seem to be of the same magnitude as those earlier horrors ~ a proposition that may generate its own heated debate.

And so she embarks on a seven-year quest to interview folks from varying sides ~ academicians, activists, advocates, entrepreneurs, students ~ of the political issue, to understand why people believe and feel the things they do about immigrants and immigration, and what forces influence their perspectives ~ ideally, to search for the truth about immigration.

Some of the interviews are rich with insight, others drown in sophomoric platitudes, and others cry the pain of the innocents caught in the buzz saw of an unkind politics.

We are reminded about the role of fear, about the desire of all parties to be treated fairly, about the influence of the media and special interests to frame, distort, and distract.

It seems all but inevitable that her investigation leads to the larger contextual framework for all the issues that, she concludes, beleaguer and divide us: complacency in the face of exploitation and inequity; the exploding gap between haves and have-nots fueled by global corporations; the counterproductive structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary fund that breed poverty in lesser developed countries and drive immigration; the interests of the corporations that control the media to foment fear and division and of the private prison industry to fill its cells, such that the agenda filters into such misguided legislation as Arizona's SB1070.

And so it goes, and Ms. Vasquez has revealed the interconnectedness of things. She is not far from wrong, but she is far from complete in answering her original questions and offering substantive solutions. After all, in all fairness, if the politics of the last fifty years are any indicator, the issue of immigration is a problem that no one really wants to solve. If they did, the solutions are so basic that we'd have done so by now.

Although the film falls far short of the hyperbole that accompanied its release ("Possibly one of the most important films of the Century" that "takes her and the audience to places never before considered in the immigration debate"), it is admirable for the research that Ms. Vasquez has done on the history of immigration and its abuses, the promises and implications of globalization, the dynamics of the public debate, and the narratives of the real people affected by the issue.

Ms. Vasquez has offered up a thoughtful and reflective piece that can and should serve as an additional resource for the numerous and necessary facilitated, informed, and critical civil conversations about immigration policy. But, regrettably she strays from those fundamentally humanist questions that spurred her odyssey, presents a wikipedic guide to the usual suspects, and ends up taking sides.

Photo credit to © 2012 Deep Focus Cinema

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