Saul Bellow's monumental picaresque The Adventures of Augie March is routinely described as "The Great American Novel." It is also, not coincidentally, a great novel of immigration. Augie himself is the child of an immigrant—though he is personally, and famously, "Chicago born." And among his many and varied abortive career paths, he at one point strikes out with an acquaintance of dubious character to try his hand at smuggling immigrants across the Canadian border.
This is in the midst of the Great Depression, when U.S. borders were on effective lock-down, and Augie runs no small legal risk by participating in the scheme. He needs money, however, and to the extent he has views on the people who might be paying for his services, he takes a humane and reasonable attitude: "Hell, why shouldn't they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There's enough to go around of everything including hard luck."
Augie may never have made such an illicit journey across the border himself, but his creator did. Saul Bellow was smuggled to Chicago from Canada when he was a child, without documentation, and in fact did not become a naturalized citizen until 1943. He was, that is to say, what has sometimes been called a "Dreamer," and he would have had to apply for DACA to be shielded from deportation, if he's been born at a later time.
As it was, Bellow was able to apply for citizenship under the 1940 Nationality Act. This bill was authored at a time when racial categories were still written explicitly into U.S. immigration law; reading it now, therefore, is a chilling reminder of what an openly apartheid state our country still was, even at this late date. The bill enumerates the racial groups who could be considered for naturalization, with "white persons" heading the list.
The bill did include a provision, however, allowing for people in the country without authorization to apply for lawful admission—putting them on a path to permanent residency and ultimately naturalization. They would be granted this status so long as they could show their family had arrived in the U.S. prior to the enactment of the 1924 Immigration Act, which established the racist nationality quotas that governed U.S. immigration policy until 1965.
Whether Bellow fudged the date of his family's arrival who knows. It is a matter of public record, however, that he received his "certificate of arrival," in accordance with the law's provisions, on June 2, 1943. You can see it here.
Back in 1943, therefore, a "Dreamer" just had to present themselves to a border official, get their certificate stamped, and they would be on the path to citizenship. Now, there is no such path. An undocumented immigrant who arrived in the country as a child only has one avenue for relief from deportation—a provisional form of prosecutorial discretion, DACA, which does not lead to permanent residency, and which our current president has tried to revoke entirely, and which the Supreme Court may very well decide to overturn—plunging 800,000 people, who have lived with legal status for more than seven years, overnight into the nightmare of potential arrest, confinement, and removal to countries they do not know.
Herein we have a sort of parable of the liberal state as a whole (a development analogous to what happened with the emergence of mass incarceration, in some tellings). On the one side of the Janus-face of history is progress. Explicit racism and discrimination abolished and eliminated from the text of our federal immigration laws, at least after 1965. On the other side, however, is the growing bureaucratization and reach of laws, now facially neutral, but that nonetheless still make things much harder for some groups of people than others.
Saul Bellow became a U.S. citizen because of an immigration system that at the time was both more racist and restrictionist —in some ways— and more open and permissive —in others—than it is today. We can be glad, to be sure, that we no longer have 1924-style nationality quotas on the books. But Bellow's story should nonetheless give us some pause in our self-congratulation about our current state of enlightenment.
It should mean something to the American public, that is to say, that one of our most lauded and beloved novelists, someone whose greatest book in so many ways embodied our national culture and aspirations—one of only ten members of our society to ever win the Nobel Prize in Literature (I refuse to count Bob Dylan)—would have spent his entire life undocumented, deportable, if we had had then the same immigration laws we have now. He would at best have DACA, waiting with anxiety for the ruling of a court as it decides whether or not to destroy the life he has built.
Of course, it is not because "Dreamers" may one day win a Nobel Prize that they should not be deported. They—and their parents and other members of their communities —should not be deported because they are human beings with as much right as anyone else to survive and prosper. Because, as Augie put it, "Hell, why shouldn't they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There's enough to go around of everything including hard luck."
It is still worth asking, however, how many Saul Bellows we lose, if the white nationalists sitting in the White House have their way. And how many Augie Marches.
Augie, readers of the novel will know, does not ultimately prove his value by social climbing or formal education—let alone by Nobel prizes—nor any of the other things people tend to point to when they think of the "American Dream." He is profoundly a Dreamer nonetheless, and an American. And his decency and quality as such is proven not by success or money—the false gods of his brother Simon, and of so many of the people around him—but by his capacity for friendship and love.
It is an unconventional love, to be sure—one often proven in ways that only lead him into deeper trouble, as when he pays for a friend's abortion and is mistaken for her lover. It is love that rarely if ever leads him to any worldly reward, and it is often not even recognized as virtue by the people around him; indeed, it is deplored as vice. And in this it is a higher form of love, a higher form of virtue. A love so high it is even willing to dirty and humble itself for its own sake.
That, above all, is what those of us left behind lose, when other members of our society are deported from their homes. It's not just that we lose future employers, workers, breadwinners, scholars, athletes, Nobel Prize winners, or what have you—though we lose all those things as well. Beyond all that, we lose human beings. And whenever that happens, a society's quotient of love and friendship is diminished.
It shouldn't be so. There is enough to go around, in this country. Of hardship, to be sure. But also of love.
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