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Reviewed by Ricardo Gilb
We Are All Suspects Now

Untold Stories From Immigrant Communities After 9/11

By Tram Nguyen

BEACON; 187 Pages; $14 PAPERBACK

Sunday, December 4, 2005



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Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the French newspaper Le Monde declared on its front page, "We Are All Americans Now." The belief behind that declaration was that the attacks were directed not only at the United States but at ideas cherished by the entire international community -- from abstract notions of freedom and liberty to the long established principle of noncombatant immunity. In defending itself, then, America was defending the beliefs of the entire world.
Since then, America's national security has become the pretense for actions with little or no international support. This includes not only the U.S. military presence in Iraq, but our essentially uncritical support of allies with dictatorial tendencies in Pakistan and Russia, all done in the name of keeping the world safe.

Now we live in a world made possible by Sept. 11 but not exactly caused by it. We would not be in Iraq today if not for the attacks, yet there is no proven connection between Iraq and the attackers. We struggle not with the attacks but with the problems caused by our response to those attacks.

Domestically, the same is true, as Oakland author Tram Nguyen shows in "We Are All Suspects Now." Her title reminds us how far we've come, from the feeling of unity in the immediate aftermath of the attacks to the fear of the U.S. government now experienced by many people. She gives us stories of six immigrant communities in different urban centers, from New York to Los Angeles.

The fear experienced by these immigrants is not of being killed in an attack but of being deported. This fear is a little difficult to imagine. It is tempting to think, as too many people do, that, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

But the fear experienced by the immigrants in these stories is not of being exposed as a terrorist -- having one's false identity as a friendly, clean-shaven cook or janitor stripped to reveal a maniacal bearded fundamentalist bombmaker. It is fear that there is a law out there somewhere that they did not know about and did not follow, that there is a dotted line at the bottom of some paper that they did not sign, and that they will be deported for such a failure. They face a court system they cannot understand, that most Americans, in fact, do not understand either, often without the aid of a lawyer. Many work jobs that they hold quite precariously and worry that a few days in court or in jail will cost them their income.

Nguyen gives us one such story, of a Latina in Los Angeles who suffered because of Operation Tarmac, "the federal sweep of airports that ended up capturing more than a thousand undocumented workers nationwide." According to the head of a human rights group in L.A., she had "used a false Social Security number in 1979 to get a job at LAX. Even though she became a citizen, she was picked up in her house and put in jail for two weeks. Her husband had a terminal illness and she was the breadwinner in the family. She lost her job. This is so extreme.

"And what does that tell our community? It says that even if you're naturalized, you can still be harmed."

This fear is not unwarranted. While at first illegal immigrants were an obvious population in which to search for terrorists, identifying and deporting them has become an end in itself. The New York Times in July reported on a sting operation in Washington in which the FBI caught illegal immigrants by luring them to a phony meeting of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In response to criticism of the operation, an FBI official said, "For many years we have used undercover techniques in drug investigations, arms investigations and money-laundering investigations." Illegal immigration has been elevated to the level of a serious criminal offense.

Conversely, anti-immigrant sentiment since Sept. 11 has been allowed to pose as concern for national security. One of Nguyen's subjects is a Californian who worked on getting Proposition 187 passed in the days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and who now can pretend that he is fighting for national security: "After going through September 11 and seeing these people not care about the problem on the border, I knew I had to do something."

"We Are All Suspects Now" is a book that needed to be written. Its purpose is certainly a worthy one: "While several scholars, legal experts, and policy organizations have explored the legal and constitutional ramifications of the war on terror, this book takes a ground-level view of the impact of such policies on individuals and communities in the United States." The only drawback to the book is that Nguyen tends to rely too much on the words of her interviewees to illuminate a given issue instead of succinctly stating the facts.

But it is important to give the immigrants a voice, as Nguyen does here, to convey the humanity of those communities. Some of this humanity comes through in her book -- glimpses of families struggling to stay together, moments of people recollecting their struggles to come to America, and interesting perspectives on lives thatare no less American for being not as well-known. With any luck, Nguyen's book will get people listening to these voices that have yet to be fully recorded.