Rinku Sen is the author, with Fekkak Mamdouh, of The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization.

Q. You write about three common misconceptions that distort our national debate about immigration. What are they?

A. The first is the belief that people migrate to the United States because of their individual choices. We fail to take into account the fact that we have in this world an uneven economic globalization. Corporations are able to move around at will; in fact they are rewarded for crossing borders and looking for the most favorable conditions for their businesses. When human beings try to do the same thing, they’re held up by men with guns standing at the border or by visa bureaucracies and immigration laws. There’s a fundamental unfairness to that that we have to be able to address, both in our global economic policy and in our domestic immigration policy.

The second blind spot is that we behave as though cultures never change. There’s a thread of the immigration debate on the restrictionist side that insists we need to limit immigration in order to preserve American culture—as if that hasn’t changed since the country was founded in 1776. All cultures change all the time: They change from within and they change from external forces. To make immigration policy as a way to preserve a pure and natural American culture is fiction at best and actually racist at worst.

The third is that we believe U.S. residents and immigrants have opposing interests. In fact, we all have the same set of interests. Most people want a decent education for their kids, good housing, and a dignified job. These are the things we could be fighting for together, and we would do much better joined together than we would apart.

Q. How do we get to a place where these myths have less of a hold over people? And how hopeful are you we can get there?

A. I actually hold out a lot of hope. In recent polls we see that 60–70 percent of Americans believe that undocumented people should be legalized, and that immigration reform should be high on the federal agenda right now. People understand that to have millions of people living essentially underground, in the shadows, is not good for the cohesiveness of U.S. communities. If thousands of people in a particular city are not sending their kids to school and afraid to even go out to the grocery store, that does something to the national fabric that is not positive.

People also recognize that undocumented people are making many economic contributions and to block this would be shooting ourselves in the foot. The loss of jobs and the fiscal and budget crises that our states and cities are facing are caused not by undocumented people but by economical decisions we have made. If we want a stable economy with growth, we need to be able to fight inequity—where everybody is working hard, but some are earning a lot and others are barely making a living—particularly racial and gender inequity. Immigration reform is a major part of tackling that.

Q: As you say, the immigration issue is bound up with economics, but it’s also about race. Talk about how race drives the dynamics of this debate.

A. It’s a coded part of the discourse. People are very careful to say this isn’t about race but about the rule of law or protecting the jobs of African Americans—pretty disingenuous stuff. You start to understand that it is about race when you read the work of the Center for Immigration Studies, the top think tank on the restrictionist side. Over a two-year period they published a hundred reports, op-eds, and things like that, and 65 percent of them were about Latinos. This group can’t find a single thing about Latino immigrants to like, so in the seven years since September 11, “immigrant” and “Latino” have become the same thing in the public imagination—all immigrants are Latinos and all Latinos are immigrants. And you can’t actually disrupt that perception by throwing facts at people: What we know about political debates is that we all have a story in our heads and that story rules. It’s not going to get disrupted by new data even if it’s accurate.

Q. So how to disrupt it?

A. We need to be able to tell a new story about immigration that’s focused on the impact of our current policy on actual immigrants. That would help Americans connect these new immigrants with the immigrant histories of their own families—which most Americans are closely attached to, I find. To disrupt our subconscious idea that a real American is a white American, we need to change the story of America that’s in people’s heads.

Q. What’s your assessment of the chances for immigration reform under the Obama administration?

A. The biggest surprise is that Obama would introduce immigration policy as a key item on his agenda in the middle of this tremendous economic recession. I think that takes quite a bit of courage and is an encouraging sign. The anti-immigrant side has worked very hard to convince us that in a recession you can’t even begin to talk about immigration reform, though studies generally show that immigrants make a net contribution to the economy. If the Obama administration is able to really drive its agenda, it’s because it recognizes that in a recession we need everybody working, paying taxes, and able to contribute to the economy at their fullest. And legalization and a new immigration policy is the best way to achieve that.

Q. What are the outlines of a sensible immigration policy as you see it?

A. First, legalization for the twelve million or so undocumented people who are here in the country right now. Having these people remain undocumented not only makes them extremely exploitable, it also lowers the bargaining power of all American workers. We need to ease legal immigration. Whenever we have decided to restrict immigration in this country we’ve driven up the numbers of undocumented immigrants; to reduce these numbers we need to make legal immigration much easier than it is.

We also have to look at our global economic policies, our free-trade agreements, and at our relationships with countries where we have military, political, and economic engagement. Over the next five years or so, we need to be looking at the interplay between the global economy, the role of the United States in the world, and a really innovative immigration policy that allows people to move around more freely, just as the corporations do.

Q. How do the bills Congress has debated in recent years measure up to that standard?

A. They usually have a legalization plan and some measures for reforming the immigrant bureaucracy, and I expect that will be true in the next round of debate as well. Recently, we’ve seen from the federal government a rethinking of enforcement policy—the raids, detention centers, and deportation. But the bills that are likely to come up in the next two years, like the ones we saw in 2005, 2006, and 2007, will have a lot of enforcement in them to build on the notion that we have to “secure the border.” The ultimate goal is to control the flow of immigrants and limit the numbers, and that’s where I broadly disagree with our approach.

Q. What, concretely, can ordinary Americans do to push for immigration reform?

A. It’s very, very important for Congress to hear from Americans that we need sensible immigration reform. When the restrictionists put out a request for people to make calls to Congress, thousands of people on that side make their voices heard, while few people on the opposite side respond. Organizations like the Center for Community Change, the Applied Research Center (where I work), and New American Media, which covers the ethnic press and distributes the content that is coming out of the Latino, black, Asian, and Native American press in this country, are trying to tell a new story that’s attached to a piece of action.

Click here to learn more about Rinku Sen’s book, The Accidental American.