Schrödinger's Immigrant
Of morality, doing what's required of you and Pascual Pedro Pedro
I’ve said it before and will say it many more times but my hometown of West Liberty, IA has this way of getting people talking. It has to do with a myriad of things. It being designated the “first majority Hispanic town” in Iowa, it being a microcosm of the country at large, it being used as the backdrop of so much political theater. The latest headlines have to do with the deportation of a 20-year old former West Liberty High School student and soccer star, Pascual Pedro Pedro.
As Paul Brennan, my colleague at Little Village writes, “Pascual Pedro Pedro came to the United States seven years ago with his father. Because they entered the country without the necessary paperwork, Pedro’s father was immediately deported, and the 13-year-old was granted supervised release so he could live with his grandparents, who have been in the U.S. for nearly 30 years. According to the terms of his release, Pedro needed to check in at the ICE field office in Cedar Rapids once a year. “Last week he did that, just like every year, and he never came back home,” his grandfather said…“In my family, we have done everything that has been required,” Francisco Pedro told the crowd (at a protest in Davenport last Thursday).
But its no longer enough to do what is required, to jump through the hoops and placate the powers that tell you, “this is what you need to do to live here” or “this is how you prove that you are one of the good ones.” Check-in with us. The same as you’ve done before. Only this time we’ll rip up our side of the social contract and rip you from your friends and family, taking advantage of a holiday weekend to expedite a kidnapping in the name of a quota steeped in point-blank racism and fascism.
Doing what we are told is no longer enough. Because you see, we are Schrödinger's immigrant. For those maybe not as versed in the Schrödinger's cat metaphor, Sara A. Metwalli, a doctoral student researching quantum computing does a good job of summarizing.
“Schrödinger’s Cat, as a thought experiment, states that if you seal a cat in a box with something that can eventually kill it, you won’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box. So, until you open the box and observe the cat, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive.”
This r/AskPhysics thread adds some context. As one user notes, “…according to quantum mechanics the radioactive atom is literally in two states at once: decayed and not decayed. It will switch to one of those to states when observed, otherwise it is in both states at the same time.”
Which I think is an apt comparison to how this administration weaponizes ours and other marginalized identities. We are at once lazy free loaders taking advantage of systems while also being bloodthirsty gang-members. We are those gang-members while also being the workers taking the jobs from so many able-bodied folks just oh-so-willing to fill those jobs if we weren’t there. We are caravans and caravans of bodies creeping north from Latin America, materializing when the talking heads need to stoke a fervor, only for those caravans to never actually materialize in any real way.
We are the “drug dealers, criminals, rapists…” that Trump used to launch his presidential career. While also being the people he said “…that work so hard, they bend over all day. We don’t have too many people who can do that, but they work very hard…” Trump said this at a victory-lap rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds over the 4th of July weekend…the same weekend that Little Village states, “ICE agents seized Pedro when he arrived at the (ICE field) office…” Of course, Trump’s sentiment was in regards to centering the plight of the mythical Midwestern (white) farmer. “…some of the farmers are literally, you know, they cry when they see this happen.”
Centering aside, it’s still whiplash how we can be so many things at once. The hardest workers doing the jobs others won’t do, the best player on the school soccer teams, the most depraved, viscous murderers and rapists, the biggest, most effective scapegoat.
Here’s a thing that gets lost about the whole Schrödinger's cat metaphor, as this follow-up comment on that Reddit r/AskPhysics thread points out. “It should be noted that Schrödinger himself didn’t actually believe the cat was in a superposition. He made this up to demonstrate how ridiculous he thought the Copenhagen interpretation was.” Lost in the sauce of us laymen taking a peek at the conversations of quantum physicists is the fact that Schrödinger was simply talking shit about how dumb this “thing is in two states at once until someone observes it” thing really is. Now if only we could all see how equally dumb this administrations multiple at-odds-with-themselves viewpoints are.
But there are other ways that we can stretch this metaphor for all that it’s worth. Because as Brennan continues in his Little Village reporting, “Pedro’s family has been trying to get an explanation from ICE about why they seized him with no warning, why they marked him for expedited removal from the country and why Pedro did not get a hearing before an immigration judge before he was deported. The answer to all those questions was the same, Francisco Pedro said.
“And the answer was, ‘We don’t know,’” he said. “They don’t know, no one knows.”
Perhaps this is taking Schrödinger’s immigrant to its zenith. As the administration obfuscates and drags its heels in answering any questions it also works at a break-neck pace to physically remove people from the scrutiny that comes with attention at injustice. The same thing happened with the way DOJ officials ignored U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s order to turn around the plane containing Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Once again, for better or worse, my hometown becomes a microcosm of the country at large. The officials in Cedar Rapids that fast-tracked Pascual Pedro Pedro’s deportation hoped, or didn’t care, that resistance would occur. As long as they moved fast enough perhaps Pedro would cease to exist as a real human being in their facilities. Sure he’d exist as an identity for his friends and family to bang on about….but his actual physical whereabouts would be lost in a weaponized bureaucracy.
One of the key figures in pushing against this narrative is Father Guillermo Treviño of West Liberty’s St. Joseph Catholic Church. Father Guillermo is also Pascual’s godfather. Of this ordeal Treviño called ICE’s unexpected seizure of Pedro “not just a legal issue” but said it’s also “a moral crisis.” Of this I agree. But our outlooks may differ on how we can effect change in the face of such a crisis. Little Village relays; “Asked if he thought any progress was being made in bringing Pedro back to his home in Iowa, Treviño said, “I think there is.” It breaks my heart to admit that I lack Father G’s optimism. But, optimism and cynicism aside, the work must be done and Pedro’s story shared so that perhaps all of the theoretical states and dissenting labels will dissipate and a man is free to return to his home and simply exist.
-Chuy
Two things:
Please consider donating to this Fundraiser to support Pascual Pedro Pedro. Funds will go to support Pascual, his extended family in West Liberty and his mother in Guatemala.
Also, I couldn’t have written this without the stellar reporting by my colleague Paul Brennan at Little Village Magazine. When I say colleague, I mean we literally sit beside each other in our offices. Paul was there when I first read the news of this ordeal and called my mom to check-in. He offered condolences and got to work in gathering info. Please consider donating to Little Village’s Independent Journalism Fund so we can keep reporting on local government and environmental reporting.
Thank you for writing this. Aside from the ethical and moral problems, their policy is stupid and counterproductive, because it will only discourage people from going to their regular check-ins.