Tavis: Rinku Sen is president and executive director of the Applied Research Center and the publisher of "Color Lines" magazine. Fekkak Mamdouh is a restaurant union organizer who this year co-founded the country's first national restaurant workers' organization. The group is called Restaurant Opportunities Center United. The two of them have teamed up for the new book, "The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization." I'm glad to have you both here.
Rinku Sen: Thank you.
Fekkak Mamdouh: Thank you.
Tavis: My pleasure. Rinku, let me start with you. The title of the book actually got me - "The Accidental American." The more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe we're all accidental Americans. But you tell me what you meant by the book's title.
Sen: Well, that's exactly what we meant, actually. It started out as a reflection on the way that most immigrants come to the country; many people don't imagine staying forever and becoming Americans, but as soon as we start thinking about that, it eventually became clear in our minds that all of us are accidental in some way. So no one actually can claim 100 percent to be the real or true American and to make immigration policy as though there were such a thing would be dishonest.
Tavis: To your latter point now, which is where I wanted to go, how do you think not acknowledging that reality, that we are all accidental Americans, how does not acknowledging that reality impact the immigration debate as we now know it?
Sen: Well, one of the things that happens is that we make immigration policy as though we're trying to preserve some kind of pure or natural American identity - something that got set up in 1776 and hasn't been changed in the 200-some years since then. And we argue that there is no such thing; that American culture has been changed many times through its history, often from people inside of the culture, and also by people who are outside of the culture to whom Americans became exposed and who influenced the way that we listen to music or the foot that we eat or even the way we do our politics.
Tavis: With regard to how the book is written, the storyline here, the narrative, weaves in discussion of policy with Mamdouh's personal story. You got these two things that are being woven together from the front to the back of the book. Why was that important, and how does his personal immigrant story augment the kind of narrative that you think it's important for us as Americans to understand in this debate - does that make sense?
Sen: Yeah. I think that people are pretty confused by the immigration debate. They don't really know what the laws are and how they actually affect human beings. And what you got to see in Mamdouh's story is how he starts out organizing immigrants who are of color, working in kitchens and at the back of the house in restaurants, and gradually in six years how that community grows and grows and grows until it includes everybody.
It includes U.S.-born workers who are working at the front of the house, it includes employers who are trying to do the right thing, and it includes diners who want to get a decent meal in New York without exploiting anyone. And at the same time, we track what happens to immigration reform in Congress in that same period, and in contrast to this beautifully expanding community that Mamdouh is building, in Congress the idea of who belongs in America gets narrower and narrower in that six years, and meaner.
Tavis: Mamdouh, tell me more, given Rinku's introduction of you - tell me more about the work that you're doing now, and how you got into doing the work that you're doing as an immigrant.
Mamdouh: Well, it all starts - I come from Morocco, and why I come here, because I was really poor and I cannot afford to live the life that everybody living in Third World country, so I managed to come here. And when I come here, like every immigrant, we start in low jobs.
So I start working as a delivery boy, even I have a degree in physic and chemical. And all immigrant, they come, they're driving taxi and they are doctors in New York, because where we come from. We don't get the help that other people get when they come here. So start working in restaurant and very quick I was moved from delivery boy to busboy to waiter, and they moved me very fast because I speak French.
Other immigrants and people of color does work as busers and dishwashers stay for life there because nobody help them and because of the look. They want pretty face - blue eyes, white skin - to be serving, and all the rest doing the hot job in the back.
And the difference between the back of the house and the front, the back will make up, like, $25,000, $30,000, and the front, in good places, you make $60,000 up to 80, to 100, to $120,000 where it's a livable job, but it's not given to people of color and immigrants.
In my case, I was given that because I speak French and in 1996, I ended up working at Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. And after 9/11, I lost 73 of my coworkers; 350 of us left with no jobs, and there was nowhere to go. We're lucky that we have a union there, (unintelligible) area local 100 - all of us went to the union, and the union didn't have the capacity to work with all of us.
...Rest of interview
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