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The Accidental American co-authors discuss how U.S. immigration policy is misguided in its attempt to preserve an American culture. (2:59)
 

Full interview. (12:58)
 

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.

So they called me and they called (unintelligible), co-director of (unintelligible) to start this center that will help the displaced workers to find jobs and to help the family to go and navigate the system. But soon, the owner of Windows on the World opened up a restaurant and he refused to hire us, people that worked with him for more than 20 years, and everything changed to organizing.

And we start organizing in New York, and that small group that started in New York now is all over the country. We have ROC in New Orleans, Chicago, Michigan and Maine, Miami in the end of the year, and L.A. sooner. So this is just to show that - and how we do in our work, we do in our work in three prong. We're fighting the bad guys, that they are not respecting the law and they are not paying minimum wage, and we're helping - these are the good guys that we're helping.

We're having a round table with the good guys who are helping to do this business, to be, like, good for everybody else. And part of these good things, we opened up our restaurant called Color. It's a coop restaurant that everybody that work inside is an owner.

And we opened this restaurant not just to show - to get another 58 (unintelligible) but to show the owner that yes, you can do it right, pay minimum wage, respect your worker, promote within, and make good profit.

Tavis: You mentioned earlier in your answer that you were working at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. You mentioned also you lost 73 friends in the tragedy of 9/11. About how long had you been out of the building? Because you worked there - had you been there the night before, the day before, the same day?

Mamdouh: Just the night before, I was lucky. My call on Tuesday was at 4:00, so if it happened at 4:00, I would not be here. Everybody that died that morning were people that really worked in the kitchen and poor people. That's why the need was really - people (unintelligible) undocumented, and people that make $200, $250 a week.

So after 9/11, they have no savings at all. That's why we get (unintelligible) ROC New York to help those people to go and navigate the system and try to get them some seed money.

Tavis: Rinku, I suspect that in this presidential debate tomorrow night there will be this issue of immigration - I hope, at least; got my fingers crossed that this issue of immigration will come up in this presidential debate, at least get raised. That said, give me your sense, because you write about it in the book, of what is missing in the current immigration debate.

You argue in the book that the debate right now about immigration is too limited. You mean by that what?

Sen: I mean that on the one hand, on the one side of the debate, all the discussion is about punishment. We treat immigrants purely as criminals or as terrorists on that side, and we're constantly thinking of how big to build the fence along the border or how many raids to have at meatpacking plants.

On the other side of the debate, it's all about work, and really about enabling immigrants to work legally, but still cheaply, and not necessarily about allowing immigrants to settle here, to be active civically, politically, and culturally. So right now the debate says immigrants are all either criminals or just a pair of arms available for hauling and picking and scrubbing, and when we look at immigrants that narrowly, we miss the many, many contributions they could actually make, and we miss the chance to find the common solutions that would actually make life better for everybody.

Tavis: So globalization - because the subtitle is "Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization." Again, we hope that this comes up in the debate tomorrow night, but that's still a domestic issue. Expand the conversation about immigration for me in terms of the globalization of the world that we live in.

Sen: Well, the truth is that we have a globalization right now that works really perfectly well for corporations - they're rewarded for going anywhere in the world they want to go and for doing their work as cheaply as possible. And when human beings try to go anywhere in the world in order to make their lives better, to find conditions that are better than what they're in, we punish them.

We close them down by men with guns at the border; we create all these bureaucracies that they have to wait years and years to go through, we split up their families. And so while corporations get rewarded for doing something, human beings get punished for doing the exact same thing.

And there's something really fundamentally unfair about that, and we end up taking it out on the immigrants who are coming and scapegoating them as opposed to turning our attention to the people who are really benefitting from that situation.

Tavis: Mamdouh, for those who are watching right now who - and this question always comes up, as you well know - about what to do about illegal immigration - there may be people watching right now, I suspect, who may even be applauding the journey that you've taken from Morocco to New York City, and the work that you're doing in organizing now other immigrants around the country.

There may be folk who want to applaud that work, but they still want something to be done about illegal immigration. Your thoughts about that are what?

Mamdouh: The illegal immigration or the undocumented people that we have in this country, we cannot work against them. We have to come up with a solution to legalize them and have them work, because we need them. Seventy percent of the workforce in the restaurants are born outside the country; 40 percent are undocumented.

So we cannot just come and stop all of them. Business is going to stop, and this is the most - it's (unintelligible) restaurant worker in this country, and it's the most - all the textile, all the jobs are shipped outside the country. This job cannot - you cannot send somebody to eat in China and bring him back. You need a restaurant where people can go and eat, so. (Laughter) So we cannot - we have to do a solution.

You have to legalize people here, and then watch the border if you want to do it. But people that they are here, we have to do a solution that's - because let's just be fair about it. We all know that they are there. They are working, they are not hurting nobody. It's a way - if we need them, we'll get them inside the restaurant. They are working, they are nice. If we don't need them, if they are organizing, then we pick on them and say, "Well, they are illegal and we have to turn them back."

Tavis: Rinku, tell me how beyond this debate tomorrow night and beyond the election in November what you expect is going to happen in this immigration debate? And I ask that because this is a debate that, as you know, was taking place in Congress before we got into the presidential race, and the immigration reform bill died, it didn't go anywhere.

And my sense, at least, is a presidential debate is not the best time to have a conversation about immigration reform, but certainly once we get a new president, be it McCain or Obama, we're going to have to come back to this issue of immigration reform. What's your sense of what's going to happen then?

Sen: I think that whoever wins the election, we are going to have some form of legalization for the undocumented people who are here now. I think the other side of that policy will be a lot of emphasis on enforcement, so there will be a lot of money spent on fences and border patrol and things like that. And I think the legalization is important to win.

We want it to be as generous as possible; we want it to put people on a path to citizenship and to staying here permanently, if that's what they desire. And then once that law is passed, that bit of reform is done, then those of us who care about immigration and about racial justice need to get to work really crafting a policy that's a complete reform of the immigration system and that is also pursuing fair globalization policies.

Tavis: So now that we've talked about it tonight, we'll see if Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama get to it tomorrow night. The new book by Rinku Sen along with Fekkak Mamdouh is called "The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization." Nice to have you both on, and all the best to you.

Sen: Thank you so much, Tavis.

Mamdouh: Thank you.