Imperfect Spiral is woven mostly around themes concerning friendship, fear, courage, connection, and heartbreak. There’s also a thread relating to immigration—a topic that claims a special place in my heart and life, probably because I’m the daughter of a refugee whose family struggled to gain entry to the United States in the face of restrictive immigration rules.
Meigs County, the setting of this book, is a fictional place. Fictional, too, are the proposed county and state laws targeting undocumented (or “illegal”) immigrants that the story mentions. However, some states and communities have adopted laws like these in an effort to push out undocumented immigrants. Such laws might order local police to check the immigration status of people they stop, or deny driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. The U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on the question of what actions states are allowed to take, but the answer to this question continues to evolve.
At the broader national level, policies on illegal immigration are also always evolving. The usual tools for addressing the issue include control of the nation’s borders, arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants, and punishing U.S. companies that hire them. On a few extraordinary occasions, the national government has also taken a very different approach, offering some undocumented immigrants a reprieve from the threat of deportation and a chance at citizenship. The favored groups have included farm workers, immigrants who were in the United States for a certain period of time or as of a certain date, and young adults who had been brought to the United States as children. This happened during the administration of President Ronald Reagan and also during President Barack Obama’s administration. Imperfect Spiral, however, reflects the far more typical situation for undocumented immigrants, in which there is no special program to help them.
Illegal immigration is a topic that often incites heated discussion. Reasonable people can disagree about the issues. I’m always hopeful that those who formulate immigration policy, as well as those who simply debate it, are mindful that it’s people we’re talking about here—even if the immigration laws insist on referring to anyone who isn’t a citizen or a national of the United States as an “alien.”
Please visit my website, www.debbielevybooks.com, for links to places where you can read more about immigration issues.