Commentary: Help Wanted/Leave Now! How U.S. immigration policy remains maddeningly consistently inconsistent

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Set us as preferred The reporter may have misheard the comment, or maybe the person being quoted actually said it, or something odd happened in the editing process.Whatever: This is what appeared in the Feb.20, 1985 edition of the Oakland Tribune, quoting a UC Berkeley professor about a protest against immigration sweeps in the Bay Area.“This probably won’t stop the Iron Ass [federal government] from making raids in the Eastbay.”“Iron Ass” is how someone might hear the acronym INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the forerunner to ICE.And now, 40 years on, it fits right into the kind of angry, derisory language many Americans use for the present-day hammer-handed operations of federal immigration officers, around the country, especially here in California.California has always been — and that’s a couple of centuries of “always” — at the fulcrum of the immigration-deportation seesaw in the U.S., with national policies yo-yoing between kicking workers out and inviting them in.

Consider the foreign-born who joined the Gold Rush, the Chinese railroad workers, and still and always the Latino population along the long, wide international border.Los Angeles is a complex place.Luckily, there's someone who can provide context, history and culture.

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That underlies the name of a new exhibition at the California Museum in Sacramento, “Help Wanted/Leave Now!” about the “revolving door” of programs and practices that have alternately enticed and expelled workers, l...