9/11, Immigration, and the Cost of Forgetting

 

By Armando García Álvarez

On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the deadliest terrorist attack in modern history. They were not only executives, firefighters, police officers, travelers, and office workers. Among them were Latino and Latina immigrants — including undocumented workers — whose labor had helped sustain New York City: cooks, service employees, messengers, delivery workers, and maintenance staff.

Their deaths remind us of a truth too often omitted from the official story: immigrants were among the victims of 9/11. For some undocumented families, grief was joined by a cruel additional burden: proving that a loved one had worked in the towers, had been there, had existed in the eyes of institutions that had too often refused to see them.

Twenty-five years later, the tragedy did not end when the towers fell. Nearly 10,000 responders and survivors have died from illnesses associated with the attacks, according to figures reported from the World Trade Center Health Program. The toll from cancer and respiratory disease has surpassed the number killed that morning. This week, New York City released more than 170,000 pages of records concerning air quality and the governmental response at Ground Zero. The documents add weight to a painful question: what did officials know about the toxic air, and when did they know it?

The answer matters because memory without accountability is incomplete.

There is another part of the story that deserves to be remembered. On September 12, 2001, Congress had scheduled its first hearing on the DREAM Act, legislation that would have opened a path to legal status for many young immigrants. It was canceled after the attacks. Before 9/11, President George W. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox had been discussing a broader framework for immigration reform. That political possibility disappeared.

What followed was not comprehensive reform. It was an expansion of enforcement.

Congress created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. In 2003, immigration functions were reorganized within it through Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Immigration was placed increasingly within the framework of national security. The consequences reached far beyond terrorism investigations: surveillance, detention, deportation, racial profiling, and a public culture in which migrants — particularly Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, and Latinos — were too often treated as threats before they were recognized as neighbors.

Security is a legitimate responsibility of every government. But security cannot be built by making entire communities suspect. Nor can a country honor the dead by ignoring the living: the first responders still becoming ill, the families still demanding truth, and the immigrants who continue to contribute their work, their taxes, their culture, and their hope.

To remember September 11 honestly is to mourn every victim, defend every survivor, and reject the false choice between security and human dignity. A nation made safer by fear alone is not truly safe. A nation that remembers with justice has learned something from its loss.