I went in search of books for children on immigration recently when deciding how to talk to my son about this topic. I found Cynthia DeFelice’s Under the Same Sky. I read it alongside G. A. Cohen’s “On the Site of Distributive Justice.” DeFelice and Cohen both acknowledge that justice transcends legal boundaries. Although DeFelice examines this issue through the lens of immigrant workers and Cohen does so primarily through the example of the family, both stress the tremendous effect that personal decisions have on justice as a whole.
In his essay “On the Site of Distributive Justice,” G. A. Cohen employs the feminist adage, “The personal is political” to illustrate that the “principles of distributive justice, principles, that is, about the just distribution of benefits and burdens in society, apply, wherever else they do, to people’s legally unconstrained choices.” This means that, although there is no law concerning the allocation of domestic duties in a family, for example, these duties still have to be fairly doled out.
Cynthia DeFelice’s Under the Same Sky addresses distributive justice by focusing on the plight of Mexican workers in the United States. The novel’s teenage protagonist, Joe, learns about the prejudice and hardship that these workers face while toiling alongside them on his father’s farm. He realizes that “There were folks who plain didn’t like Mexicans and didn’t think they belonged here and didn’t think we should hire them.”
Furthermore, Joe realizes that his new Mexican friends are better people than his school friends who harass Mexicans and use hateful terms. This kind of behavior has as powerful an effect as legally sanctioned methods of oppression. As Cohen observes, “The legally coercive structure of society functions in two ways. It prevents people from doing things by erecting insurmountable barriers (fences, police lines, prison walls, etc,” while “Informal structure manifests itself in predictable sanctions such as criticism, disapproval, anger, refusal of future cooperation, ostracism, beating…and so on.” Joe’s friends’ harassment is as effective as a legally sanctioned measure, such as a prison, in oppressing the Mexican workers.
Joe also witnesses the problems surrounding immigration. He learns that some of the Mexican workers are illegal, but also that the immigration laws are flawed. When he sees his deeply principled parents bending the rules for the workers, he starts to realize that sometimes people have to negotiate their own terms of justice. Cohen, too, notes that “The justice of a society is not exclusively a function of its legislative structure, or its legally imperative rules, but also of the choices people make within those rules.” According to both writers, it is also important to take into account the choices people make that are not prescribed by the law.
DeFelice suggests people must establish their own rules of justice when the existing ones are not satisfactorily just. Joe realizes that his parents are of the latter opinion: “But why had those guys called our crew ‘illegal’ aliens’? Mom and Dad went strictly by the book. They wouldn’t allow anything illegal to go on at the farm. But I was beginning to realize there were a lot of things happening at the farm that I didn’t understand.” Sometimes the law doesn’t properly address the problem. When Joe helps shelters the illegal immigrants from the law (even driving before he has a license in the process), his father says of the complicated situation: “Laws made by humans aren’t always perfect. Sometimes there’s another law, a higher law, that we feel we have to answer to.”
As Joe becomes familiar with the work ethic of his Mexican coworkers, he realizes that it is not ability but social standing that separates them from him. Cohen makes a point of saying that, in terms of the incentives argument (which claims that those who are talented will produce more for society if they are highly paid), “One need not think that the average dishwasher’s endowment of strength, flair, ingenuity, and so forth falls below that of the average chief executive to accept the argument’s message.” This statement implies that some of the talented people who receive the largest paychecks may not be more talented than those who don’t; it is just a matter of social positioning.
When Joe falls in love with Luisa, one of the Mexican workers, he wonders what it would be like to live like Luisa: “To want to go to school, but not be able to because my family needed the money I could make by working. And how I’d feel, knowing that if I didn’t go to school, I might have to spend the rest of my life picking strawberries.”
Both Cohen and DeFelice recognize that the inequalities in labor and wealth distribution are almost impossible to remedy as long as the societal structure supports them. Cohen and DeFelice advocate imposing moral standards in situations in which there are no legal standards to ensure fair treatment. Both writers recognize that principles of distributive justice apply outside of the legal sphere. DeFelice takes this argument to its natural conclusion by demonstrating that where the law falls short, people have to live by their own laws