Immigrants

My mother was an immigrant.  Her family came to America in 1921, from Canada.  She was 9 years old.  Her mother was Irish; her father was Scotch-Irish.  I'm a first generation American citizen, born and raised here. We've talked a lot lately about who immigrants are, what they do when they get here, and why they come.  Here's the story of my family. 

They came for economic reasons, and because they had family in California.  My grandfather was a photographer; my great-uncle Tom, his brother, had a chicken farm in the San Jose area.  They lived in San Jose for awhile, then moved to Vallejo around 1930, where my grandfather opened a photography studio.

When they arrived in California they had 4 children:  a 19 year old daughter, a 15 year old son, a 9 year old daughter (my mother), and a 2 year old son.  Here is the course of their lives:

• The 19 year old daughter contracted TB from a carrier in her nursing class, and died in November 1928.
• The 15 year old son attended Stanford University, married a young woman from the Napa Valley, and eventually got a job as a manager in a firm manufacturing aluminum windows.  He had 3 children, and died in 1989.
• The 9 year old daughter eventually attended college briefly, dropped out to work to help support her family after her father died, and very eventually (1944) married a man from Missouri, whom she met at the USO in Vallejo (my father).  She had 2 children and died in 2000.
• The 2 year old son contracted TB in his hip bone, probably from his sister, which left him with one leg shorter than the other. I remember him using an orthopedic shoe built up to near 6 inches.  He attended U.C. Berkeley and other universities, ending up with a Ph.D. in Economics at Michigan State University.  He married a woman from New York, had one child who died at birth, adopted 2 other children, and died in 1995.

My grandfather died in 1936.  My grandmother died in 1962.

Many people who emigrate to the United States today look pretty much like my grandparents, except for their skin color and language.  Things weren't so great in the old country, they hope to make a better life here, the children they bring (or produce here) go on to become Americans, and produce more Americans.

Americans could be rough on immigrants.  We've always had a xenophobic streak, not necessarily aimed only at people of color.  The Irish, and later Italians, were unwelcome because they were Catholic, an early echo of the anti-Muslim prejudice we see.  Now, of course, we also have war refugees, many but not all Muslim, simply running for their lives from countries like Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. My reading suggests that in the early 20th century, Americans often disliked immigrants, because they weren't "like us", but they weren't afraid of them, as we're now being urged to fear Muslims.

Most immigrants just want to make a better life here.  Now there's a very small group of people - a few thousand out of tens of millions - who believe that killing infidels (including Americans) is a service to Allah.  Should we really shut out all the people who just want a better life, because a few of them might be a threat?  Immigrants built America; shall we stop building America because we're afraid?  We're all armed to the teeth these days - couldn't we handle a few jihadis, if they did show up?

As for their threat to American jobs - most immigrants take jobs that Americans wouldn't do, even for better pay.  How much would it take to make you pick vegetables by hand all day, stooped over in a field?  Or pack chicken carcasses on a factory line?  Immigrants don't threaten American jobs; automation threatens American jobs.  But that's another post.

Arizona's New Law

Someone on Facebook asked me if I was upset just because Arizona just wrote a law that is "almost the same as Federal law."  Yes, I am upset about it, because the "almost" is the problem. The exact issue is that the local police are now essentially ordered to enforce immigration law.

Many people don't understand what a local police department does and how it does it. I've been working with the Oakland, CA PD for several years, volunteering in the local Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council, attending the Citizens Police Academy, and now spending an afternoon a week answering phones and filing papers in the Recruiting division. So I'm not just talking through my hat.  I've been out on a ride-along with an Oakland cop.

 

The job of a local police dept. is to KEEP THE PEACE - to prevent crime if possible, solve crime if necessary, and gather evidence to convict the criminals they need to catch.

A critical piece of this job is having the trust of the community they work in. Oakland has major problems with this. Large sections of the community don't trust the police, and it's one of the reasons we are one of the five most dangerous cities in the country. Is that what Arizona wants? Because if the entire Latino population of the state suddenly feels they can't trust their local police, it's what Arizona will get.

Arizona has just passed a law that tells their local police departments, it's more important for you to find and arrest illegal immigrants than it is for you to keep the peace. Good luck with that.

 

And they claim it isn't racist, but it is, because in Arizona, the odds are very high that any illegal immigrant will be Mexican.  That's why this is being called the "Breathing while Mexican" law.   The annoying thing is, the entire Southwest is sprinkled with Hispanic American citizens, absolutely native-born, whose families have been here since the Spaniards came in the 1770s.  Those people will be pulled over too, and they have every right to be angry about it.

 

Consider trying to enforce this law in the San Francisco Bay Area.  The police would have to stop everyone and check papers, even blonds and redheads - the Bay Area has illegal immigrants from Ireland, from the Netherlands, from England, from all over Europe.  I haven't even begun to count the Asian countries from which we probably have illegals.  Now, that wouldn't be racist; but it wouldn't be possible, either.

Actually, I hope that this law won't stand.  The courts have repeatedly ruled that enforcing immigration law is a Federal, not a state, prerogative.  Arizona seems to think their law is different; we'll see.

Pity the Poor Immigrant (with thanks to Bob Dylan)

It was in the paper today that St. Michael of Homeland Security is going to Get Tough with those awful illegal immigrants. Specifically, he's going to start chasing down and fining U.S. employers who don't clear up those "no match" letters - the ones that say, your employee's Social Security number isn't in the file. He's going after the employers because, of course, his department's ongoing attempts to find all these illegals and deport them have had about as much effect as spitting into the wind. I have one question for St. Michael:

You and what army?

The standard estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. is around 12 million. There are more illegal immigrants in the U.S., on that measure, than there are people in any of almost 150 countries (courtesy of the population list in Wikipedia).

In 2004 (the latest numbers on the official web site), Homeland Security had 183,000 employees. Of course that has changed; say it's doubled, to 366,000. Unlikely, given how cheap the Bush administration is for everything except the Iraq war; but assume it. That means that each Homeland Security employee, everybody down to the janitors and the guy in the mail room, has to go, and find, and process out, 33 illegal immigrants, in order to clean this up. And that assumes they do nothing else, including guarding the border and issuing the passports that everybody now has to have to go to Canada and Mexico and anywhere else.

So - this isn't possible, they're just blowing smoke to make the Republicans look good for the presidential campaign. Or, as one nurseryman I heard on the radio complained, they plan to turn local businessmen into their enforcement officers, and without any pay or benefits for doing the job, either. In fact, for some businesses, complying with this initiative will put them out of business, because as far as I can tell (from a couple of completely unscientific chats with people in the field), these really are jobs that many Americans will not do. It isn't just picking fruit, either - the jobs include a lot of stuff that used to be standard blue collar work: Hanging drywall. Painting. Doing garden maintenance. Making beds in hotels. Looking at the five guys roofing a house down the street from us, I have to wonder about them: do they have papers? Valid papers?

Which raises the question: even if it were possible to deport all these people, is this a good idea?? As far as I'm concerned, and even leaving aside the effect on agriculture, the service industries, and the construction trade, the answer is no. This is a country of immigrants. Everybody here, if you go back far enough, descends from an immigrant - even the Indians. They just got here first; but they came (it's pretty clear) from Asia. This country was built on immigration (see the verse on the Statue of Liberty); and it's been a good thing, too. The "greatest generation", the people who fought in World War II? Immigrants, or children of same, most of them.

I discussed this whole issue before, back in May 2006 (see The Immigrant Uprising), where I, and the commenters, covered many more aspects of this than I plan to go into here. If you're interested in the subject, I recommend you go read that thread. What got me posting today was the sheer chutzpah of the whole announcement, with no resources to enforce it any better than what we're doing now, except to put the whole thing on the business community, with threats of fines for non-compliance.

And, oh - if the immigrant has stolen an actual, valid Social Security number and is using that? No problema, amigo, the system won't catch it - and what an incentive to identity theft that is!

And given that Congress has already failed to produce a workable immigration bill, and has further covered itself with disrepute by handing the Attorney General the keys to the telephone system before scuttling home for a vacation which I hope they do not enjoy - I guess we're stuck with these yokels until the election.

"The Immigrant Uprising"

Anonymous David asked, in his last comment, "What does the immigrant uprising look like from your vantage point?" This is a serious enough question that I think it deserves a post, not just another comment.

First of all, David, go back and read the comments under my post "Walls and Borders" (March 21), especially Boggart's long comment on the view of the situation from a residence 11 miles from the Mexican border. I don't necessarily agree with everything in it, but most of Boggart's points are really well taken.

I saw the immigrant uprising from the viewpoint of my office on the 6th floor of a building near a main street in northern California. It was amazing to watch - at least 10 visible blocks of people, filling the sidewalks about 3-4 abreast, walking quietly onward for another 4-5 blocks before they turned right toward a park where they gathered. When I saw them they were stopping for traffic lights, although some of my co-workers said they didn't at first. I didn't see any flags, just all those white T-shirts. That was the day the garbage guy didn't come around to my office to empty my wastebasket, and the cleaning lady didn't refill the toilet paper dispensers. Nobody was really inconvenienced; the office building is immaculately maintained.

If you mean, what do I think about all this, I don't know. As Boggart pointed out, there aren't any easy answers here. So I'll just give some random impressions, please don't expect these to be consistent or to make sense:

I read an English translation of the Spanish version of the anthem, Nuestro Himno, and I was tremendously moved. It's a staggering compliment to our country, our flag, and our ideals. You'll find the translation at the bottom of the article at the link.

James Sensenbrenner is freaking insane, absolutely barking mad, if he seriously thinks he can classify 12 million people as felons and then do anything realistic about it. We can't handle the prison population we have now.

Not to mention making felons of teachers who teach their children and doctors who heal them; I guess the good Christians of today want to throw the Good Samaritan in jail. Besides which, you can catch an infectious disease from an illegal immigrant as fast as you can from a good Murrican citizen; faster, in fact, because they don't have health insurance and so don't go to the doctor until they're REALLY sick. Once upon a time we had a concept called "public health" but we seem to have forgotten it.

This country was built by immigrants who came here with nothing but their hands and their work ethic; we didn't limit immigration until 1924 (except for the Chinese). The undocumented illegals are a whole lot closer to those immigrants than to some of our current citizens. "I lift my lamp beside the golden door" - but the golden door isn't on the Mexican border, apparently. Some people seem to think, my family is aboard, now pull up the gangplank, and that gives me kind of a queasy feeling.

On the other side of the coin, it takes years to become a citizen legally, and granting these people amnesty will skip them to the head of the line, and that's not fair to the people who've tried to obey the law. Do we have all these illegals because Reagan granted an amnesty in the eighties?

On the third side of the coin (sort of like the third half of the show on Car Talk), the urge to not let people in because they're not like us is not only racist and xenophobic, it's boringly racist and xenophobic. All the things they're saying about the Mexican illegals now have been said, in the past (in only approximate reverse order), about: the Poles. The Slavs. The Italians. The Irish (for generations, "No Irish need apply"). The Swedes and Norwegians. The Germans (and that was Benjamin Franklin, ranting that they refused to learn English and they bred like rabbits, and haven't we heard this before?). Which of those were your ancestors? The real question is, why don't we want them to come here? Why do we feel so threatened by them?

Finally, a little full disclosure, so to speak: it's very likely my lace-curtain Irish, boned-lace-choker grandmother was a wetback (as we used to call them before it became politically incorrect), all 5 feet 2 inches of her. A Canadian wetback: she came to the country in 1921, and just never bothered to become a citizen; and sometime in the 40's she insisted on going home to Toronto to see the relatives, and they had to smuggle her back across the border because by then you needed papers. She's dead now, God rest her; if they want to deport her they'll have to dig her up.

So I don't have any answers. I can't argue with Boggart's points about the load on our services, and the taxes they don't pay, it's all too true; but this whole country is built on immigration, right back to the "Native" Americans whose ancestors came over the Bering Strait in the last interglacial, or whenever. The only continent in the world with people who really can't be called immigrants is Africa, it's the only place the species evolved. Everybody else is an immigrant at some level; and I think we need to quit arguing about who has the "right" to be where, and start trying to think of the practicalities that we all need to deal with, like educating children and preventing epidemics.