Tuesday, April 07, 2009 | Opinion, National, Georgia, Politics
IMMIGRATION REFORM NOW!
The reason that wrongheaded Republicans have made illegal immigrants their scapegoats—and the reason that spineless Democrats have not spoken out against the anti-immigrant nastiness—is that America has lost respect for honest, hard work and the people who do it.
The reason that wrongheaded Republicans have made illegal immigrants their scapegoats—and the reason that spineless Democrats have not spoken out against the anti-immigrant nastiness—is that America has lost respect for honest, hard work and the people who do it.
It is eye-opening that my candor regarding the menial jobs I did to support myself after being laid off from white collar work as a journalist has been met with ridicule by other people in the press who post comments saying that the fact that I worked such jobs clearly shows that I am a person of no account. That sort of attitude is what is wrong with America today. Back in late 2002 and early 2003, I took unemployment for about six weeks and just couldn’t stomach it anymore. I went to work at a day care and at night I worked at Café Lily in Decatur. I’d previously taken contacts there when I worked in corporate PR and before that, as a journalist, I’d taken sources there. One night, I took the AJC’s Cynthia Tucker there.
When I found myself out of a job, I went to Angelo Patillo, the owner, and told him I needed work and I could wait tables. At first, he was horrified: “But, you’re my customer!” he exclaimed. “We can’t have you working here!” But I leveled with him. I was broke, I had a son to support, I was raised to work and I would never go on the dole.
He looked me in the eye and said gruffly, “I understand. When can you start?”
(I ended up working as a hostess--yes, opening the door for people.)
We were a nation built not on lattes and 401Ks and corporate healthcare, but on simple persistence, humility, determination and the copious sweat of laborers. When we lost respect for work and sought to subsidize ourselves with credit cards, we lost respect for ourselves and we lost our way. We lost our very identity. Americans are the people of work. That is who we are.
My father was such a person. He dropped out of school in eighth grade to support his family because his father was an alcoholic. Then he spent his life going from one menial job to another. He tried farming. He was a truckdriver. He was a milkman. He ran a store. He cooked at a restaurant. In the end, he retired after decades working as a boiler operator at Gilman Paper Company. Ours was not an easy existence. We kids—there were six of us—were pushed into the labor market even before we could legally work in some cases, but my Dad was extremely proud of the home that he’d bought for his family and the fact that half his children graduated from college.
Several years before he died in early 2003, Dad had just arrived home from what the rest of the family referred to as his second home, the Huddle House. It was a Saturday in summer and close to noon. My parents lived in the same tiny hometown where I’d grown up in middle Georgia and already the temperature was into the 90s.
Dad was blanched with the heat and poured himself a glass of ice water before sinking into a chair in the kitchen and saying thoughtfully “I just went by, down there at the creek, where they’ve got a bunch of Mexicans clearing out the place and man, let me tell you, those jokers can work.”
My father was in his 70s. He was a World War II veteran and, like many of his generation, he admired a person’s willingness to work hard more than just about anything else. He believed that a willingness to work was the central tenet of being American and that is probably one of the reasons he loved immigrants so much and he did not, just so you know, make any distinction between legal or illegal. He used to say “If somebody wants to come to this country and work, then by God we ought to let’em. We already got too many sorry SOBs who don’t want to work.”
My father, as I have reported previously in this space, used to say that immigrants, more than anyone else, understood what there was to love about this country—much more so than native-born, perfectly legal Americans who took it forgranted. The immigrants he admired the most at the end of his long hard life, a life that included his wounding in combat and contraction of malaria while in the service of his country in the Pacific, were the illegals he saw nearly everyday in middle Georgia. He would see crews of them and comment that they were “hip-deep in cottonmouths” down in the swamp, clearing someone’s land. He was fascinated by them and he felt that they made a strongly positive contribution to this country.
Now, if you knew how conservative my Dad was, that might surprise you, but old conservatives will recognize him as one of their own. He was not religious and he saw clearly that the lifeblood of America is those people who are willing to sacrifice their safety for this country and work hard to earn the American dream—he believed that dream must be earned, that it is not a birthright, and that is why, to him and his generation, those who are willing to work are the true heirs of this country regardless of any paperwork.
He explained to me on no uncertain terms that it is work itself that makes one an American and that, in his opinion, the so-called “illegals” were nothing of the sort.
I thought about that recently when Jon Stewart excoriated CNBC’s “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer for encouraging investment in companies that would, not much later, fail and require a taxpayer bailout. Stewart said something that could very well have fallen from the lips of my curmudgeonly WWII veteran dad: “When will we realize in this country that our wealth is in our work?”
This, to me stands out in sharp contrast with the mindset of one of Georgia’s foremost bashers of undocumented immigrants, D.A. King, whom I interviewed at length in 2006 for an article entitled “Little Pink Houses.” In it, King explained to me that it had been some time since he had worked—he was previously in insurance—because his business had declined and he’d felt it imperative to devote himself fulltime to the cause of fighting illegals—those same illegals whose work ethic is beyond dispute.
I seriously doubt that D.A. King has ever swung a sling blade to clear a ditch or even, as I did growing up, squatted low between rows of butterbeans and picked them until my back ached and then shelled them until I thought my thumbnail would fall off.
In our interview, he spoke of how much of a foodie he was, enjoying fine wine and cuisine, and how he’d been inspired to start down the road of anti-immigrant advocacy when Mexicans had moved in across the street and he saw that their van leaked oil onto the cul de sac. They also—horrors!—painted their house pink.
I have had the bitterly unfortunate experience of living next door to good-for-nothings for most of my life. I’ve seen them fake disabilities to get a government paycheck. I’ve seen them drink themselves half to death and then demand that I, the taxpayer, pick up the tab each and every time they called an ambulance to come get them because they wanted to drink more than they wanted to manage their diabetes. I’ve seen them flat-out refuse to work, too sorry even to put recyclables in a bin. I’ve seen neighbors deal crack. I’ve seen them neglect and abuse their kids. I’ve seen them neglect their elderly folks. And they were all perfectly legal, native born Americans.
I would have paid money to have a hard-working bunch of so-called “illegals” next door.
King and others like him make a distinction between “legal and illegal” because they do not actually understand what it means to be American.
Our country was built on the blood and sweat of people who did not believe in entitlement. They were people who were brave enough to risk their lives and give up everything they had to come here to be able to…WORK.
Today so many of the complaints against Latino illegals involve things that we have forced them to do by withholding citizenship from them. Yes, withholding. The Latinos by and large have earned their citizenship. We have forced them to live like criminals, we have alienated their children from the American dream and made them criminals by denying the very thing that would help this country the most: granting them citizenship.
Why do they eat up our tax-dollars at emergency rooms? Because they know the ER has to treat them regardless of their citizenship status. Who forced them to such subterfuge? Politicians like Georgia’s Chip Rogers who have passed law after law criminalizing these hard-working folks. If they were not afraid of being separated from their kids and deported, they might be more willing to seek less expensive forms of health care—like seeing a primary care physician. Doctors at Grady Hospital have told me how many of the Latinos they see dig into their pockets for cash to try to pay their bills, as opposed to native born Americans who waltz in and waltz out without a thought for who’s going to pay for their treatment.
By criminalizing undocumented immigrants, we’ve isolated them, making it harder for them to learn to speak English and yet their rabid critics scream that their inability to speak English is one of the chief reasons why we should not tolerate their presence in this country. That’s like stabbing someone and then complaining that they’re bleeding all over your floor.
Some point to the Reagan “amnesty” of 1986 and they say that it only encouraged more illegals to come here. It was no “amnesty.” Risking your life to come to a country to be able to work an honest job and provide for your family is not an illegal act. President Reagan understood that. He granted them citizenship because they had earned it. And my father, I remember, applauded Reagan for it.
How strange it is that in an era when Reagan has been canonized by both Republicans and Democrats alike, no one on either side—except John McCain—has had the cajones to talk about one of the most dramatic things Reagan ever did: his so-called “amnesty” for workers here without papers. It was the right thing to do. They cannot fully be Americans, they cannot live with equal protection and responsibility under the law, until we grant them legal status.
And before you take up the chant about how this group and that group has to wait and wait for many years to become citizens let me say two things: 1) Our entire immigration system needs to be reformed and 2) Actually, Mexicans do, in fact, have a status that merits special consideration not extended to everyone and so, by the way, do Canadians. It makes sense to make allowances for the countries that share your border. Their regional concerns are yours and you will find, if you know your history, that draconian immigration controls employed by neighboring countries always result in huge amounts of money being spent to achieve absolutely nothing.
Notice I said “immigration controls”—not “borders.” We need strong borders. But borders and immigration are two separate matters and it is only since the two have been forced into one issue by those wishing to further their careers by persecuting Latinos, that we have seen enormous, wasteful financial outlays in the form of nanny-chasing and gardener-tackling and all manner of other ridiculous and pathetic so-called “immigration enforcement” and “homeland security.” In 2007 alone, American taxpayers spent $270 million to incarcerate and maintain Hondurans whose only reason for being arrested, in the vast, vast majority of cases, was that they were here illegally. How much sense does that make to you? And that was just the Hondurans.
America is more than 200 years old and yet until the 1960s she always seemed so young, even younger than other, much newer states around the globe. Why? Because America’s previously more open and forgiving—prior to 1964—immigration policies meant that we were constantly seeing ourselves anew through the eyes of grateful newcomers. Their infusions of sweat and determination kept our economy robust as their presence created more jobs. That’s something the anti-immigrant crowd never talks about because they either don’t know or don’t want you to know: working people tend to create more jobs. Any economist can tell you that. My father used to say “I’d be ashamed to admit somebody took my job away. Anybody who’ll work will find a job.” That may seem harsh, but if we boil it down to bare economics it’s actually true, and working people create more work. You might not be working the job you want, but you’re helping yourself and the economy if you’re working at all and your job allows someone else to have a job, too.
As Fareed Zakaria pointed out in a May 2007 Newsweek article, “The six states that get the largest inflow of illegal immigrants—New York, California, Illinois, Texas, Florida and Arizona—have unusually low unemployment rates. With the exception of California and Illinois, they are all lower than the already-low national average of 4.5 percent (last month). As for the argument that immigrants depress the wages of native-born Americans, the best new research on this topic—by economists Giovanni Peri and Chad Sparber—demonstrates that unskilled immigrants complement rather than replace native Americans in the labor force, doing jobs that native Americans will not.”
The answer to the immigration dilemma is actually pretty simple. We must create a work visa program sooner rather than later. If you believe as I do, and as many generations of Americans before me believed, that your sweat is your justification for being here, a work visa program is the obvious choice for helping the American economy.
It makes sense in terms of tax revenues and paying for public services because guest workers can be taxed at a higher rate to pay for public services. It makes sense in terms of investing in America’s future because it will provide a legal path to citizenship. It makes sense in terms of reducing the prison population so that cell space can go to real criminals instead of housekeepers, roofers and landscapers. It makes sense in terms of creating a new generation of hard working immigrants to rejuvenate America’s economy. It makes sense in terms of preserving English because, without the taint of illegality, Latino laborers in particular will move more freely in society and they and their children will learn to speak English as a consequence.
It makes sense in every way except politically and if we, the people, make our wishes known, then it will make sense in that way as well.