If we learned anything last week as a million young people peacefully and joyfully marched in downtown L.A., it was about the strength of cultural identity. Many, the children of immigrants, both documented and not, are citizens of this country by birth. Their cultural heritage, however, lies deep in Mexico. Hence the waving of flags in equal numbers from both countries.
To call the march a protest is to miss the broader implications. Some probably do understand the punitive nature of one of the bills before Congress. Others were simply saying: Here we are. We’re here because the country of our parents is poor and America needs their help.
What they want most is legal status of some sort for their parents and a way for other relatives to enter the country legally and work without fear of deportation.
But seeing this incredible congregation of brown faces marching, waving flags and shouting, “Si se puede” or Yes we can, many Americans reacted with anger and fear. They favor toughening our laws, building a 700-mile fence at our southern border. They argue that illegal immigrants are straining the state budget, overwhelming schools, hospitals and social services. And the politicians who pander to that constituency are feeding the anger rather than allaying it. They write bills that would turn priests, doctors, even charity volunteers who serve needy immigrants, into felons.
We already have laws that make it a crime to hire undocumented workers. But employers flout the law and are rarely fined. And responsible companies that try to adhere to that law have great difficulty verifying the documents presented by those applying for work. Counterfeit documents are sold by the score every day on the streets of L.A. Of course, we could jail the counterfeiters.
Workers are hired based on the validity of these bogus papers. Taxes are deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, Medicaid, Workers Compensation. The government keeps the money, but the workers will never get the benefits because there is no valid account in the worker’s name. Are we going to deport them now just to make sure?
Some fearful residents of border states say Mexican women cross the Rio Grande to give birth here just so their children will be citizens. They never talk about the thousands of mothers in Mexico and other Latin American countries who have to leave their children with relatives because they can’t find jobs or earn enough money to feed them. Given a choice, most would do anything to stay close to their extended families and their own culture.
The deport-them-all faction (to which Sen. Bill Frist’s bill panders) seems to think we can get along very nicely without immigrant labor. They ask: Who did these jobs “that Americans won’t do” before 11 million illegals snuck across the border? Well, we were all immigrants once. But it was the Chinese who built our railroads and ran our laundries while we searched for gold and ran saloons. Italians worked on our docks. The Irish fled famine to face discrimination here but ultimately thrived.
Before World War II, Japanese gardeners mowed our lawns, grew and sold vegetables in wealthy neighborhoods. Germans cleaned our houses and cooked our meals. When they were interned or deported, their jobs were filled by blacks fleeing discrimination in the South.
During the Depression, our own immigrants left their dust bowl farms to work in California fields. After the “Great War” reinvigorated our economy, our soldiers came home and women who had worked for the war effort were happy to stay home and care for their own children. Displaced Irish nannies took jobs in hotels, restaurants and stores.
A generation or so later, women went back to work to support children in college and a higher standard of living. And Mexican women came north to care for our babies and clean our houses. Mexican men took over our gardens and fields. As they move up to better jobs, new waves of Latino immigrants take their places.
So after many generations we have an Irish senator working for immigration reform. Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain introduced comprehensive and humane legislation last May that formed the basis for Sen. Arlen Specter’s compromise now being debated. With any luck at all, Frist’s militant alternative will be pushed out of the hunt.
I’m not enough of an economist to understand exactly how NAFTA and the whole free-trade business have affected the balance of jobs to labor. It’s complicated. But for every American company that built plants in Mexico to reap the benefits of cheap labor, there is a horror story like the heavily subsidized American dairy industry squeezing out a Mexican dairy co-op with over supply and cheap prices. If Mexican businesses fail, those workers will come here, with or without documents.
It seems to me that during times of budget surpluses, we’ve been more helpful to our neighbors in building their economies. Now, with surpluses a distant memory and all of our resources drained in the Middle East, we are reaping a sad harvest of failed policy.
When my children were little, I hired a woman from Central America who had run away from her abusive husband, leaving her two children with their grandmother. I didn’t ask to see her papers. My kids loved her, we all did. After awhile I offered to try to get immigration papers for her son and daughter, because she missed them so much. She told me her brother, who lived in Santa Monica, was already working on it. That he planned to move to a larger house so they all could live together. To preserve their culture, she hoped. Eventually, this happened.
It was children like hers who were marching last week, out of respect for their parents’ struggle to give them a better life. Many may take the money they earn here and go home again. Perhaps we can develop an immigration policy that will help them do that.