A post-convention digest of where the parties and their candidates stand on various issues placed immigration alongside affirmative action, marriage and the environment. What a mix.
The Gannett News Service release defined the immigration issue thusly: “A rising illegal immigrant population has spurred national debate over balancing human rights with border security.” It said the number of undocumented immigrants is estimated to have risen by more than five million since 1996, to more than nine million.
Most apparently make the dangerous border crossing, with or without the aid of coyotes, into California, Arizona and Texas, desperately seeking work that Americans find demeaning, unrewarding and just plain too hard. Many die in the attempt. Those who make it may live in squalid conditions, sending most of their meager earnings to their families in Mexico.
Californians have a love/hate relationship with these workers. Agriculture in the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys depends on these folks to weed row crops, pick fruit and vegetables, and sort and crate them for shipping. Much of this work is done in the blistering heat of summer when Americans seek jobs in air-conditioned warehouses, factories and offices. Trouble is, thousands of those jobs have moved south to Mexico, leaving the government to pay unemployment and job retraining for our workers and emergency medical costs for immigrants.
According to the Gannett list, President Bush wants to create an ambitious national guest-worker program that would “match willing foreign workers with willing American employers.” Undocumented immigrants who prove they have a job would be given renewable three-year visas, but would have to return home when the visa expires.
It seems to me the workers and employers are already hooking up without the aid of a federal employment agency. And without a huge increase in INS funding, how would they ever be able to enforce the visa expiration business?
Democratic candidate John Kerry pledges to sign two bills into law during his first 100 days in office (with a Republican Congress? Really.) One bill would legalize undocumented immigrants who work in agriculture. The other would legalize their children if they attend college or join the military. The first might work. As for the children, it would be 10 or 15 years before many would be old enough to enter the military or attend college. And how will agricultural workers earn enough to pay for their tuition?
During our years of ranching and showing horses, we hired many Mexican workers. Like the rest of the ranchers and trainers in our state, we followed the don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to documentation. I remember only one who offered to show his green card. He was lazy, lied and stole. And when we let him go, he ratted on the others to the INS, who raided our ranch but didn’t find our two good workers, who fled into the hills, returning only after nightfall.
Everardo had come to us through another trainer’s head groom, who ran a small but efficient underground employment agency to the show horse business. Everardo was honest, strong, cheerful and intelligent. Though his living quarters were not fancy, he kept them clean, grew his own vegetables with irrigation water from our trees. He never wasted a thing. He was happy to live in such a beautiful place but his heart was still with his family on a small farm in southern Mexico. I suppose that’s why he was so tolerant of my young son, saddling his horse, giving him a leg up, leading him up to the arena and carefully closing the gate. And answering many times each day, “Como se dice en Español este?” while my son pointed to everything from dogs, cats and birds to pitchforks. Every month he bought postal money orders to send most of his salary to his esposa. And once a year, he made the dangerous journey there and back to visit and plant crops for the next season.
Before he left the first time, he arranged for his primo to work in his place. This cousin, whose name I’ve forgotten, stayed on after Everardo returned. Together they built miles of fence line, straight up and down the steep hillsides, singing all the way. Most of those fences are still standing after 40 years. Margarita, a U.S. citizen I hired from an L.A. agency to care for my newborn twins, turned out to be a cousin of Everardo’s cousin. In the evenings, they played their guitars and sang of Mexico, loneliness, love and good fortune.
If it weren’t for Everardo and his cousins, I, too, might think of immigrants only as an issue. Just another big problem that needs solving.