The Immigrants’ Battle Stirs a Memory and Demands Our Respect
JIM KLOBUCHAR
It often begins, “My grandparents immigrated from….”
From where? From Norway, Germany, Poland? Lay out all of the flags of the world, the cookbooks and the dialects. Join them with the hungers for identity, for food, for schools for their children.
All of those DNA markers of our migratory past are here, in our blood and in our photo albums and on the headstones of our cemeteries. They are in the alphabet soup of our telephone books, the unpronounceable syllables that have the sound of somebody falling downstairs, or in the blunt and expanding rows of Wongs that weren’t there 40 years ago.
And now we have a lot names like Gonzales and Chavez in our midst, uninvited millions of them. We’re in a crisis because the other millions of us were here first—after, of course, Sioux and the Chippewa. Some of us want to be generous; some of us aren’t so generous but are scared to look like hypocrites; and others claim furiously that the country’s laws and security and job markets are being corrupted by this rabble of brown-skinned squatters from the south.
“My grandparents immigrated from XX,” we are hearing today. “They came out of poverty, but they had a dream. They wanted to make something out of their lives, and they worked, and they came here by the rules, and now I have a good life because of their drive for a better life. They came here legally. They risked because it was a whole new world for them. But they passed through customs. They didn’t sneak over a border in the dead of night like the illegal immigrants we’re talking about now. They weren’t a tax burden on the country.”
Most of this can be said about my grandparents. But I doubt that their history makes them much different from the illegal immigrants who have thrown the country into a political uproar. It has suddenly forced us into an examination of conscience and a search for the hard core truth in how they define their ethic as Americans.
No matter how the crisis is reconciled—and you can wager your next tank of gas that it won’t be permanently resolved—it already has achieved amazing alliances. Thursday morning two of the more prominent voices of social conservatism in America essentially lined themselves up with Ted Kennedy, the noisily reviled keeper of the lamps of compassion among the liberals. George Will, managing to be realistic without shedding any of his rhetorical hauteur, demanded that Republican politicians calling for deportation should look at the facts and stop being stupid.
Right wing columnists can do that plausibly when they’re worried about turning over the country to the Democrats. Most of the estimated 11 million illegals, Will argues, have been here for more than five years and have put down roots in their communities, blended in with the rest of us. Their children born in this country are American citizens. Make them meet tests of responsibility by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. But if the borders are strictly (not barbarically) controlled, encourage more Latino immigration if those people can come with math and technical skills that we don’t teach very well in America. It’s the entrepreneurial way, George says, of true conservatives. From there David Brooks of the New York Times carries the true conservative argument further and with sprigs of passion. His thesis: Most of those illegal immigrants are or will be good citizens, family people, contributors to the economy and people of sound values. That’s documented even if the immigrants aren’t. The bottom line: Most of those immigrants succeed.
They were uninvited and unwanted by current settlers when they entered the country, which makes them lineal successors of the Pilgrims and Puritans and probably to Leif Erickson and the Vikings. But their advocates reach all the way into the White House, where George Bush confounds the impeachers and Democratic multitudes by being a friend, or trying to be, of the guest worker idea and of the unlawful immigrants. And also a friend, of course, of American businesses that are crying for cheap labor.
There are the wackos in the House of Representatives who insist on deportation or jail for 11 million people and border walls halfway to the moon. Which prompted a Minneapolis woman to call me last night in a state of genuine fear. She said her daughter is married to a man classified as an illegal immigrant. She is hearing horror stories of what’s happening or going to happen on the borders, and she’s watching Lou Dobbs on CNN every night. Dobbs is being credited with marshalling armies of anti-immigration people in this argument. I tried to tell her this was marginally true Dobbs’ higher ratings are probably more worrisome to Fox TV than they ought to be to the immigrants. She loathes George Bush but I had to tell her: “Give him credit on this. He made pledges to Hispanics and he’s trying to stick with them. He’s not exactly campaigning for re-election. He may deserve your anger for all the rest but he makes sense on immigration.”
This will be no romp either way. Any new law has to require some process for earned citizenship. The wackos don’t want that kind of law and they are going to insist on deep-sixing the bunch, making all 11 million of them felons or deportees. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re an anointed true conservative or a battle-scarred Democrat. Their cause is one you want to fight for. The huge majority of those uninvited folks named Gonzalez and Chavez are going to be productive Americans, family people, tenacious about giving their kids a better life. You can see it in the community where we live. There is nothing more powerful than the hunger that drove our own grandparents to leave their villages a century ago and to arrive on Ellis Island, frightened, underclothed but undefeatable. I thought of it the day after my grandmother died in the mining country, where she and her husband raised a family. All of their children were educated. She carried her gratitude to the country each day. One of her children fought on Iwo Jima. Another became a scientist who pioneered in the chip industry.
“I don’t think it occurred to her,” I wrote, “that the road ran two ways, that the genius and ultimate greatness of America flows more profoundly from the conflicts and struggles of its people than from its treasure; and by this measurement, one of its small but imperishable gifts came from the lady who spoke broken English and sang the songs of her native village. There in the mining country of northern Minnesota for three or four decades was the essence of the American destiny—the meshing of the immigrants’ hunger for identity with the nation’s restless search for fulfillment.”
The country is divided but it is not broken. It is still a grail for those who want.
It often begins, “My grandparents immigrated from….”
From where? From Norway, Germany, Poland? Lay out all of the flags of the world, the cookbooks and the dialects. Join them with the hungers for identity, for food, for schools for their children.
All of those DNA markers of our migratory past are here, in our blood and in our photo albums and on the headstones of our cemeteries. They are in the alphabet soup of our telephone books, the unpronounceable syllables that have the sound of somebody falling downstairs, or in the blunt and expanding rows of Wongs that weren’t there 40 years ago.
And now we have a lot names like Gonzales and Chavez in our midst, uninvited millions of them. We’re in a crisis because the other millions of us were here first—after, of course, Sioux and the Chippewa. Some of us want to be generous; some of us aren’t so generous but are scared to look like hypocrites; and others claim furiously that the country’s laws and security and job markets are being corrupted by this rabble of brown-skinned squatters from the south.
“My grandparents immigrated from XX,” we are hearing today. “They came out of poverty, but they had a dream. They wanted to make something out of their lives, and they worked, and they came here by the rules, and now I have a good life because of their drive for a better life. They came here legally. They risked because it was a whole new world for them. But they passed through customs. They didn’t sneak over a border in the dead of night like the illegal immigrants we’re talking about now. They weren’t a tax burden on the country.”
Most of this can be said about my grandparents. But I doubt that their history makes them much different from the illegal immigrants who have thrown the country into a political uproar. It has suddenly forced us into an examination of conscience and a search for the hard core truth in how they define their ethic as Americans.
No matter how the crisis is reconciled—and you can wager your next tank of gas that it won’t be permanently resolved—it already has achieved amazing alliances. Thursday morning two of the more prominent voices of social conservatism in America essentially lined themselves up with Ted Kennedy, the noisily reviled keeper of the lamps of compassion among the liberals. George Will, managing to be realistic without shedding any of his rhetorical hauteur, demanded that Republican politicians calling for deportation should look at the facts and stop being stupid.
Right wing columnists can do that plausibly when they’re worried about turning over the country to the Democrats. Most of the estimated 11 million illegals, Will argues, have been here for more than five years and have put down roots in their communities, blended in with the rest of us. Their children born in this country are American citizens. Make them meet tests of responsibility by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. But if the borders are strictly (not barbarically) controlled, encourage more Latino immigration if those people can come with math and technical skills that we don’t teach very well in America. It’s the entrepreneurial way, George says, of true conservatives. From there David Brooks of the New York Times carries the true conservative argument further and with sprigs of passion. His thesis: Most of those illegal immigrants are or will be good citizens, family people, contributors to the economy and people of sound values. That’s documented even if the immigrants aren’t. The bottom line: Most of those immigrants succeed.
They were uninvited and unwanted by current settlers when they entered the country, which makes them lineal successors of the Pilgrims and Puritans and probably to Leif Erickson and the Vikings. But their advocates reach all the way into the White House, where George Bush confounds the impeachers and Democratic multitudes by being a friend, or trying to be, of the guest worker idea and of the unlawful immigrants. And also a friend, of course, of American businesses that are crying for cheap labor.
There are the wackos in the House of Representatives who insist on deportation or jail for 11 million people and border walls halfway to the moon. Which prompted a Minneapolis woman to call me last night in a state of genuine fear. She said her daughter is married to a man classified as an illegal immigrant. She is hearing horror stories of what’s happening or going to happen on the borders, and she’s watching Lou Dobbs on CNN every night. Dobbs is being credited with marshalling armies of anti-immigration people in this argument. I tried to tell her this was marginally true Dobbs’ higher ratings are probably more worrisome to Fox TV than they ought to be to the immigrants. She loathes George Bush but I had to tell her: “Give him credit on this. He made pledges to Hispanics and he’s trying to stick with them. He’s not exactly campaigning for re-election. He may deserve your anger for all the rest but he makes sense on immigration.”
This will be no romp either way. Any new law has to require some process for earned citizenship. The wackos don’t want that kind of law and they are going to insist on deep-sixing the bunch, making all 11 million of them felons or deportees. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re an anointed true conservative or a battle-scarred Democrat. Their cause is one you want to fight for. The huge majority of those uninvited folks named Gonzalez and Chavez are going to be productive Americans, family people, tenacious about giving their kids a better life. You can see it in the community where we live. There is nothing more powerful than the hunger that drove our own grandparents to leave their villages a century ago and to arrive on Ellis Island, frightened, underclothed but undefeatable. I thought of it the day after my grandmother died in the mining country, where she and her husband raised a family. All of their children were educated. She carried her gratitude to the country each day. One of her children fought on Iwo Jima. Another became a scientist who pioneered in the chip industry.
“I don’t think it occurred to her,” I wrote, “that the road ran two ways, that the genius and ultimate greatness of America flows more profoundly from the conflicts and struggles of its people than from its treasure; and by this measurement, one of its small but imperishable gifts came from the lady who spoke broken English and sang the songs of her native village. There in the mining country of northern Minnesota for three or four decades was the essence of the American destiny—the meshing of the immigrants’ hunger for identity with the nation’s restless search for fulfillment.”
The country is divided but it is not broken. It is still a grail for those who want.
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Check out a rare pro Bush opinion that augments you are saying at http://www.irishstrangler.com/wordpress/?p=118
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