Some Problems Are Better than Others
"Immigration Problems"
By me
The
Panhandling Philosopher
Some problems are better than others.
Illegal immigration is a problem. Not just in the perspective of nationalists
who wish to preserve their culture. There are real problems associated with a
flood of undocumented immigrants.
The desire to secure boundaries and
protections for cultures is understandable. When American Indians resist a
pipeline going through their historic area how much are their protests concerns
about big oil spills, and how much are the protests rooted in the frustration
of a history full of having land allotments once granted and later taken from
them? Their concerns about the pipeline, whether real or hyped, are rooted in
their history of having badlands given to them only to have prime lands taken
from them. It must be frustrating.
I came from a Midwestern town that once
had a patchwork of various immigrant neighborhoods. Many of the older cities of
the northern regions of the United States were once able to be mapped into zones
of where immigrant communities lived. New York and Chicago histories are full
of such stories. In my smaller Midwest town, Painter’s edition was where the
Italians had once lived, Old Number 3 which was named for the number of the
shaft which went down to the coal mines was where many
Slovaks lived. Old Number 3 was also sometimes called “Goosetown” because many Slovaks and Polish living there had geese they raised and butchered right
there on their little lots in town. By the time I was growing up, the
immigrants’ ways were disappearing. Still, as long as the older generation
still lived the congregations regularly stipulated that priests and ministers
should be able to preach a sermon in Polish, Slovak, or Italian. This was
because for older people, even if they had lived in America for decades, the
language in which they thought was often the language they had known when they
had been boys or girls growing up in what they described as “the old country.”
By the time I was growing up their
grandchildren were my friends. By then we were all part of a community. My
father had once lived along the edges of “Goosetown”. Later he moved to our
small farm seven miles away. Once he had a hickory tree. It was such a sight.
It had grown tall and strong along a small creek in our pasture. But the creek
was cutting a new channel because even streams live like immigrants changing
their places where they live. The old hickory tree was now on a bank being cut
away as the stream carved away at old banks and created new ones. The roots of
the hickory tree had been uncovered by the stream as if the stream was desirous
of letting us see what was beneath the skirt of the beautiful hickory tree.
There was a strange beauty of a tree now mostly uprooted and extending away
from a bank almost wholly parallel with the stream intent on tearing the soil
away from the tree's roots. As the little war was battled between the upstart stream
and the majestic tree holding the soil of the bank progressed, it was the
upstart stream that won with persistence and steady effort. The majestic
hickory tree was doomed. My father remembered the store owner who sold meats
he butchered in Goosetown. He stopped and visited Fialko’s. The little store
also had a little bar. It was a family owned butcher shop, canned goods store,
and neighborhood bar. Just enough to pay a family’s mortgage, bills, and put
food on the table and maybe finance the family’s dream of seeing their child
have a better life and maybe even get to send a child off to college. So my Dad asked if
Mr. Fialko would like the hickory tree to smoke the sausage he made. He paid a
nominal fee for the old doomed tree and we were gifted with fresh made sausages
on yearly intervals for several years. The immigrants made by with little
things that made the difference; from keeping a goose in the yard to be
butchered, to gathering the dandelions for salads and making wine, to a
community buying a steer to be butchered and celebrating the butchering with
blood pudding for a week. Those were days in the process of being forgotten when I grew up. Those
were the ways of immigrants, despised by the cultured people who felt
threatened by them, and despised even more by the children stigmatized by old
world ways for which they were stigmatized. I mostly knew the old grandparents, the original immigrants by
reading the newspaper’s obituaries and seeing someone passing away that had
been born in Italy or in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 1890’s or
early 1900’s. They were passing as I was growing up. But they had been part of
our history. Now their grandchildren who didn’t speak the language of their
grandparents were often my best friends. I was a social disaster in high school.
The ethnicities remained family points of identity even though we were all
Americans now. But somehow I noticed one day that I usually had a crush on a
Polish girl, an Irish girl seemed to like me as a friend, and somehow I managed
to ask out a German girl and my best friend was Slovak.
My friends’ grandparents had been legal
immigrants. Still there were fears that they were changing our nation. These
hordes of legal immigrants who were Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Catholics and Jews
were threatening what was good about America. So we began to reform the
immigration laws to reflect the United States population as it had been in
1890, Protestant with a whiter complexion. Reformers also noted that these Jews
and Catholics often routinely used alcohol. If we couldn’t make an Italian or
Greek or Slav look American, we might be able to do something good for the
lesser races by prohibiting the sale of the alcohol they consumed. You know
these immigrants were such an appalling feature of our beloved America. But the
immigrants remained and had families and eventually the grandchildren of the
immigrants and the children of favored tribes that had come to America a couple
of generations before the less favored tribes all played together, fell in
love, had arguments, played baseball, rooted for the Cubs or Sox or were
traitors to their geography and pulled for teams like the Mets. P.S. I sometimes have been known for saying "Let's go Mets!"
Today there are new waves of
immigrants. Some are legal immigrants coming from new lands with strange
religions and frightening histories. Their people are associated with
terrorists and jihad. Sure probably some are simply looking for a place to be
free, where instead of being constrained by societal limitations they can
pursue their opportunities like the people who come to America from the Middle
East and end up having the highest percentage of college graduates within any
American ethnicity. But some are bad apples. We need to do vetting. I am not
contradicting that. I am acknowledging yes there are some who want to come to
our land to do evil. But for many they come because they believe in America
and that their children will enjoy a better way of living than they and their families
had known in the old country.
The same is true of the illegal
immigrants in our midst. They risk a lot to come here. They know that they are
not always welcome, but there are opportunities for their families that they
will have here and that their children especially will have here that they don’t
feel they can hope for in their old countries. They risk a lot and sometimes
the bad people in that old country take advantage of the undocumented. The drug
trade which we once smiled at in the days of Al Pacino playing a Latino in
Scarface, or on Miami Vice when doing lines of cocaine was treated ambivalently
as a delightful evil; has tempted some who imagine a shortcut between entry
level American life and the dream of upper middle income level privilege. They
risk a lot trusting the two-legged coyotes that will bring them to the north.
They don’t think of themselves so much as law breakers as they regard
themselves as providers for families whose lives will improve because they make
the choice to get their families to a place where they can have opportunities.
I know there are a lot of ways we
can deal with these situations. There are legal solutions and human ones and
arbitrary ones. I don’t know the answers. I am not inclined to thinking the off
the cuff simple solutions will prove to be the best.
I have written all this to simply
say that this morning I woke up thinking that some problems are worse than
others. As we are thinking about
building walls and measures to keep people out I want to remember that there
are worse problems than when people want to enter our country. I can remember a
wall built to keep people inside a place they wanted to escape. Governments are
funny that way. They will build walls as easily to keep people out or to keep
people in. I want us to be interested in creating the sort of society where
other people want in. It seems a lesser problem to me than changing ourselves
to make people to no longer want to come in. Somehow it doesn’t seem to me to take long
from working to keep people out until we will become a place where people
don't want to come. From there it might not take long for people here to want out. I know that the same government that spends a lot
to build walls to keep people out can someday want to build walls to keep people in.
In won’t be as expensive to build a wall to keep us in once we have built a wall to keep others out. Once the wall is built to keep people out,
they will only need to change the direction where the guns are pointed to keep people
in. Some problems are better than other problems. I want the problems
associated with people who have joined together to make our nation and society a place where people want to get in. It will always be problematic when
we do that, but it’s one of the better problems to have. When we get them to not want to come, then we will really have problems.
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