A Piece of a Woman's Mind

For several years now in the United States, there has been much dialog about immigrants. An immigrant is someone who is not a citizen of the United States but would like to move here permanently. An immigrant is by definition a citizen of another country. There are many reasons an immigrant might wish to move to the United States. Sometimes the person is the spouse of an American citizen. Sometimes the person cannot get work in her own country and is seeking better job opportunities in our country. In fact sometimes American companies recruit foreigners to immigrate to the U.S. because those persons have special knowledge and skills required by that company. The saddest reason that a person immigrates to the U.S. is that she is being unfairly persecuted in her own country. Sometimes she fears that she and/or her family will be killed by the authorities in her home country. People in that country are seeking asylum in the U.S.

On their way to the U.S. many asylum seekers end up in refugee camps in a third country for a certain amount of time which can extend to years. Often the refugee camps have a lottery system for people seeking to enter the U.S. The U.S. government establishes a yearly quota of immigrants allowed by country. The refugees submit their names and wait for their turn to immigrate. Sometimes refugees sneak across the U.S. border and demand asylum at the border. Sometimes these refugees are sent back across the border. Sometimes they are processed, placed on a future court docket and allowed to stay in the country until their case comes up for review. This has happened frequently over the last few decades with refugees from Mexico and Central and South American countries who walk north to our southern border.

I have described in detail what an immigrant is because I want to remind the reader of the following. Unless you and your family are Native American Indians, you and your family are all immigrants. My sister traced my ancestors back to the Revolutionary War as part of her application to join the Daughters of the American Revolution. She found records dating back to the 1700s making it clear that our ancestors all originally came from England and Ireland. Just because my ancestors arrived over 250 years ago, it does not mean that I am not an immigrant. The Lost Colony of Roanoke, considered the first permanent English settlement in North America, was founded in 1585. When they arrived, they found Native Americans living in what is the state of North Carolina. Those immigrants were trying to establish an English presence in the New World in order to counter Spanish influence. When the colonists from the Mayflower landed in 1620 at Cape Cod (in what is now Massachusetts), they found Native Americans already living and prospering there. In fact those Indians helped the English immigrants to survive. The Mayflower immigrants were fleeing from religious persecution.

When your family immigrated to the United States, they had a specific reason. Chances are their immigration story matches the stories of the present-day immigrants. They were seeking a better life, a good job, freedom from tyranny, asylum. Some of them were seeking to join family members who had already immigrated and were prospering in the territory that is now the United States. At one time your family members, your ancestors, were newcomers to America. It may have taken several generations for them to be accepted in their adopted country and to blend into the melting pot of America. There has always been opposition to new immigrants ever since our country was founded in 1776. However, historians all agree that one of the things that has made America great is the diversity of our citizens and the ability of our country to integrate newcomers and take advantage of the talents and cultures those immigrants brought with them.

By the way, I can guarantee that every immigrant would much rather have stayed in her own country. It would have been much easier and less dangerous. Unfortunately there was a compelling reason for each immigrant to leave home. At one time or another every immigrant has questioned her decision to move to a new country and wished like crazy to go home. Each immigrant demonstrates great courage, fortitude and perseverance in leaving home and starting all over in a new country. Those characteristics guarantee that their new country will be receiving a strong, resourceful individual, the kind of citizen every country needs to become great.

It is sad that some of us cannot seem to empathize with today’s immigrants since at one time our ancestors were immigrants just like them. Politicians love to create fear among the populace by describing new immigrants as criminals and freeloaders who are either lawbreakers committing heinous crimes against us or unfairly taking away jobs and resources from our citizens. They are depicted as a huge burden on our society. A drain and certainly not a positive addition. In reality they are fellow human beings who are seeking a better life, a good job, freedom from tyranny, asylum, or to join family members already here. Does that sound familiar? It should unless you have totally forgotten your own roots. Rather than hate or oppose the new immigrants, we need to help them to integrate into our melting pot.

We need to urge our lawmakers, law enforcement officers and bureaucrats to stop persecuting immigrants and to start making a positive plan for them to join us. If we feel that the United States should stem the tide of immigrants and slow it down, then we need to demand that our lawmakers put forth and implement a plan to do that. The history of action in the Congress to implement fair and reasonable/workable solutions surrounding immigration is a sad one. No matter what party has been in power, for decades our lawmakers have just never taken the time to broker a good plan. I believe they would rather use the problems of immigration as a political football to engender fear in our citizenry than to propose a humane solution for the thousands of people who want to move to the United States for a better life, just like your ancestors did. Don’t be fooled by the lazy tactics of our legislators, and don’t be afraid of immigrants. We are all immigrants. We came here for a better life. It is up to us to make our own lives better as well as the lives of our fellow citizens and newcomers—immigrants.