In recent years, the debate over immigration in the United
States has been epic. There are few
places in the heavily populated regions of this country where you don’t run
into foreign-born people working at jobs.
We see people in all lower-paid areas of the service industry who are
‘not from around here’ and yet they work at those jobs every single day.
No, they’re not just like us U.S.-born citizens. They have a different language and culture
and they earn substantially less money than we do (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/forbrn.nr0.htm). They work hard in spite of this and they work
every single day just like we do. The aforementioned
report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that the jobless rate
in 2015 was actually .5 percent lower for foreign-born people than it was for
U.S.-born people.
I emigrated to the Dominican Republic in 1982 from the U.S. I went there to see the world from a
different point of view and to see what it was like to live somewhere
else. It was a learning experience to
state the understated.
I found out what it was like to survive in a completely
different culture, to not speak the local language and to see how local
citizens acted. I worked hard to learn
Spanish and soon became fairly fluent. Those first months were frightening,
especially when I learned that I wasn’t ‘from around those parts.’ People treated me differently. I didn’t make a lot of friends at first. I learned about nationality, about survival
in a foreign country, about the very different view from outside the United
States and about culture. I learned a
whole lot about who I was (a citizen of the United States) and I learned to
respect those who found themselves in a foreign place.
For the most part I was welcomed. I am from the Latino world’s view of heaven
on earth, the home of the American Dream and the two car garage. I was seen as rich, even when I found myself
unemployed and nearly penniless. There
is, by the way, no unemployment net in the Dominican Republic. You either survive and pay the rent or you
find yourself on the street. It is
frightening for someone like me. Latinos
(and I am sure, many others), just live with the risk. Eventually, by the way, I came back to the United States because I could not live in a country that had electricity 5 to 10 hours a day and expected its citizens to buy generators to make up the difference.
People who come to the United States are looking for
work. They are looking for
opportunity. Legally or illegally many
people work to get here and work to stay here, to take the most menial jobs if
that is what they have to do. In the
Dominican Republic, I met a lot of Haitians who had gone to the Dominican
Republic the very same way, in order to find a slightly better
opportunity. They worked as maids for
barely survivable wages because Haiti is even worse economically than the
Dominican Republic. There are simply no
jobs in Haiti. Conditions are horrible. Haitians are hated, though, and still they
go.
The U.S. citizenry has a long history of treating its immigrants
poorly and yet, without that supply of new people, we would not have anyone
working in the jobs that we think ourselves too good to perform. Eventually, those very same people have
families, children who become acclimated to our culture and who become
assimilated. Those children become
doctors and executives and pillars of our communities. In short, they become like us. Then it is their turn to be U.S.-born and to
take better jobs, and treat the new arrivals exactly as we have treated those
children’s parents.
I think of immigrants as heroes. I was once in a similar position. I know just how hard it is to go to another
place, not speak the language and to eventually receive the sideways, sarcastic
comments directed toward the new arrival.
Immigrants work, they celebrate their culture and they grow families
that become Americans in every sense of the word.
A week ago, we were informed that the United States would
have ‘A Day Without an Immigrant’. I
told my staff, the majority of whom are Hispanic and Asian, that I would not
penalize them for taking the day off.
All but 2 of the 20 or so folks that work at my company came to work
that day. I thanked them. I continue to thank them. They are the heroes to me. Regardless of the social pressures exerted on
them, they said that working that day was more important. Why?
First, yes, they need the money.
Second, they see themselves as a team, a group of individuals who work together
to make a company grow and prosper.
Their logic was that this whole thing is a non-issue to
them. They live here. They work.
Who, after all, would they be showing and what would they be
proving? That they had power? They know that. I tell them all, every chance I get, that they
have that power. I can’t replace our
staff. That makes them valuable and
important both as individuals and as a group.
The people who make up the fabric of our country are
important individuals who are respectable, who work for a living and live for
something that they probably could not have in another place. There is a good reason for people to want to
move to the United States. I know that
immigration won’t stop for any reason at all, regardless of who is doing what
to whom. And I know that the people who
come here to make a better life for themselves earn the right to be heroes an
awful lot of the time.
