Eloise, Domingo, Jose and 22 other former students stare at me from a faded Box Elder News & Journal clipping from August 1966.
Fresh from June graduation ceremonies at the University of Utah, I had a teaching certificate and some Spanish. These credentials got me a summer employment as a teacher of migrant farm workers’ children at McKinley School in Tremonton. The Box Elder County Migrant Council must have been desperate. I was really green.
My students ranged from 5 to 13 years old. Teaching them was hard work, but not because of bad behavior by the kids. They were the best. They were so grateful not to follow their parents into the fields, or to have to remain in hot migrant housing. Elementary teachers know that teaching young kids is never easy, but teaching kindergarten through eighth grade in an unairconditioned classroom in August calls for superhuman effort and talent exceeding any I possessed. I wonder what happened to them. I hope I did them some good.
We have not always treated migratory laborers or their kids well in America. In 1960, non-Latinos still did farm labor in large numbers. By the end of the decade, farm work and work in related agricultural industries mainly fell to Latinos, some home grown, but many straight out of Mexico.
Working in the fields is backbreaking and low paying. Farmworkers still are mostly Latinos. Non-Latino Americans avoid stoop labor with so many easier, well-paying jobs available. They increasingly avoid jobs in fast-food and construction. My first job in 1960 was as a swing-shift dishwasher in an all-night café in Perry at 65 cents an hour. Today, chances are a Latino occupies that spot. Meanwhile, my two teenage nephews’ first employment at a ski resort on Junior Ski Patrol pays $15 an hour.
Donald Trump notoriously said of Mexican migrants: “When Mexico [read Latinos] sends its people, they’re not sending their best.”
On the contrary, they’re sending their very best. Today’s migrants possess the grit to walk hundreds of miles through jungles, deserts and crime-ridden border towns just for the chance to work in America. These folks have the same stuff as my father’s grandparents who left County Devon in Cornwall in the mid-19th century for an uncertain future on the Kansas plains. They have the same grit as my mother’s grandparents who left 1913 Serbia practically penniless and who ended up raising seven children in Akron, Ohio, on a shoemaker’s earnings. Plus, unlike my ancestors, today’s migrants face imminent violence from cartels and border vigilantes. This vigilante reaction occurs in an America desperately needing workers in its agriculture, transportation, hospitality and construction industries.
Nonetheless, here comes my “But.” Our immigration system is FUBAR. (For those who did not have a World War II veteran as a father, the courteous version of FUBAR is “Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition.”) Designed with a few million post-World War II refugees in mind, our asylum system is inadequate for the 21st century. Hundreds of millions around the world arguably have the “well-founded fear of persecution” required for asylum. We can’t take them all. Too many passengers swamp the boat.
Meanwhile, December’s media reports showing desperate migrants milling about the border did not inspire confidence. They showed disorder. They showed a government unable to perform the most basic function of government — control of national borders. FUBAR.
Neither major political party gets a pass for this disgrace. But for unmitigated gall and demagoguery, a special tip of the hat goes to Republicans. They bang on about their eagerness to reform the immigration system — if only we “first secure the borders.” The elegance of this movable goalpost is its complete elasticity. You want 0, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 unlawful entries a year as proof of a secure border? Whatever number works politically.
An inconvenient truth, however, is that no nation has been able to shut down its borders over time; not the Chinese with their Great Wall, not England with the Channel’s treacherous waters, and certainly not Trump’s border hodge-podge which was only marginally more effective than the little Dutch boy, finger in the dike, pushing back the ocean.
However, the Republican secure borders emphasis contains a lesson which all politicians ignore at their peril. Americans will increasingly view border chaos as a threat to national and personal security. Scholars from Thomas Hobbes to Abraham Maslow have observed that security concerns — real or imagined — tend to override nobler values such as compassion and justice. In extremists, security fears surface as conspiracy theories such as the Great Replacement of European Americans by Latinos, the current Fox News’ plat du jour.
If you don’t believe that border mismanagement can produce bad outcomes, look to Great Britain. Perception of uncontrolled immigration from Europe led to the self-inflicted wound of Brexit. Britain’s exit from the European Union ultimately might result in a hard border between a breakaway Scotland and the rest of Great Britain and an Irish civil war between the Anglican North and Catholic South. Brexit has already contributed to a deep recession stemming from disruption of trade between Britain and Europe, and a severe labor shortage resulting from departure of Italian, Polish and Romanian laborers who had jobs the English didn’t want. Except for these minor bumps, Brexit is an unqualified success.
Here, Republicans think they have an edge on border security. Alas for these brave souls, their time will come. You can only bamboozle Americans for so long before they catch on that they are being played.
But perhaps this year will be the time of the problem solvers and the upending of the dividers. There are hopeful signs. Perhaps we can finally end this cruel sport of playing with decent people’s lives.
Lawrence J. Leigh is a retired federal prosecutor. In another life, he obtained a Ph.D. in government. His 1967 master’s thesis at the University of Utah was entitled “Migratory Labor: the Limits of National Response.”
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://ift.tt/n8waLoP
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