By Francisco Valdez
In Yuridia Gonzalez’s letter “Don’t embrace illegal
immigrants” (Daily Bruin, Viewpoint, Nov. 15), she
suggests that concern for the plight of illegal immigrants in
America is rooted in anti-white and anti-American rhetoric. As if
feeling pity for the Guatamateco, who slaves all day under a
blazing sun in a vineyard with the rank stench of pesticides,
picking the grapes Americans eat, were merely fashionable talk.
For Gonzalez, it’s not really about simple human
compassion ““ the sort one person might extend to another
““ it’s about being cool. It’s about being
popular.
Many Americans may say, “Don’t feel sorry for these
illegals. They are just criminals. Why can’t they stay at
home, submit papers and go through all of the bureaucratic
rigmarole that applying for U.S. citizenship entails?”
Never mind that most illegal immigrants can’t read or
write, let alone get through the battery of tests involved in
citizenship applications. Never mind that even applying for a visa
can lead to all sorts economic punishment from their own
governments who might perceive potential immigrants as disloyal.
Never mind that getting through the entire process often takes
years, possibly a decade or more.
Let them watch their children starve to death. Let them watch
their parents wither away before their very eyes, victims of a
lifetime of poor diet, disease, and inadequate health care. They
should have faith in the mega-bureaucracy. The proper paperwork
will save them ““ eventually.
This faith in bureaucracy is so quaintly American. It’s
almost charming in its naivete.
Gonzalez goes on to say that most immigrants “come for
money, not political freedom. Greed is the basis for almost all
crimes.”
Well, so what? Who cares if they come for money? They work the
fields from which you eat, they sew the clothes on your back, they
clean your homes and your hotel rooms. They probably even poured
the cement for your driveway. They do all of these things for the
few paltry dollars their employer deems worthy of giving them.
We’re not talking benefits here. There are no paid
vacations, nothing as comfortable as even a 40-hour workweek.
It’s back-breaking, unskilled, mindless, menial labor that
many Americans such as Gonzalez may not even consider an
option.
Immigrants scrimp and save and send a little back to their
families in their home country every month, because as bad as their
living conditions are here, they’re worse back home.
Never mind the fact that America was built on the backs of
immigrants, illegal or otherwise.
How dare you, Gonzalez, apply your dense, white-bred morality to
the man in Mexico who must decide whether or not he should steal
bread to feed his children or escape to the cotton fields of Texas
where he might be able to earn more money?
“It’s un-American for you to have to work 40 hours a
week to support illegals,” Gonzalez writes. As if
immigrants’ sole purpose is to come here to suck at the teat
of the American welfare system.
Personally, I am appalled at such ignorance. I’ve known
plenty of immigrants from Guatemala, Vietnam, the Philippines,
China and even Germany and Sweden. They work long and hard to carve
out a living on society’s fringes. They are the invisible
hands that take out your garbage when you leave the office, wipe
down your tables when you leave the restaurant and mop up the
floors after you’ve spilled a jar in the grocery store. It
might not be much, but it’s all they have.
Many immigrants are not willing to put the little they have at
risk under any circumstances. Any contact with anything even
remotely official exposes them to the risk of deportation and a
return to the mind-numbing destitution from which they came. They
can’t turn to a labor union when their employers rip them
off. They’re too afraid of hospitals to go there when one of
their children breaks an arm. They’re too afraid to call the
police if they’re beaten or raped.
Immigrants suffer all of these injustices and yet you presume to
call them criminals? Many Americans may deem immigrants as unworthy
simply because they couldn’t wait for the bureaucracy to get
around to them. They are abhorred by many because they made the
tough decision to take charge of their own lives and have a crack
at America, where they might have a chance to claw their way out of
poverty.
I’m disappointed that you, Yuridia Gonzalez, can forget
your heritage as an American. It’s where we all came
from.
Every one of us, Latino, black, white, Asian, Pacific Islander,
Armenian, Iranian or any other ethnicity should remember that this
is where all of our fathers came from. We should work to build a
sense of community that includes all immigrants, illegal or
otherwise. Now that’s American.