Global perspectives on immigration: comfort levels

Part II

People need to feel safe in their country. The “insecure border� we have is not really the problem, it is the poster child. The problem is that people do not feel safe.

People living along the border do not feel safe because drug elements traverse the border every day, heavily armed with criminal intent.

People in Detroit do not feel safe because they are under-employed and resent anyone getting a job that an American should have.

People in California do not feel safe because their hard-earned tax dollars are being spent on illegal immigrants, who didn’t pay into the system.

In times of plenty, in times where the country as a whole feels economically safe, such worries would be shrugged off. In times of stress, in times of over-population, safety becomes a number one priority.

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Safety is not unimportant. Feeling like you have elbow room before the next guy bumps into you is genetic human nature. It is called defensible space in architecture, a lawn in rural housing, room to breathe in the American pioneer spirit. Every human wants to have a sense of place that belongs to him or her. Encroachment on the beach near the sand castle you were building made you mad as a kid. It is the same when you are an adult. It is the same for the nation.

What we have to do is establish the cause and then remedy an effect. This is a nation of immigrants (including the Native Americans) but most of the population is only first or second generation. For most, is easy to feel threatened by taunts, draconian laws, discriminatory rhetoric and bias toward one ethnic group or another. Tomorrow it may be Greeks who are targeted, or Russians or Ethiopians.

We’re all Americans if we came here legally and have the right to stay here legally. Those who are here, supporting the backbone of American industry and the food chain, may have come quasi-legally because of our government’s failing, not their own. Should they be punished for our government’s failing?

And what about those that come here totally illegally? Should we simply chuck them all out? How are we going to explain the deaths that would result if we rounded up and expelled 11,000,000 people (a version of Crystal Night) to our children? Wouldn’t  America, the Land Of The Free, be tarnished with xenophobic behavior like that?

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The solution to the nation’s unease over illegal immigration cannot be solved by draconian measures. We have decades of wrongful INS activity to undo, decades of underfunding to remedy, and decades of misunderstanding of the importance to the American economy and culture of the immigrant worker to rectify.

Does this mean we should do nothing? No, I am not saying that. But what we decide to do in the short term (for example, secure the borders better) should support what needs to be done in the long term.

Let’s not have another order to get everyone passports without thinking that through. Let’s not say we want lettuce on the East Coast without understanding that 80 percent of those workers need to come from a country whose workers are willing to work for far less than American wages. Let’s not proclaim to be the Land of the Free without respecting those who have died to preserve that freedom, freedom no one ever said was exclusively American.

If we think freedom is exclusive to American citizens only, then pull up the drawbridge, retire overseas factories and call back our soldiers from every foreign land and never go back. If we did that, America and American ideals would quickly perish.

Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.