by David Marin
In 2005 I was the only single Caucasian male in the United States to adopt three minority siblings – abandoned by fieldworkers and felons in Santa Barbara County. In addition to providing a home to a delightful, homeless trio, I was proud to help mark the end of the days when we judged people by ethnicity. I miscalculated.
Harassed by the California Highway Patrol, fending off a social worker wondering why I would adopt “those children,” asked by a fancy hotel to go elsewhere, and listening to a cook in a Utah restaurant yell, “Those are your kids!” I wondered where society was headed. Arizona, where I’ve lived and travelled, I have family there, a vibrant state of magnificent beauty, has now replaced the deep south as the source of the latest anti-ethnic rhetoric. At least, you would hope it was just rhetoric. But no, they’ve leapt into action.
Eager to purge illegal Mexican school children, immigrants clogging their health care system, and the 15% of their felons who are illegals, Arizonans are in a rush to lay off thousands of school teachers and nurses and shrink their economy, while disengaged from addressing the other 85% of people in their jails, the other causes of anyone being sick in an emergency room and the United States Supreme Court. That court ordered the state of Texas to educate immigrant children because not doing so was a violation of the 14th amendment against discrimination. The Supreme Court disagreed with Texas. It found that illegal immigrants are people.
If the Arizona anti-illegals crowd prevails, Arizona will be a culturally stunted, shrink-wrapped vanilla hive. Our children are learning that the United States, taken and built by immigrants whose work, cunning, and merit ruled the day, is now retooling society based on who was there first. Well, ignoring Indians and Mexicans, so let’s say it’s retooling based on who was there third. Or, to summarize, white people. If the police stopped me for rolling through an Arizona stop sign, would I have to show them my children’s papers? Would I have to show them papers if my children were white?
Growing up without a father, I searched for ideals. I was chastened to learn that the Constitution excluded women, Martin Luther King had flaws, George Washington owned slaves, and that the heroes of the American revolution killed Indians. A boyhood hero, Kansas City Royals baseball player Amos Otis, smooth as silk in centerfield, admitted to using a corked bat his entire career. All human; all flawed; such is life. I found only one ideal, carved into a steel plate mounted at the base of Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” 151 feet tall, the copper clad woman watching over all of us was the difference between reality and hope. It was love’s pure light. It’s why any child in the emergency room is treated, or any child left at the school gate is educated. It was the difference between what was and what could be.
It says tempest-tossed because the writer wrote in a world covered in storms, political and otherwise. It assumed the planet has issues with ethnicity, the wretched refuse, the homeless and wandering. The invitation was extended anyway. Now, according to the New York Times (June 25, 2010), 25% of Americans under 18 years old are immigrants or children of immigrants. The Liberty plaque didn’t say tempest-tossed to me if you have solid paperwork. That’s the language of bureaucrats, government-loving process servers: the opposite of what the Republican Party used to be. That’s the shame of it all; the party of small, stay off my porch government is at the gate in Arizona or Texas, looking under women’s skirts to see if their belly button is distended because if there’s one thing we hate, it’s mothers looking for a better future for their children. Played out, airport screeners should check for a bulging female belly, or better yet, require a pregnancy test for all women entering the United States.
Armed at rallies like an old west carnival act, the anti-illegals crowd touts their second amendment right to bear arms. However, the second amendment isn’t in the Bill of Rights because the founders feared tool-less hand farmers from Mexico, it’s there because it feared people like the far right in 2010, unable to hold their tongue, unable to contain their zeal, unable to achieve objectives through elections, frustrated standing in line at the emergency room, trampling on others – the poor, the homeless, the wretched refuse – pick on some your own size – while imploring officials to help them achieve their objectives.
The second amendment wasn’t written to protect them, it was written to protect the rest of us from people like them.
Freckled with red hair, I’m the son of a blonde Missouri mother and a light-skinned Puerto Rican father. I often travelled to visit my Spanish-speaking relatives. I’m comfortable in that culture, even if I didn’t openly embrace it because of Puerto Rican jokes, and, because, as a boy, I saw no successful, nationally recognized Puerto Ricans outside of Chong and Cheech, with whom I share a last name. A therapist would say adopting Hispanic children is my way of saying sorry, it’s okay to be who you are.
But wait. Last month, accused of being a Mexican in school, my eleven-year-old daughter told her accuser, “I’m not Mexican, I was born in Santa Barbara.” Two weeks ago, my eight-year-old son was told he couldn’t be on a recess soccer team because he was Mexican. And now, people call for the children of “illegals” to be stripped of their citizenship. My children are those children.
Recently, a coalition of major corporations, including Boeing, Disney and NewsCorp, the purveyor of Fox News (go figure), called for a pragmatic approach, reminding people of the American dream. Disney CEO Robert Iger: "It's our great strength as a nation, and it's also critical for continued economic growth. To remain competitive in the 21st century, we need effective immigration reform that invites people to contribute to our shared success by building their own American dream."
Pragmatists favor a sensible reform, a secure border, a path to citizenship, and a work program for adult fieldworkers. If a man or a woman is invited to work, perhaps tied to a specific job and a specific employer, there’s no need for them to hike through the desert. What the business people see is that a society, an economy, needs room to grow, new consumers, new professors, new artists and new ideas. The world is tempest tossed, that’s why people try to escape it. We’re the lamp by the golden door.