We live on the edge of Congressional District 7. My congressperson is Michelle Fischbach. She really wants me to know she’ll “secure the border.”
This summer, “The Krzmarzick Household” received four 8-by-11 mailings telling me that. With grainy photos of dark-skinned people and large words like “Emergency” and “Crisis,” I’m to believe that securing the border is the greatest issue facing our household. We didn’t get any mailings about farm policy, health care, or the environment.
Congressional District 7 does include a border. That would be Canadian. I think the border that Fischbach says she’ll secure is the one 2,000 miles south of here.
I agree the border needs attention. The flow of people northward from Central America is not something we are going to exactly solve. It will be an issue for our children and grandchildren. You don’t need a crystal ball to know that human migration and climate change will be challenges into the future.
This is not only a concern for North America. Europe is facing as much pressure from their African south. As the Earth’s population grows toward nine billion, it’s foolish to think we can slam an imaginary door and live oblivious to the rest of the planet’s human beings.
Our species has a tremendous capacity for solving problems, even the most vexing ones. Right-minded, decent people working together for a larger good can find solutions. Petty, small-minded, selfish people make things worse. A reasonable, humane, and thoughtful border policy is possible.
To address any issue, we must first know and speak the truth. We must see clearly, not through clouds of lies and prejudices. Right now, nontruth impede the work we need to do on immigration.
I want to stand on a tall platform and yell this into a megaphone: The great majority of people attempting to come to the United States are not criminals! In the recent debate, the Republican nominee for President said that “millions of criminals” have come into our country illegally. That is a lie. It is a terrible lie. When a lie is so big and filthy, it can live in dark places, like mold. We need to shine light on it.
The people seeking refuge at our border are human beings. A set of politicians wants you to think of them as something less and to fear them. If you have an ounce of compassion in you, disavow that notion right now. If you’d have been born there and they’d have been born here, you could easily be the migrant trying to escape a desperate situation.
Say it with me. “There, but for the grace of God go I.” Say it anytime self-righteousness creeps in.
It is truth that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population. That is true for legal and illegal. Look it up. You are more likely to be raped and murdered by the guy next to you in line at the grocery store than someone crossing the Mexican border.
I follow enough Fox News and right-wing media to know they regularly overreport crimes by migrants and underreport crimes by stupid white men. If they were accurate in their reporting, there might be a movement to round up all the stupid white guys and deport them.
Our daughter Abigail has worked in the field of human rights in Guatemala and currently in Colombia. She also collaborated remotely with a team in Venezuela. She has worked in exactly the places where people are in such dire situations. Leaving the lives they know for the unknown is the only choice they have.
Sometimes they are facing malnutrition and deprivation. None of us has held an emaciated child. There is immediate hunger, but the child is also susceptible to horrible diseases. Other times there is the real threat of violence. Gangs may have killed your cousin and his family two villages over. That’s a fear we don’t know.
People leave failed states and failed economies. There is a long history leading to those. If the people of those places were responsible for their situations, one could say, “Let them figure it out.” Unfortunately, any accurate reading of history shows that Americans and Europeans advantaged themselves at the expense of the Southern Hemisphere for centuries. Slavery, colonization, and extractive economies have harmed the places immigrants flow from now.
This is not different than what your family did a few generations back. Your ancestors left everything they knew to take a dangerous ocean voyage with nothing guaranteed but opportunity in a new place.
We are a nation of immigrants. We just are. You are from a line of immigrants. You just are. Remember that next time someone is disparaging immigrants.
I remember listening to stories of families being separated at the border, a despicable strategy of the previous administration. These were from the good reporting of National Public Radio. I was brought to tears in my cab as I listened on the tractor radio.
When you hear real stories of immigrants, not the Fox News-manipulated stories, you begin to feel empathy. I am a Christian. I think the capacity to feel empathy is a requirement.
Another true thing is that migrant workers are essential to our economy. A friend had repairs done to hail-damaged barns. A crew from Iowa did the work and they were entirely Hispanic, with only a couple of them English-speaking. Another friend winters in Arizona and reports the only people working outside in that climate are Hispanic.
Packing plants are majority immigrants. Increasingly, migrants are doing the work of caring for the elderly. Migrant workers pick the produce that we buy in our grocery stores. Fifteen-hour days in the sun with minimal breaks are common. I would suggest that any of those men and women work harder in a day than JD Vance or Donald Trump ever has. They deserve our deep admiration, not our hate.
It has always been the case that first generation immigrants take jobs that no one wants. Second generation immigrants have historically been some of the most creative and innovative people we’ve had. So, our nation is rewarded for allowing people in.
No one is for open borders. Repeat, no one is for open borders. But good border policy is possible.
Leviticus 19:34 says, “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
That was written three thousand years ago. I don’t think God has changed.