Get in line
Writing by treason on Sunday, 26 of March , 2006 at 11:49 am
A good way for the immigration movement to lose support is if immigrants start pissing off other immigrants. It’s real easy to do because just about everyone is an immigrant - or at least is the relative of immigrants. My relatives were poked and prodded at Ellis Island when they came here…legally…almost a century ago. I myself did not get off the boat, stand in lines to be interrogated and examined, and wonder if I would be allowed to stay or even maintain my family name. I didn’t have to struggle to learn a new language and culture, to fit in, to find work to raise a family, to build a new life. I wasn’t called a dago. But those before me…you pick on my immigrant family, you’re picking on me.
Immigrants who came here at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries know the hardships. Ask the Irish, Germans, Italians, and Poles. Ask the Jews who fled Russia. Immigrants came here before then and settled in places where no one else wanted to live. Like the Swedes and Norwegians in North Dakota. Immigrants came after. And they keep coming. And as long as they do it legally, very few Americans have an issue.
But, like I said, it doesn’t take much to tip that scale. A talk radio discussion erupted again the other day when a Hispanic caller chimed in with:
“We built this country!”
Excuuuuuuse me? Not to diminish the contributions of our compadres who have come here from south of the border, but this caller was clearly overreaching. He stated that the people who had come from Mexico had made the greatest contributions, had worked the hardest, had made the biggest sacrifices, had done the heaviest labor. I suspect listeners were bristling. Our country is relatively young, but it has a long history of immigration. Ask the Chinese who helped make it possible for America to move West when they built railroads. Ask the Italians about the bridges and skyscrapers that make our cities the engineering marvels of the world. Like in baseball, every group of immigrants made their mark. To insist that your group alone has been responsible for “building the country” is a little presumptuous.
Who came here to help pull metals and minerals from the land? Who helped to reclaim swamplands and build irrigation systems? Who plowed fields, planted, and harvested crops? Who worked to develop the fishing industry? Who operated manufacturing industries? It was the Chinese. A few people remember the railroads, but mostly they think of laundry and opium dens. Every group has experienced their own period of slavery and every group has been vilified.
I lived in California for almost a quarter of a century and watched the rise of several different ethnic groups. The Asians are a powerful force in the state. I watched as they moved into Hispanic areas, then dominated them. When it started I was living in a small rural town nestled against the rolling foothills of the South Bay - a town that was, in essence, the laughing stock of the entire Bay Area. Its residents were mainly lower income Hispanics and the town had orchards, fields, and a K-Mart. It was at a time I was working for a Bay Area retail chain that specialized in office furniture and supplies, greeting cards, gifts, and wedding and business stationery. Most of our customers were Hispanic and we had several Spanish speaking employees in the store. When I took over managing the gift department at this location I continued to receive shipments from our warehouse of low end crap. Other stores in the chain were getting better product. The perception was that most of the customers didn’t have a lot of money to spend and therefore had no taste.
I spoke to the buyer and the owners of the company and asked them to spend a little more time down in our neck of the woods. The demographics were changing and they were changing fast. In a few years that city boasted the highest income per capita, and once I convinced the powers-that-be that there was cash to be made, I started getting better quality products ordered especially for my department which, of course, resulted in the highest sales in the chain.
One day I was in line at the bank and noticed I was the only non-Asian in the place. The city had evolved. Gone were the fields and orchards - even K-Mart had disappeared. I’d walk the dogs around the neighborhood and saw subtle signs. Some traditions, quietly observed, like fresh fruit and flowers carefully placed in the front garden as an offering to the gods. Not so subtle, of course, were entire shopping centers filled with Asian stores and no subtitles in English.
After I moved here I was asked to chaperone two trainees back to the Bay Area for some training. Two guys - one Native American, one Hispanic - were in the area for the first time so I made sure I gave them the grand tour. We drove past the shopping malls. When they asked how people who didn’t speak “Oriental” knew what the stores sold, I told them that it was easy to figure out. You go inside and look around. And we did. I brought them to a local grocery store and their jaws dropped. It was like they’d flown over the Pacific Ocean and were in a new land. I was able to explain most of what we saw, but even I was stumped by a few items. They shopped for exotic things to bring home to show friends and family.
In the Bay Area, most of my coworkers were Asian, but to find out specifically where their families were from, one sometimes had to ask. Names and physical characteristics were not always accurate indicators of nationality. I can hardly think of a country that wasn’t represented. Yet go into the parking lot and there wasn’t one of those country’s flags displayed on a car and no bumper stickers that would reveal an owner’s ethnic background.
If any cars displayed any trace of ethnicity, they belonged to a specific group. My Central American coworkers did not display flags of El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Costa Rica on their cars. Employees whose heritage was Mexican - even if they were born here - had items on their cars and clothes that signified allegiance to another country.
The question Americans are justified in asking, then, when they see the immigration marches is: Who are these people and where is their allegiance?
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