I’m an immigrant, you’re an immigrant, everyone’s an immigrant…
I am the great-granddaughter of German immigrants who came to the United States around 1850, seeking a better life. A whole group of dairy farmers left the area of Koblenz, Germany for new hope in America. They came to Chicago and then scouted out the land in McHenry County. Finding it suitable for dairy farming, they settled there. Being good German Catholics, the first thing they did was to build a church in Johnsburg, Illinois, east of McHenry. We are not sure why they left Germany. Was it religious reasons or was there a famine or crop failure? My grandfather spoke German in the house my mother grew up in. I ate German Potato Salad bathed in bacon grease and heavily seasoned with celery seed every Christmas. These were the beginnings of my priveleged life in the U.S.A.
As I stand here this morning in front of the deportation building, I watch an undocumented worker from Mexico, with nothing left in the country he’s mandated to go to, led in handcuffs to a van loaded with thirteen others in handcuffs and shackles. His brother stands next to me, and explains that his brother who is being deported, has lived in the United States since he was three years old. He knows no one, not a soul, in Mexico, and he leaves a family back in the United States. He barely speaks Spanish anymore. Yet he is forced to go there, since he has not yet become a U.S. citizen. He has worked in America, doing the jobs no other American wants to do, yet for him, attaining citizenship is challenging, if not impossible.
My dairy farming ancestors paved the way for me. I enjoy U.S. citizenship with no roadblocks. My life is easy – it is easy for me to get a job and support a family, should I choose to do so, I can give birth to children and be assured that I will not be forced to separate from them in the future. My husband and I will live in the same country, ’till death do us part, with no threat of someone showing up at our door, ripping our family apart – leaving my children fatherless, our family without a source of hard-working income.
Is this predujice? Sometimes, I think it may be. The American dream has become the American scheme. When I’ve easily obtained American citizenship, by nature of being the granddaughter of immigrants, who am I to tell them to get the hell out?
The media makes these people seem like such criminals. As if they have disobeyed our Constitution, they are shuttled out like thieves in the night. In reality, there is not much they have done wrong, and in fact, our economy is stronger because of them. These people don’t mind cleaning up the mess we make, literally. Why do we shoo them away?
