A very few words on immigration

And that will be all

It’s very sad that things have come to this point.

My first job out of college was organizing construction workers in West Palm Beach, Florida. Most were Mexican immigrants. The owners of construction companies hired them for cheap labor, had them working in unsafe conditions, and threatened them if they tried to speak up or unionize. It was the rich who benefited from the cheap, compliant labor. But the workers benefited too, if they were able to raise their families and send their kids to American schools.

Most of my friends from labor circles in college went on to organize hotel and casino workers. Later on, I worked for the union benefit fund for the restaurant workers’ union in New York. In 2014 these workers were making $10 an hour to do some of the hardest jobs there are in New York. They had terrible wages but great health benefits.

One of my two best friends from college is a the daughter of Mexican immigrants, and one of the greatest American success stories you will ever hear. She will, however, kill me if I write about her, so I won’t.

I was at the citizenship ceremony for a dear friend of mine who came here from Mexico and I was honored to be a witness as he became an American citizen.

Some of the best days of my life were spent teaching immigrants and children of recent immigrants in Reading, PA.

We are all from somewhere else. My ancestors were mostly Scottish, maybe English, and there may be some mystery Jews back there on my dad’s side. We are the true settler colonizers. Yet no one is telling me to go back to Scotland.

In my ideal world, everyone who is here now and has not committed any crimes would stay, have a reasonable path to citizenship, register to vote, raise their families and we would all go on our merry way.

I know that isn’t possible. As long as life is better here, people will continue to come through rings that involve terrible exploitation and brutality. A friend of mine teaches on the Texas/Mexico border and sees it all the time.

I do not have any new or better ideas and no one is asking my advice. I’m not an expert.

I am, however, something of an expert on what works and what doesn’t when trying to move the kinds of people who are currently swing voters in this country.

I also know a lot about the last 25 years or so of protest tourism movements, from the Republican National Convention to wave after wave of following this or that international body to Occupy Wall Street to post-October 7 burning the American flag with the Israeli flag right outside City Hall here in Philadelphia.

I do not think that violent riots will improve life for immigrants at all. And they will only add fire to the pro-Trump forces, that I can promise you.

Israel, antisemitism and Star Wars are my issues, with a bit of sex and gender politics thrown it. I’ll save most of my written firepower for those. But I do sympathize with those who want to do something, anything, right now.

Just please do it safely. Blowing up police cars won’t help. Destroying property won’t help. Providing cover for those who commit violent acts will only encourage more violence.

I’m going to my cat shelter shift soon. It’s so grounding to feed and cuddle cats who were starving when we got them. My work partner and I are doing extra because so many people are on vacation.

Two of my friends called today, both unexpectedly, though I’m in touch with both on a pretty regular basis. One had the task of calming me down after I found three unattended lit candles in the house backyard (it’s a shared garden space) and a grill just under the eves of a wood roof that comes off from my kitchen. I’m on the first floor. This could have easily become a fire that would burn me and Loviefluffy up.

“We’ve got to get you out of there,” I can almost hear them saying in chorus. True, but for now, I know how blessed I am to have a place to live that I can afford, that is relatively safe though not as safe as I’d prefer, and where Loviefluffy and I can be alone with our quiet and each other. Most of the world is not so fortunate.

The quiet could be erased at any moment by the smash of glass on the main street a block away from me. It’s happened before and I am bracing for it to happen again.

But just for now, just for today, I am prepared for the worst, but hoping for the best. And a lot of things are happening that make me think the best is yet to come.

As Han Solo said, “This day isn’t turning out the way I thought it would.”

None of my days have turned out the way I thought they would lately. And that’s a change for the better.