Who Has Real Strength?

Alligator Alcatraz. Catchy name. Trump, DeSantis et al, think it’s really funny. Lock up brown people in concentration camps surrounded by deadly animals. The strains play out in my head.

“My Country ’Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty . . .”

Many voices decry the horrors perpetrated by this administration. Masked thugs kidnapping brown children. Due process rights violated with impunity. Cruelty is not an isolated byproduct of enforcement. Cruelty is the policy.

Decent people recoil at the extreme measures our increasingly fascist government employs. I suspect that most Americans are slightly more humane, even if MAGA propaganda has persuaded them that we are being overrun by “illegals” who take our jobs and threaten our communities, even though those things are demonstrably false.

But in the constant debate over policy and practice, one element of immigration is never acknowledged: It takes great courage to enter a new country and culture and forge a life. Most Americans are comfortable and complacent and could not muster the strength to do what most immigrants do.

When I lived in Manhattan, I watched the daily influx of service workers from the outer boroughs. They often traveled several hours on buses or trains before most of us awoke and finished our first latte. They were invisible as they took their daily stations, cleaning for us, serving our meals, caring for our children. They probably had children too, left in the care of an older relative or neighbor. They saw our lives. We never saw theirs.

Many of them spoke little English, but were eager and open to learning and trying more. Few of us have ever had the strength to travel to a place where English is not commonly spoken. But if and when we do, our presumption is that they do speak English, or should speak English. If you’ve been a visitor to such a place, you may have heard an American speaking very loudly, enunciating every syllable, as though insisting that the host must understand! Such Ugly Americans, to reprise an apt but forgotten book, make no effort to learn even rudimentary phrases in the native tongue. They don’t have to. In many places nearly everyone involved in local commerce has learned English, both as a matter of pride and of commercial necessity. Money talks. Money talks English.

The immigrants I encountered in New York, and everywhere else, work harder for lower wages, often because some opportunistic employer takes advantage of their undocumented status. When moving to Colorado, these impressions remained and new ones appeared. In our almost all-white privileged community, the first sounds each morning are lawn care workers or the construction starting up for the day on the new development of $650K homes rising out of the empty field just out of sight.

There is the rat-a-tat of roofing nails, guns wielded by brown men straddling roof peaks in the 100 degree afternoon. Or painting crews huddled beneath the one shade tree in a parched lawn, taking a short break for a drink of water.

We are conditioned by our comfortable biases to believe that we deserve what we have and that they, despite our absolute lack of any knowledge of their lives, also deserve what they have - or don’t have. That their poor English is due to ignorance, but that our inability to utter a word of Spanish, except perhaps “Margarita,” is because, well, why should we? It’s our country, right?

Imagine, if you can sufficiently liberate yourself from what is to consider what if, a reversal of circumstances.

Think of Donald Trump hanging onto a grimy subway pole at 5 a.m. as he heads to his job as a porter in a pre-war apartment building on the Upper Westside. The tenants are all wealthy El Salvadorans and ignore his efforts to say hello in his native (not very good!) English. Or Melania squeezed between two man-spreaders as she commutes to her job cleaning and cooking for a family of Honduran hedge fund titans.

I don’t mean to be preposterous, although these vignettes are surely preposterous. But why? What personal virtues or diligent acts makes Donald Trump entitled to a better life than Gallo, Jorge, or any of the bright, good-spirited porters in the building we called home for 19 years? They also spoke much better English than Trump.

And the sensitive, dignified woman from Eastern Europe who took public transportation to clean apartments in our building - including ours. She has remained our friend some eight years later and her soul shines brighter than all of Melania’s diamonds.

So to all you pompous Republican bottom dwellers in Congress and the members of the criminal enterprise in the Whitehouse: I challenge you to walk a mile in immigrant shoes. You couldn’t do it. You’d take a limo or a golf cart.