In the movie “Born in East L.A.”, Cheech Marin is swept up in a factory immigration-raid and dumped in Mexico. (Though Cheech has only been to Mexico to vacation in Margaritaville.) Our All-American “Dreamers” might relive Cheech’s nightmare. We can thank right-wing, “Remember the Alamo!” ambushes on the Obama-inspired, but bipartisan, Senate Gang of Ocho’s long-overdue “path to citizenship.”
But pro-immigration-reform senators like Arizona Republican John McCain haven’t drunk the Tea Party’s bong-water. They’ve heard expert testimony about the dollars-and-sense economic (and crime-fighting) advantages of bringing eleven million hard-workers out of the shadows.
The experts included McCain’s and President George H.W. Bush’s top economic adviser, Douglas Holtz – Eakin. Those experts testified that over its 13 years, the path to citizenship would add $3 trillion to America’s economy. Plus, San Benito County farmers’ crops wouldn’t rot in the fields. Like the crops did after Southern legislators voted to make life even more miserable for traveling workers and their “If It’s Monday, This Must Be Alabama” school-kids – so the workers all “vamoosed” to greener pastures.
Holtz-Eakin and other experts testified that the competition for non-back-breaking jobs – the kind of jobs Americans want – is from dictatorships where you aren’t free to join a union or practice your religion. But you have the right to wear a gas-mask 24/7. And self-proclaimed Walmart subcontractors’ sweatshops collapse and bury the workers alive. Or burn the workers up when those sweatshops burn down.
The Obama/Eight Amigos’ bill is a lot tougher than the wrist-slap and quickie amnesty three million immigrants got from President Reagan and a bipartisan Congress. Applicants who don’t speak English would learn it, and pay fines and future-and-back taxes. And stop (often) getting paid less than the “69%-of-what-it-was-before-inflation” minimum wage.
But House Tea Party Republicans are still Berlin-Walling reform’s path to citizenship. They’re conspiring to pass only other immigration bills first, “piecemeal”, to pump up multinational corporations’ already-record profits.
But aren’t we “a nation of immigrants?” And besides being crucial for America’s economy, isn’t “letting the cream rise to the top” the American Way? For example – like young Abe Lincoln buying his now-legendary barrel of books for one hard-earned buck – our Born-in-the-U.S.A. Assemblyman Luis Alejo picked strawberries to work his way through grade school. Then Alejo earned a doctor of law degree from the University of California and a master’s degree in education from Harvard University.
Now he’s California’s busy-bee Chair of the Assembly Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee. Alejo is hearing testimony in Sacramento from strawberry growers, scientists, workers and environmental groups on safer and economically feasible alternatives to methyl bromide.
Nonpartisan education groups just voted Alejo “Legislator of the Year.” Maybe because Alejo learned firsthand that without education, we’d still be picking berries. Even if our ancestors sailed here on the Mayflower.
The Native Americans that Pilgrims met on the beach shocked them, greeting them in perfect English, “Welcome, English….Got any beer?” (Even Englishmen suffer from cultural stereotypes.)
Then Americans taught the English city-slickers to farm, fish, hunt, pick cranberries and wild wine-grapes, etc. Otherwise, Englishwomen cooking their first “potluck” Thanksgiving dinner would’ve been short on pots. Or maybe even “short out of luck.”
(The English ladies may have brought beer to la fiesta. But history doesn’t report whether Americans’ cocktail chatter had to be in “English only.”)
May 5th was Cinco de Mayo. Our “Heinz 57 Variety-ancestry” family remembered Mexicans’ battle for freedom from antidemocratic “royal you-know-whats.” But next week, can Congress’s war-painted Tea Partiers please forget El Alamo? And start discussing immigration reform’s path to citizenship rationally – as a matter of dollars and sense?
Karen and Tom Lantz live in Hollister.
