Immigrants

 I heard something interesting last week coming out of my cousin's mouth and my sister's mouth: that immigrants were overrunning the country, terrorists were going to come in. I pointed out that there had been no foreign terrorists attacks since 9/11, that the real danger was white men like me engaging in mass killings. They were hung up on the possibility of foreigners.

Trump was big on the idea of brown-skinned Southerners invading the country. I always inferred from his talk that the migrants were approaching us with malice. That malice I never saw in reality.

The Guardian's ‘I feel safe here’: the people leaving everything behind to seek refuge in US reinforces my view that people are fleeing here to be safe, because they see good in the United States of America.

But for millions, hunger, violence and fear ring out louder. Political dysfunction and economic calamity are pushing people from many nations in the western hemisphere in what Joe Biden has called the “largest migration in human history”, exacerbated in Latin America and beyond by the coronavirus pandemic.

People with tenacity but few means make a hopeful journey mostly across land towards the US-Mexico border. If they beat the odds to reach American soil they may find harbor – or more heartbreak.

Yesi Ortega choked up when talking to the Guardian at a shelter in El Paso, west Texas, earlier this month, as she recounted the odyssey she, her husband Raphael López and their five-year-old son, Matías, had spent six months making.

The family had reached a tipping point in their native Venezuela and followed more than 7 million other citizens who have fled the country’s economic collapse and pervasive hunger when their choice came down to food or clothing, Ortega, 24, said.

“We had no option. We needed to take the risk,” she said. Like almost a third of this exodus, they first tried nextdoor Colombia, itself unstable and contributing amid the post-pandemic hardship to the latest rise in migration towards the US.

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 Fabiola Cometán who fled Peru with her six-year-old son, Luis, feels protected on US soil after decades of physical abuse by her two former partners, she said.

The last straw was receiving a death threat from one of her sisters in their native Peru recently over a debt, going to police and being ignored and then threatened by three men who came to her door demanding the money be paid, she said.

Before leaving Lima to join a small group of mostly Venezuelan migrants traveling together for safety overland to the US, she had to decide which of her children to take with her.

She thought of the hazards of the Darién and the danger of extortion and sexual assault in Mexico, she said.

She sobbed as she said she took her six-year-old son and left her nine-year-old daughter behind with another sister, to protect her from the greater risk of being raped or kidnapped.

Maybe the MAGA Republicans impute evil intent to these people because they are the ones who hate American ideals. 

Native Americans have plenty of grounds to complain about immigration into American. After all, they - and not the MAGA Republicans - who have gotten the short stick of immigration.

My mother's side of the family all came over early. I do not know why they came to America. That they were mostly Scots and Irish, I assume two things: to get away from the English, and to find the prosperous life. My father's family came over from Switzerland in 1849, they make a great deal about the original immigration, but they do gloss over what probably motivated our ancestor's migration - a life of more economic security. Which sounds damned similar to what is motivating the people interviewed by The Guardian.

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