Death at the chicken plant. Dead at 16. “Caught in the machinery.” A curious, detached, bloodless statement. Broken-hearted loved ones. Unrealized dreams. A few seconds on the Six O’clock News. A few lines in the newspaper. A guilty conscience here and there. Not much to show for a life. Is this now the narrative of the “American Dream?” For too many, I’m afraid, it is.
I, for one, would like to celebrate the innocence of his youth, his exceptional work ethic, his commendable commitment to help provide for his family, and his laudable desire for a better way of life. Read it here.
The seeds for this horrific accident were sown hundreds of years ago when the first European ship sailed for the New World to exploit its riches and opportunities. Unless you are an African American, or a Native American, you are, or someone on your immediate family tree was, an “immigrant” to these shores. An immigrant is “someone who comes to live permanently in a foreign country,” as opposed to an “emigrant,” who is “a person who leaves their own country in order to settle permanently in another.” Someone sold into slavery, of course, would have been an unwilling immigrant. So, essentially, most of us are immigrants, strangers in a strange land. The New World, and particularly the United States, has long been an “escape valve” to solve problems of worldwide overpopulation, economic meltdown, political unrest, and religious dissent. All these concerns have historically manifested themselves in one troublesome, central issue – immigration.
As we ramp up for the coming presidential election, I’ve seen polls saying that, after the economy, immigration is the most important issue on voter’s minds. When you think about it, the history of immigration is the history of our country. In the great scheme of things, our claim on this continent is relatively brief. Technically, the first immigrants to what is now the United States arrived from Asia sometime between 12,000 and 30,000 years ago by crossing the Bering Strait from present day Siberia into what became Alaska and migrating east and south.
Discounting the possible exploits of Leif Erikson (c. 970-1025), as early as the 16th century, Basque, Portuguese, and English vessels fished for cod off the outer banks of Newfoundland and Labrador. The Spanish explorer, Juan Ponce de Leon, arrived on the northeast coast of Florida in April 1513, during the Easter feast (“Pasca Florida”) searching for the fountain of youth. Spanish ventures into California began in the mid 1530s when Hernan Cortes’ men traveled to Baja California. Spanish colonists then established St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, which is the longest continually inhabited European-founded city in the United States. They also established the second oldest city, Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1607.
The English were also in the immigration mix early with settlements at Jamestown (1607) and Plimoth Plantation (1620). Although the French had a successful colony in Nova Scotia as early as 1605, some of their other early colonization efforts were at Biloxi (Fort Maurepas, 1699), Mobile (1702), Natchez (1716), and New Orleans (1718). Since many of these sites are located near us, we are familiar with them; however, one of France’s most significant contributions to immigration in the United States is in the harbor of New York City.
I probably saw the Statue of Liberty from a ship at sea a dozen times before I finally set foot on Liberty Island, formerly and less glamorously known as “Bedloe Island” until 1956. One of my earlier ships was in New York City for Fleet Week, an annual gathering of Navy and “tall” sailing ships from around the world, so I took the short ferry ride out from the Battery to look it over. While the Statue is a work of art and can be interpreted in many ways, there are some interesting and perhaps little-known facts about it.
The statue was originally intended to be placed at the entrance to the Suez Canal, which had opened in 1869. Engineered by a Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the sea level canal connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and reduced the travel distance from England to India by 4500 miles. After the Egyptian government refused to pay for it, the statue’s creator, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, came up with the idea of presenting it to the United States in the name of France to “recognize America as a champion of liberty and to encourage the French to support the same ideals.” Unfortunately, the statue languished in crates on a Hoboken, New Jersey, pier for lack of a suitable pedestal to mount it on for years. The money for this was finally raised, through one of the first examples of “crowd funding,” by newspaper man, Joseph Pulitzer, and the statue was completed in 1886. Other interesting facts: the interior iron structural frame was designed by Gustave Eiffel, who built the iconic Eiffel Tower in Paris; it served as a lighthouse for 15 years; it was originally red in color but the copper sheathing eventually turned green by oxidation; the statue’s face was modeled on the designer’s brother, rather than his mother as is commonly stated, and the Masonic Order was heavily involved in its ultimate construction and dedication.
The poem that we associate with the statue, “The New Colossus “(1883), also known as “The Mother of Exiles,” and which is carved on the pedestal, was written as part of the fund-raising effort. A local New York City poet, Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) wrote these words which are known all over the world and have given hope to millions of immigrants:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
Yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your
Teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift up my lamp
Beside the golden door.
I have stood reading these words, in the not-too-distant past, and thinking to myself: “Formerly they came by ship, and now they come by foot, and there’s not one mention of green cards, or quotas, or La Migra.” Once the original colonies were in place, our country experienced successive waves of immigration, most notably the Irish fleeing the Potato Famine (1845-1849); the Italians, Greeks and other peoples fleeing poverty around the littoral of the Mediterranean Sea; Germans and other Northern and Central Europeans displaced by the Industrial Revolution; the Vietnamese in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, etc.
Less than two miles across the harbor, in perfect view, is Ellis Island, the first stop for over 12 million of such immigrants from 1892-1954. During its years of operation, more than 120,000 potential immigrants were refused entry and sent back to their countries of origin, including the ill and those “likely to become public charges,” such as unescorted women and children.
The irony of immigration history in America is that as soon as one national group arrived, they took steps to prohibit or hinder the arrival of others different from themselves. Consequently, the history of immigration law in the United States is a dizzying descent into bureaucratic jingoism. For example, the first federal law devoted explicitly to immigration was the Steerage Act of 1819, which required that passenger manifests of all arriving ships be turned over to the local Collector of Customs, copies sent to the Secretary of State, and this information provided to Congress.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred all Chinese from the United States for 10 years; the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 barred potential “extremists,” and the Immigration Act of 1907 mandated the exclusion of “imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, individuals affected by a physical or mental disability that might impede their ability to earn a living, those with tuberculosis, unaccompanied children, and individuals admitting crimes of ‘moral turpitude.’”
The Quota Law of 1921 limited total immigration to about 350,000 per year and restricted immigration from any country to 3% of the number of people of that ancestry who were living in the United States in 1910. It wasn’t until 1952, with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, one year after the Civil Rights Act, that the discriminatory national-origins quota system was abolished. This law finally eliminated race, ancestry, or national origin as a basis for denying immigration to the United States.
Regarding how we treat each other in this country, none of the above even touches on the Holocaust, the American Shoah, of Native Americans. Following Christopher Columbus’ arrival on the continent in 1492, violence and disease soon killed 90% of the population, some 55 million people, the so-called Columbian Exchange. In North America, the population dropped from an estimated 1-10 million to 237,196 on reservations as recorded in the U.S. Census of 1900.
More relevant to Mexico, World War II caused severe farm labor shortages in the United States, and in responses to grower’s requests, the U.S. government in 1942 instituted the large-scale importation of temporary agricultural workers from Mexico, which became known as the “bracero” program. It eventually brought a total of 5 million Mexican field workers into the country, often under horrendous conditions, by the end of the program in 1964. As a result, illegal immigration also rose, leading to the creation of “Operation Wetback” in 1954 and the roundup and deportation of over one million Mexican workers.
It’s obvious that the “immigration problem” isn’t new and that it isn’t going away anytime soon. I’ve studied the problem for years. I have an MA degree in Border Sociology from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, and I haven’t seen a viable solution. It’s not fences (too easy to go around, under, or over); it’s not quotas (there’s already too many standing at the gate); it’s not returning immigrants home (they will only come back) Maybe the solution is in Scripture: “For I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you welcomed me; I was naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me (Matthew 25: 35-36). I do know this: trying to find an answer to our immigration problem is as elusive as what Winston Churchill said about why Russia and Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939: “It’s a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma.”
It’s a conundrum. But, as someone who has been to over 100 foreign countries, I certainly have a frame of reference: I can understand why people want to move here. It’s the land of free bubble up and rainbow stew. There’s law and order, a medical infrastructure, an opportunity to succeed, all the things that are often missing in Third World countries. As long as there’s poverty, violence, and hopelessness in the world, people are going to keep coming; as long as there’s hope of bettering themselves, they are going to keep coming; as long as people dream of freedom, they are going to keep coming. But for too many, it’s a false dream. One of the best expressions of this false dream is in the song, “Across the Borderline” (1987), the Ry Cooder version, as sung by my favorite singer of Texmex music, the late Freddy Fender of San Benito, Texas:
There’s a place so I’ve been told
Every street is paved with gold
And it’s just across the borderline.
And when it’s time to take your turn
There’s a lesson that you must learn,
You could lose more than you ever hope to find.
Up and down the Rio Grande
A thousand footprints in the sand
Reveal a secret no one can define.
The river flows on like a breath
In between our life and death
Tell me who’s the next to cross the borderline.
And when you reach the broken promised land
Every dream slips through your hand
then you’ll know it’s too late to change your mind.
Cause you’ve paid the price to come this far
Just to wind up where you are
And you’re still just across the borderline.
It seems to me, sadly, that the brave young man who inspired this piece is “still just across the borderline.”
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
