Public Comment

North America Needs Immigrant Workers, And We Should Appreciate Them

Jack Bragen
Saturday May 02, 2020 - 03:27:00 PM

President Trump touts keeping undocumented immigrants out of the U.S., with a wall, claiming "They certainly aren't sending us their best." I differ from that opinion. The actual motive of the President is not to keep out immigrant workers. These are men and women on whom our economy depends, something the President very well knows. The President wants to keep this designated category of human beings down at the bottom, with no opportunity for bettering their conditions, so that these hardworking, brave individuals will be barely more than a slave population.

Latino workers and immigrants from other countries less affluent than the U.S. often come from incredibly harsh living conditions, in which survival is not considered an inalienable right, it is something you get only if you are strong enough, if you work hard enough, and if you don't complain.

Anyone who can make it on the arduous, dangerous, hazardous trip from there to here, without dying from the rigors of the journey and without being apprehended, is a brave and strong individual at the least. And these are people with families to feed, which is probably their biggest motive for attempting such a daunting undertaking. And since they are coming here with the expectation that they will work, we are not getting lazy individuals. If criminal invaders were coming here to do harm to naturalized citizens, previous administrations (whether Republican or Democrat) and the Congress would have put a stop to this activity decades ago.

This is not to say that that among undocumented immigrants there are not a few bad apples--but you'd get the same thing among any designated group of human beings. I expect that statistically, the number of criminals among undocumented immigrants is about the same as among Caucasians. 

My wife and I had occasion to witness three Latino workers do hard work on our behalf, because we had to move from an upstairs unit to a downstairs unit in our building. I've been taking heavy dosages of antipsychotics for nearly forty years, I am sedentary, and I am in my fifties. I am in no condition to do for myself what these three miracle workers did for us. The men were not impressively big--they were about the same size as me. Yet the performance I saw was something I would never dream of being able to do, at any age, medicated or not. 

They carried heavy loads to the limit of capacity of their muscles, yet with total focus and incredible balance, at a very fast pace, for about eight hours steady with just a few short breaks. When I would walk the same staircase, I was fortunate not to stumble and fall while carrying nothing. 

Legitimizing immigrants who have come to the U.S. to work--at jobs that ninety nine percent of Caucasians would categorically refuse--is the only human thing to do. The supposed deportation and the wall--theater. Trump's actual agenda is to keep people down, so that the U.S. will be an increasingly classist society, essentially a caste system. 

This is not what the U.S. is about. The President is a descendant of immigrants. The only ones who aren't descendants of immigrants, are the immigrants themselves, and Native Americans. And look at what the U.S. has done to Native Americans. I say it doesn't matter where you come from geographically, all people are created equal, everyone has to eat, and everyone has to go to the bathroom. 

This is aside from the fact that the U.S. economy depends heavily on immigrant labor in order to buoy the standard of living to which Caucasian Americans are accustomed. If Trump truly did kick out all the Spanish-speaking immigrants, the U.S. economy would collapse in short order. 

Let's get a President who has a little bit of empathy for fellow human beings and let's restore the U.S. to having a compassionate society.