Not quite – but it runs in his family.
Illegal immigration is one of the big problems that plagues this country today, right? Illegal immigrants take jobs from real Americans, right? After all, Americans are lining up to mow lawns for landscaping companies, bus tables for chain restaurants, and clean the toilets of middle-class homeowners, right? Meanwhile, these illegal immigrants are sending their kids to our schools so they don’t go through life illiterate, seeking medical care when they’re sick or injured, and once in a while even taking legitimate, above-the-table jobs and paying taxes.
Leeches – leeches, all of them!
Right?
Well, no, not really. While illegal immigration is a major issue, and possibly a major problem, it’s also been, until very recently, one of the most interesting issues on the public policy front: interesting because until recently none of the large, conventional political groups – liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats – had a single, unified position on the issue. This fascinating situation was destroyed late last year by the Tea Party, whose virulent members inspired a stampede among the Republican candidates for president to prove who could propose the harshest, least tolerant “solution” to the problem of illegal immigration. In their sheer hatred for anyone who doesn’t look, act, and think exactly like they do (especially the guy who currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.), Tea Party members successfully forced their warped perspective on every candidate seeking the Republican presidential nomination. It may be years before some semblance of reason can be restored to the public discourse on this issue, but that healing will probably begin on November 7, the day after President Obama is re-elected and Republicans realize they need to go back to the drawing board on this (and possibly other) issues. Until this recent upheaval, though, it was pretty interesting to see people of all political stripes, unaccustomed to doing their own thinking, having to puzzle out matters for themselves for once because their political parties and factions hadn’t formed a single, unified position on the issue.
It will be interesting to see what these non-thinkers come up with – and when they do think, their thinking will probably be informed by their personal experiences and perspectives.
The Curmudgeon, of course, has a such a personal perspective: if not for illegal immigration, he might be 7630 kilometers away (4740 miles, for you American readers) lamenting the recent election of Vladimir Putin.
You see, The Curmudgeon’s grandfather was an illegal immigrant.
The Curmudgeon didn’t know this growing up. He learned it while he was in college, when he took a course in the sociology of childhood and was assigned to interview his oldest living relative and learn and write about how that person was raised. What he learned was eye-opening.
The Curmudgeon’s grandfather was raised in the village of Samhoudorek (the spelling is approximate; The Curmudgeon has had a difficult time finding the town), near Kiev. When the communists took over they made life miserable for Jews – not that it had been a bed of roses before – until one day, fed up, grandfather Abe’s father put him and his cousin into the back of the family wagon, hitched up the horse, drove his son to the border, gave him some money, told him to go to America, kissed him, and turned around and went home. During the course of his travels Abe lied about his age so many times that everyone lost track of how old he really was. The flight from the Soviet Union appears to have taken place in 1922 or 1923; Abe said he was born in 1904, which would have made him eighteen or nineteen, but his cousin always insisted that he was born in 1899, which would have made him twenty-three or twenty-four. His cousin claimed Abe lied about his age because it was thought to be easier to get into the U.S. if you were under twenty-one.
When Abe finished traversing Europe and arrived at Ellis Island he received bad news: the annual quota of immigrating Jews had been reached and he couldn’t enter the country. So informed, he went to Canada, eventually settling in Montreal. After a few years he snuck into the U.S., settled somewhere in New York – where is not clear, although anecdotal evidence points to Brooklyn – and arranged to marry a Russian woman who had legally been admitted to the U.S. It’s not clear whether Abe feigned love so he could become a legal resident or whether it was a marriage arranged within his community, but somewhere between the decision to marry and the wedding itself, the federal government sent a notice to Abe’s last address in Montreal that he had been approved for admission to the U.S. Someone got that notice down to him in New York, he broke the engagement, snuck back into Canada, and crossed back into the U.S. legally. He eventually married The Curmudgeon’s grandmother, who begat The Curmudgeon’s mother, who begat The Curmudgeon.
All of this leaves The Curmudgeon with mixed feelings about the illegal immigration issue.
For starters, he has no problem with the term “illegal immigrants.” The term that some people – mostly liberals – prefer is “undocumented residents,” but The Curmudgeon thinks that’s a rather namby-pamby way to avoid calling a spade a spade. “Illegal immigrants” is precise and it’s accurate: they are immigrants and they are here illegally. “Undocumented residents” sounds like there’s just some missing paperwork and therefore is too soft a term to satisfy The Curmudgeon. Should we negotiate the issue? By all means. Still, let’s be adults and call it what it is.
Beyond that, The Curmudgeon thinks the country’s southern border need to be guarded closely, but at the same time, we need to recognize that you can’t guard it completely and people are still going to find ways to cross. (And isn’t it interesting how no one seems to worry about our northern border? Maybe that’s because Canadians are mostly white and the people who are so terribly worried about illegal immigration apparently are far less worried about white people sneaking illegally into the U.S. than they are about brown people sneaking illegally into the U.S.)
The Curmudgeon thinks any illegal immigrant who commits a crime, no matter what the crime, should be deported. He does not think an illegal immigrant who enrolls a child in school or who calls the police when there’s a problem or who seeks help in a hospital emergency room should be deported. When it comes to punishing that crime, some people are afraid of breaking up families through deportation. Here, The Curmudgeon is a bit hard-hearted: it should be up to the family of the deportee: they can leave the country with their loved one or stay here. There are consequences to our actions, and this is one of those times when people need to pay some of those consequences.
Absent a specific decision to attempt to round up and deport every illegal, however, The Curmudgeon thinks we’d be better off getting these folks more heavily invested in this country by creating some reasonable path to citizenship for those among them – the vast majority – who are already here and already abiding by all of our laws except those that hold their presence here to be illegal.
And when that day comes, a lot of other people’s grandfathers can become legal, too.