Immigrants made America great, so why the scramble to keep them out?
It's time for a very difficult and very deep conversation about immigration. The children of DACA need to be “adopted in” because they have been here long enough to have qualified, and know nothing about their parents’ previous homeland.
The last president’s grandfather was born in Germany and “immigrated” to this country to escape service in a war. He opened a brothel as his first business. His mother was an immigrant from Scotland and the wives of 4 of his five children are/were immigrants. Americans are all descendants of immigrants at some level of their DNA, except the original Indigenous peoples, who were here first.
Even my Ancestry DNA tests tell me how “mixed” and “mixed up” my family tree is from one side to the other, with majority West African (now Nigerian, Kenyan, etc) and a blend of Irish, English, Scottish, Asian and Indigenous. No one is “all one race” but we are all combinations of other nationalities, ethnicities, religious and racial groups.
Even America’s “Founding Fathers” like George Washington and the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, took a boat to get here! To the South, the Spaniards laid claim to Mexico for Spain and then crossed the Rio Grande to expand their land holdings, long before they sold it to the United States and made it a part of America; the French sold the Louisiana Purchase to us, making the country double in size and Lewis and Clarke took us all the way to the Canadian border, and then Russia sold us the very Alaska they now claim they want back!
America has moved people over and out to make way for expansion, brought people in to work the land, build railroad systems, build cities small and large, and yet many have fought that expansion “tooth and nail”. We are a nation of immigrants — Asians (Chinese, Philippino, Korean, Japanese and more), Hispanics (Mexican, Chilean, Brazilian, and more too numerous to name), Africans (let’s just say the entire continent), English, French, Irish, religious faiths... You name it, we’ve got it!
In this latest conversation about race, that same former president says “they’ll poison the blood lines” of America. I got news for him. The pool already has every drop imaginable in it! The “Browning of America” is not a coming thing. The “thing” has been here for generations.
New people are trying to “come to America” because they think life is better here. After all, we are still the major power in the world and everything “looks” good on the other side of the Rio Grande, at least on paper. Jobs are everywhere, or so some tell me, because stores and restaurants don’t have enough trained personnel/staff. If you think they are taking "your jobs", then why aren't you at work?
Yes, we need and must have a viable, workable immigration policy. Yes, Congress must be willing to support the president in finding a solution, the same one they missed for the past five administrations. However it should never include taking people’s children, imprisoning them in camps that are more like prisons, nor the risk of them drowning trying to come here.
The gangs south of the border make a fortune off of the desire of the poor to get here by any means necessary, but it's time for that to stop. Solutions are better than sacrifice. We’ve had this problem for decades and as the man said ”Move along! Nothing new to see here”!
Solve America’s immigration problems without destroying homes and lives, and you have half the battle won.
The Rev. Rose H. McCall of Kingdom Woman Ministries is a native of Montgomery.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Immigrants made America great, so why the scramble to keep them out?
