Just try living in the USA without immigrants for one day…
I’m working on a new journalism project, “Who is An American? Stories from our Neighborhoods,” to share stories of my immigrant neighbors, new Americans who started life in another country. They are the construction workers trying to repair the bricks in my apartment building, the Spanish-speaking cooks in the Italian restaurant kitchens next door, the doctors, nurses and technicians at Mass General and Brigham and Women’s hospitals, the electrical engineers, plumbers, dry cleaners, physical therapists, AI coders, the garbage truck guys and street sweepers who try to keep our neighborhood clean even when we don’t. Some of them have documents, and some of them don’t. These immigrants all across the USA pay more in taxes, as a group, than they collect in benefits. Check it out with multiple verified data sources. it’s true.
Where did your ancestors come from, to make you an American today? Weren’t they just a few generations earlier than today’s immigrants? i am one of the lucky ones. My own ancestors came over at the time of the American Revolution from Scotland, lured by promises of cheap farmland, and from Switzerland, escaping religious persecution. Others came 100 years later, from Sweden and Norway when their farms went bankrupt and their national economies had collapsed. Most of them found a good life here, helping to build not just their own lives, but the USA we know today.
A Boston neighbor from the Dominican Republic, who cleans houses like my Swedish grandmother, self-deported last month after 25 years here. She raised two children with her husband in the USA. But she didn’t have the right documents for herself. So she is gone. I wonder what has happened to the Haitian nurse in Lexington who looked after my mother in her old age?She probably had Temporary Protected Status, which has just been cancelled abruptly by Trump. She can’t go home, it’s too violent there. Where will she go? It isn’t safe here either, any more.
In her poem HOME, Warsan Shire, explains:
“no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well..”
If you, like me, want to change the poisonous narrative right now about immigrants in America, check out the resources of the National Immigration Law Center local immigrant support groups, or your local Indivisible group. Then ask the White supremacists in power now to try living one day in America without any immigrants!