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The new people Kick the Ladder, SadieBy Rick Horowitz
My mother loved to tell this one: One of her neighbor ladies down in Florida, just back from the stores and she's complaining about the help. They barely speak English!, the neighbor lady is saying. And then, in the very next sentence, the very same neighbor lady, reminiscing about the good old days and how much easier shopping was back then. You walked into a store back then, the neighbor lady is saying, and all the shopkeepers spoke Yiddish! Translation? What we do is normal. What they do is foreign. Alternate translation? It was better before they showed up. Whoever they happen to be. We're talking immigration, of course, and anybody who tells you this is an easy one is delusional -- or hoping that you are. It's a mess is what it is, in multiple layers. You've got your labor-pool issues and your living-wage issues, your pick-the-crop issues and your enforce-the-law issues. Mix in family stability and upward mobility and national security and -- Did I mention politics? There's just the tiniest nugget of politics involved here, too. That's hardly surprising; elections are just around the corner, after all, with more elections just around the corner after that one. (If you play it right, elections are always just around the corner.) Millions of voters are up for grabs, and maybe even up for locking in as Democrats or Republicans for a generation or more. Serious business. So you can understand why emotions are running high -- people taking to the streets, and to the microphones. But what keeps tugging at me are the ladders. You know the ladders, don't you? They're the things you climb to get over the wall. And they're the things that, as soon as you and yours have made it over the wall, you're happy to kick aside to keep the rabble out. I catch glimpses of the ladders in the darker corners of the immigration fight. We don't like what's happening to our country, certain people say. We don't like the way things are changing -- the way they're changing things, all these new arrivals. It's time to crack down. Time to tighten up. And I wonder: Are we hard-wired to forget? To forget that once upon a time, somewhere along the line, we were the new arrivals? Resented? Exploited? Dehumanized? Feared? Is it somehow an essential part of the assimilation process? To start thinking you've been here forever? Or maybe it's simply a rite of passage: To prove that you've become a true American, first you have to find someone who's even less of an American than you are. Find him, and point at him -- preferably while shouting. It's been going on for centuries, of course, right here in the land of the free (and the home of the slave). The English weren't crazy about the French, and they stomped all over the Irish. The Germans looked down their noses at the Poles and the Russians, who had no love for the Greeks or the Italians, who could have done perfectly well without the Chinese, who weren't exactly fans of the Koreans. And let's not overlook the boatloads of various Africans, or the Scandinavians, or the Cubans, or the Vietnamese, or the Mexicans, or the Iranians, or the Dominicans, or the... Just one big happy family, right? It's not that I want people dwelling on it -- it won't help to have everyone playing multiple rounds of "We Had It Worse Than You Did." But something less than total amnesia would be nice, if only to recall the time when we were the ones who had just arrived, when we were the ones who were changing things, and when the people who got here before we did didn't like it one bit. Something to remember as the argument rages on. Something to remember the next time you hear the help speaking Spanish. Posted 3/28/06. Tell
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Rick Horowitz
