My Thoughts on Illegal Aliens

Have you ever lived in terror?  Heart stopping, fear-for-your-life terror?

                I never have, not in real life.  I’ve only experienced that kind of terror in my dreams.  Echoes of a past life, or just imagination, whatever the cause, I always wake up and the feeling dissipates.  Thankfully.

                What if you couldn’t wake up?  What if your life was one long nightmare?

                That feeling, that suffocating, can-hardly-draw-a-breath, frozen-in-place-feeling, is why I support allowing illegal aliens to stay in this country.  Because no one should have to live with that feeling.

                I understand the arguments against allowing illegal aliens to stay in the country.  I even agree up to a certain point.  Our laws exist for a reason, and people who enter our country need to abide by them, or they can’t stay.  That’s common sense.  And it logically follows that, just by being in our country, illegal aliens have already broken our laws.  Therefore, they can’t stay.

                But our country discerns between levels of offenses.  Who among us has not broken a traffic law?  We’re not treated the same as say, a murderer.  People don’t regard those that get tickets as criminals.  If they did, we’d all be in prison.  Not every person who commits a crime is a criminal. 

                I can only imagine the level of desperation a person must feel to flee their country and go to a strange place where they are not wanted.  Where they don’t speak the language, and dwell in the shadows to avoid discovery.

                Life as an illegal alien is not an easy one, despite what people believe.  They don’t receive welfare.  They’re afraid of deportation.  They’re not breaking cover and giving their address to government agencies to collect benefits.  They’re trying to avoid detection. They don’t hang around the polls on election day trying to vote Democrat.  Those are myths drawn from the same poison well that once insisted Jews drank the blood of Christian babies.  Propaganda designed to incite hatred against a specific group.  The people spreading it are the same ones who spread rumors in middle school. 

                Illegal aliens fled their countries because they were desperate and didn’t know what else to do.  They want to survive.  They want their children to have a better life.  And yes, some crossed the border while pregnant, so their child would be born a US citizen.  Because they want their child to live a life free from terror and fear.

                Our forefathers wanted the same things for us.

                My great-great-grandfather, Mason Heuston, was fleeing starvation when he arrived in Boston in 1848.  The potato famines decimated Ireland.  Rich British landlords were seizing properties that had been in families for generations, tossing the inhabitants out into the cold.  There were literally corpses lying in the streets.   Like hundreds of thousands of Irish, Mason fled the specter of certain death and hopped a ship headed to the promised land.

                Contrary to popular belief, the United States was not welcoming the Irish with open arms.  The Know-Nothing party, the anti-Irish 19^th century version of the Ku Klux Klan, made their hatred of the newcomers clear by burning churches and threatening factories that hired them.  My mother told me stories of her great-grandmother, who learned to speak without an Irish accent and snuck out of the house where she worked as a governess to go to mass.  She wouldn’t have been employed otherwise. 

                Hatred of immigrants is nothing new.  How easily we forget that it was once directed at us, our people.

                Boston newspapers bemoaned the ranks of unwashed Irish crowded into the tenements of Charlestown, dirty Papists that bred like vermin.  They wrung their hands regarding the crime that afflicted the area, decrying the Irishmen as brutes and the women as loose and immoral.  Even when I was a small child living there in the seventies, it was well known that the area was a no-go zone for people who didn’t belong, that Townies looked and spoke a certain way that identified them to one another. Their clannishness was a direct result of the hatred and lack of understanding directed at them for much of their existence in the United States.  Still, my family was able to move and blend into a new landscape seamlessly, our differences erased by over a hundred years of Americanization. 

                One hundred seventy years later, the descendants of those Irish refugees are snarling at the latest crop of immigrants seeking asylum on our not-so-welcoming shores.  They say things like, “my ancestors came here the right way,” which is not the case.   Our ancestors didn’t have to jump through the same hoops as immigrants today.  If they did, none of us would be here.

                There is no real difference between the immigrants that came here then, and the ones coming here now.  They come because they’re desperate, so desperate that being sentenced to a lifetime of slinking under the radar is preferable to staying put.  They came because more than anything they want their kids to grow up in a place where you’re not in fear of your life and death doesn’t stalk you around every corner.  They were willing to sacrifice their own comfort and stability for that.  And we’re spitting in their face.  We’re forgetting where we came from, who we came from.  People just like them.

                This past weekend, I got into it with a guy I vaguely remember from college over Facebook.  When I looked at his profile, I saw that he had posted at least seventy memes expressing hatred towards illegal aliens in a seventy-two-hour period.  That level of obsessive hatred is alarming and breathtaking, particularly since he’s from the Potsdam, New York area, where we both attended college.  I haven’t been there lately, but I doubt it’s been overrun with illegal aliens since my 2010 visit.  Last time I checked, cows outnumbered people.   Has he even ever encountered an illegal alien?  I find that unlikely.  So where is all this anger and hate coming from?  How can you hate a group of people you don’t even know and who has never done anything to you?

                One thing I’ve learned in my forty-three years of life is people are people, whether black or white, Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, etc.  We’re all human, and subject to the same range of human behavior.  And humans can suck.  In every group of people, no matter what your religion, race, political affiliation, or Sam’s Club Status, you will have liars, criminals, and bad apples.

                Americans are not exempt from this, and neither are illegal aliens.  Are there illegal aliens who are murderers, rapists, and thieves?  Yes.  And there are Americans who are all those things, too.  Our prisons are overflowing with them.  We’re on a slippery slope when we assign characteristics that unfortunately exist within the spectrum of human nature and claim that one group exhibits them more than everyone else.  We’re lying to ourselves if we believe that’s true.

                Back in the nineteenth century, the ghettoes overflowing with Irish refugees were crime ridden.  That’s a fact.  They were crime ridden not because the people were Irish, although that’s what many Americans believed at the time.   They were crime ridden because anywhere there are large amounts of people of limited resources sharing limited space, you will have crime.  If one out of a hundred people is a criminal, and you shove twenty thousand people into a couple of streets, you now have two hundred criminals in one small area.  You don’t have a lot of crime because of religion or ethnicity or citizen status, you have a lot of crime because when you shove a lot of people together, your percentage of criminals rises. And you also just made it easier for them to find each other and hang out.

                The attitude I find most concerning is the one of superiority emanating from Americans who have never experienced anything close to the terror and poverty many of these immigrants are fleeing.  They turn their faces away and refuse to have compassion, and they ignore the fact that these people are people. They’re human beings.  It’s easier to just dismiss them as criminals and create a narrative that they are not the same as us.  They’re other. Different. 

                They want the same things as the rest of us.  Safety.  A warm place to call home.  Food.  Not to live in fear.  Most of us have had that our whole lives.  How would we feel if it were taken away?  A few generations ago, we were in their shoes.  Don’t treat them worse than our ancestors were treated.   We must learn from our past mistakes and evolve as a society.  This is a nation built from immigrants seeking a better life.  We must not forget our ideals.  Let’s become the America we’ve always dreamed we were.