My wife and I sent our spittle to one of the DNA sites and received the results we had expected. My family had come to this country in about 1750 from Scotland to Connecticut and started farming. They were still farming when my father was born. He was raised on a dairy farm in central New York. He and his siblings left farming for other occupations. My wife had a different story as her mother immigrated from Italy as a child. Her father was born in the US but taken back to Italy when a baby. His father died in a coal mining accident in the US, so he was raised by his mother and stepfather in Italy until he was 18. He came back to the US to live in Morgantown, WV, where he married and had 3 daughters. So as you can see, my family is a mixed immigration family with a first generation American married to a husband whose family has been here over 250 years.
Another immigrant in our family was a war bride brought to the US after WWII. She was from Vienna, Austria, and my cousin spent 2 years to get her here. She arrived at Ellis Island and was detained about a week before being allowed to meet her husband-to-be. She became one of the family very quickly, and except for her accent it was forgotten that she had ever lived anywhere else.
We have an immigrant problem in our country now, and it is between legal and illegal. For many years, people have been crossing the Southwestern border without proper immigration status and legality. When I was a school student, we learned that they were called “wet backs” because many of them crossed the Rio Grande River between the US and Mexico. It is, also, interesting that my aunt Sarah and her husband in California had a job bringing in Mexican farm workers to harvest crops and work the many truck farms. It was a guest worker program that worked. Most of the workers returned to Mexico when the work was over to return the next year. This was after the war and into the late ’50s and early ’60s. There is still a guest worker program, and some of the landscapers in my area bring in Mexican men to work during the summer after which they return to Mexico. Why this is not used more frequently I do not know, but sneaking into the US illegally seems to be the preferred method of getting here. It is illegal, and those involved have committed a crime. Many on the left do not want to separate legal from illegal, but my family and my wife’s family did it legally as did my cousin.
It is now more common that families and children are claiming asylum as they enter the US with those entering legally. They are held as family units until seeing a judge, and those entering illegally are being detained as criminals until they can see a judge for their plea. Entering at a port of entry is the legal way and saves the family a lot of grief, but many try it illegally and are sometimes separated. Again there is a political divide with the Democrats wanting open borders and Republicans wanting a secure border that defines a country. There are a lot of “what ifs” connected with the open border idea. What about the criminal element trying to enter or the drug smuggler? With an open border there is no answer to these questions. There are also millions of Africans and Asians who would like asylum in the US along with many in South America. Where do we put these millions that we would receive if the borders were open to everyone? We could double our population in a few years with foreign speaking people, many without the skills to enter the work force. This is something to think about in the “open border” scenario.
Protecting the borders and allowing only those who are entering legally would make a lot more room for the people who are truly seeking asylum, with the ability to handle them without looking for criminals and smugglers. It would also define the US as a nation again as listed on the maps of the world rather than an erased border between the US and Mexico like the one we have now. Treating all people with dignity would be easier if only those being allowed in were doing it legally and not made up of groups and mobs being smuggled across the border. We are the only country in the world that lets people in without some type of jail time or immediate expulsion. In many of the countries of the world, a person crossing a border illegally might be shot.
There has to be a way that we can protect our borders and still be compassionate towards those who need help to maintain their existence. We have done it before, and we can do it again.
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