the little foxes

I dearly wish someone would explain why I should be all upset over the fact that people are coming into this country illegally.

I'm sorry, but I just can't get up the outrage, other than to be upset that people sometimes die in horrible ways because they are desperate.

I knew a man who was an illegal immigrant once. I taught him writing at night school. He held down three different jobs and had a daughter who was an undergraduate at a distinguished university in my city. When she started school, he decided, there and then, that he was going to go to college too--to encourage her, and maybe, too, to show her that her old man was no slouch in the smarts department.

(Of course, the Staircase Witch knows that one need not have a degree of any sort to prove one's mental mettle, and that many degrees are utterly worthless for this purpose.)

Anyhow: he was my best and favorite student. And he took a full load. I don't know how he did it. I don't think he slept. It was a little scary. Other students whined about the reading and tried to fake their way through it during class discussion; he showed me copious notes. I asked for five pages, he gave me ten (which I made him cut down to five, explaining that sometimes brevity was a requirement, but I was still impressed). English was his second language and he was always, always trying to improve it. He was diligent, he had perfect attendance, and he was a really, really nice fellow. And afterwards, when my self-satisfied whitebread nineteen-year-olds from their comfortable suburban homes who'd never done more than earn CD money working part-time at the Dairy Queen whined about the hardship of juggling three whole classes during a semester, I'd always bring up the subject of Joaquin.

Joaquin is the person of whom the anti-immigration people are most afraid. I think it's because they are more like the comfortable, socialist French they despise than they would like to believe. They have grown complacent, obese, lazy, self-entitled. They want the good life, without work: their hideous, vinyl-sided McMansions, their fully-equipped minivans, their flat-screen TVs, their effortless sinecures. Joaquin wants to work. He wants to prove himself to us; he wants to prove that, dammit, despite being forty-seven and having done minimum-wage work all his life, he's just as smart as us, and even smarter. He is full of hope and pride and determination for his children. He is the engine of the American economy, and has always been.

My ancestors were immigrants. On my father's side, they were on the run from the Puritans, and they settled calmly in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and built farms and sent a son to a college in Massachusetts to become a clergyman. They were shunned by their neighbors. Oh, later they would make money and have university buildings named after them and so forth, and a great-great-great-granddaughter might be approached to join the DAR (which she would decline) but they were still immigrants.

On my mother's side, they were also immigrants, but more recent. They were refugees from another third-world country broken by civil unrest--dark-haired, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed. My grandmother was a beautiful girl full of tuberculosis and despair. Barefoot she and her sister walked to school, pelted by clods of dirt and howls of "little black Irish bitches!" My mother, full of remembrance and bitterness, would send me to school on St. Patrick's Day in an orange turtleneck. The descendants of their blond-haired, German-surnamed tormentors would ridicule me for not wearing green. "Aren't you Irish?" they would gape. Silly idiots, who were not, would never know what it was like to be other, to be sub-other: there were two kinds of Irish, and we were the orange kind.

Last year X and I visited the deserted cities of those who were here first. We wandered through the restored rooms and kivas and wondered at the beauty of their geometric complexity. We walked desolate miles of sage and Mormon tea to a sheltered overhang where someone had watched the supernova of 1066 and carved its memory into the overhang of the cliff. We sat there in the cool shade of the cliff and pondered that they had believed in their own permanence, as did we, and in that faith and in the determination to be permanent lay the seeds of their destruction. When had the panic begun? When had the broad, expansive plazas been replaced by fortresses and lookout towers? When had largesse been replaced by petty hoarding? When did corruption at the top turn those farther down against one another, the have-littles against the have-lesses? When were they forced to turn away altogether from that beautiful, remote, violent phenomenon in the sky forever? When did the last astronomer wander away, the last artist starve? When was beauty finally killed by self-preservation?

Oh, silly, silly people who think that a wall will keep out the immigrants, the Joaquins who are our salvation. Silly people, who think that they can cheat death by denying life to others, to whom beauty and civilization and dignity are rendered utterly invisible by fear and greed. Our time will come, and you will disappear whimpering and scrabbling into the night to be contemplated by a remote culture who will shake its head at your petty territoriality as it defends its own.