Immigrants: We Get the Job Done

In 1985, with only a suitcase and $200, my father left India to join my mother in the U.S. They exchanged their jobs, friends, and families for a life of dire poverty. My mother had once been an anesthesiologist at a prominent hospital in Chennai; my father had trained in neurology and neurosurgery. Now they found themselves unable to afford health insurance for my pregnant mother or, later, diapers for their infant son. Out of sheer desperation, my father took a strenuous job at a factory. Still, with their medical degrees and proper documentation, they were the lucky ones; what of their undocumented counterparts?

For undocumented immigrants, fear has become quotidian. ICE raids, which occur in increasingly abnormal settings, tear communities apart. President Obama may have been “Deporter-in-Chief,” but his successor may outdo him. President Trump’s proposals for an impotent “merit-based” system and a discriminatory ideological test are blatantly xenophobic. Moreover, his plan to build an egregiously expensive wall along the U.S.-Mexico border has been panned by members of his own party, and the newly unveiled VOICE is essentially a witch hunt for undocumented immigrants — despite evidence that they commit fewer crimes than the average legal citizen.

Illegal immigration results from desperation, not malice; a system that encourages legal immigration — which even Republicans acknowledge must be reformed — would assuage fears in immigrant communities. For example, the Bracero Program of the 1950s decreased illegal immigration by about 90%; why trade the demonstrably effective for the unnecessarily punitive?

I recently asked my parents: would you do it all over again? “Under the present circumstances,” my father replied, “if I did not have children and I was not going to have children, I would not have come.” Trump’s immigration plan and the associated rise in racial hate crimes have frightened my parents. They were not so afraid under the Obama administration.

Read the opposing conservative response here.

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