I don’t care if the men in yellow vests who recently paved my street are undocumented immigrants; they did a great job and did it in Baltimore’s heat and humidity.
I don’t care if the bartender who handed me a Guinness the other day speaks English with a South Asian accent; he poured the draft perfectly and served it with a smile. I don’t care what his immigration status is.
Nor that of the women cooking meals in the restaurant’s kitchen.
I assume, as many Americans do, that the nation benefits from the immigrants in our midst. That includes an estimated 11 million who, over decades, entered the country the hard way, through an unauthorized border crossing, often because they were desperate.
I could cite numerous economists who say what should be obvious to anyone who pays attention: Immigrants, documented or not, make our society work; they are part of the reason it grows and thrives. Many have made billions in Social Security contributions for benefits they will never receive.
Forty years ago this summer, when President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, ran for reelection, he said: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” His offer of amnesty pulled 2.7 million people out of the shadows and gave them an opportunity to become citizens.
Now, as Republican Donald Trump runs a third time for president, he proposes the absolute opposite. He has made deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants a centerpiece of his campaign. Never mind that it will require a massive roundup of people who have been living here peaceably for years. Never mind that it will hurt the economy. Never mind that it would erase any sense of official American empathy for the poor and oppressed who have filled the immigrant ranks for generations.
Ali Velshi, the MSNBC host, visited Baltimore in the spring to promote his book, “Small Acts of Courage,” about the migrations of his family going back to India in the 19th century. Velshi’s book left me with an even greater feeling of awe and respect for those who make the decision to leave their homelands.
Being a migrant is incredibly hard. Even for the desperate, it takes courage to move into a new culture, learn a new language and find work while enduring animosity, even violence, just because you are different. Velshi’s family history is an odyssey that runs from the time of the British Raj in India to South Africa during apartheid, then to Kenya to Canada and to the U.S. It’s a remarkable story about a daring and enterprising family.
What’s impressive is Velshi’s journalistic labors to flesh out family legend and lore, to understand what made his ancestors move. “Why Does Anyone Leave Anywhere?” is the title of a chapter in the book.
“I had heard a lot of the stories,” Velshi said in a recent telephone interview. “I knew the facts, but not the why…why those stories came to be, what the motivations were. I wanted to understand what the goal was, whether it was my great grandfather jumping off a ship…”
Jumping off a ship into shark-infested waters in order to reach the coast of what was then Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique. From there, Velshi’s paternal great grandfather, Velshi Keshavjee, hoped to travel to Pretoria, South Africa. What motivated him to take that risk in 1901 was the same thing that motivates migrants today — an escape from poverty and oppression and the hope of a better life.
I appreciate Velshi’s dig into his roots. Intentionally or unintentionally, as time goes by, a lot of first- and second-generation Americans lose interest in their immigrant ancestry and how it relates to immigrants today.
“I’m of a split view on this,” Velshi said. “On one hand, I think we need to change how we think about immigrants and immigration and be a little more grateful to these people who are keeping our work base going and our economy going. There’s all sorts of studies that indicate that, even in the next 10 years, our growth — that will exceed the growth of other similar countries — will be based on immigration. So there’s the economic argument.
“I’ve leaned away from the sentimental argument. But the bottom line is, it’s both. People tell me, ‘These people are only coming here for money, for economic reasons.’ And I’m like, ‘Why did your great grandparents come here exactly?’ They leave for the same reasons — either they’re being oppressed or they’re fleeing conflict or [for] more money, greater prosperity. And you should count our blessings that you live in a place that they want to come to.”
On MSNBC and in his book, Velshi can seem overly optimistic about the prospects for American democracy. That’s a condition he came by honestly. He descends from a long line of men and women who, once oppressed under colonialism, became politically active and valued democracy above all other systems. Whoever claimed immigrants respected our system more than a lot of native-born Americans was not off the mark.
As Velshi puts it: “Cynicism about politics is actually a luxury of those who have never had to experience life without it, and if those people ever truly lost their ability to participate in the system, they’d never take it for granted again.”