On Immigration Policy

Over the years I have listened to arguments over immigration from many different perspectives. As an immigrant myself (I was six years old when my parents immigrated from Germany), the perspectives that resonate with me are those expressed by first or second generation arrivals.

First, my story. My father was from a small village in southern Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union. Germans had settled the region in the early eighteen hundreds with land grants provided by the Russian government, and they had become successful farmers. When Josef Stalin ascended to the helm of the Soviet government, he instituted a series of five year plans aimed at industrializing the country. Out of this came the collectivization of land, which meant that the landowners were required to cede their land and assets to the government, which turned agriculture into a monopolistic enterprise. Instead of working their individual farms and trying to eke out a profit, the farmers gave up their possessions and became mere employees of the government. The plan was met with wide-spread resistance throughout the country, including in the German communities. Those that resisted, or expressed less-than-enthusiastic support, were arrested, sent to labor camps in far-off Siberia or northern Russia, or executed. This happened to my grandfather and great grandfather.

World War II offered a hope for the German settlers of Ukraine. When Germany and their allies occupied the region, the native Germans were treated as the vanguard of a new German nation. My father and his brothers enlisted in the German army to fight against their communist oppressors. When the German army was defeated, my father was captured and sent to an American prisoner of war camp in southern Germany. His brothers found themselves on the eastern front. One was sent to the northern Ural mountains to work in the iron mines and the other ended up serving a twenty five year sentence in a Soviet prison.

When my father was released from the POW Camp, he was sent to another camp for refugees, where he met up with relatives who had been evacuated from his village in Ukraine. There was no hope of going back to his village, so he waited in the camp while the refugee agency looked for a home in another country. After brief stints in England and Belgium, he returned to Germany, where he would meet my mother. They were married and moved in with her parents. He took jobs as a concrete laborer and then a truck mechanic while my mother worked as a sales clerk in a grocery store. After eight years of living in two rooms of my grandparents' home with their three sons, they still yearned for a better life. By this time relatives from dad's village had been able to immigrate to the United States. The chain had started in the late 1800’s, before the revolution, when one of my great-grandfather’s brothers had decided to immigrate to Nebraska and had obtained land through the Homestead act. In 1908 he was joined by his nephew, who eventually settled in North Texas. This nephew, a brother of my grandfather, then sponsored my father’s cousin and her husband, who had also been living in the refugee camp. This cousin then sponsored my family, who immigrated to north Texas in 1960. This was a classic case of ‘chain migration’, denounced under the Trump administration, in which the first arriving immigrant applies for other family members, and can result in multiple generations of immigrants allowed into the United States.

In the immigration debate, there should be no argument about illegal immigration. It’s wrong, plain and simple. That being said, it’s nearly impossible to prevent. All countries attempt to prevent it, some more humanely that others. Truth be told, if someone is desperate enough to escape their homeland, they will endure any risk. I know of someone who arrived on our shores on a raft with his mother as a young boy. He has been here over forty years, raised a family, works a regular job, and has never been in trouble with the law. Others risk their lives, pay smugglers exorbitant fees, and risk imprisonment and deportation once they arrive. It’s no different in Europe. During my travels in Europe, I constantly see immigration officials board the trains at border crossings to check passengers’ documentation. This in itself does not prevent illegal individuals from simply disembarking at the last station and walking through the woods and crossing the border. Of course this means that they will forever be at risk of arrest and deportation, but for some the risk is worth it. Vast expanses of water serve as a natural barrier, but even then we find desperate refugees risking their lives in appalling conditions.

As for legal immigration, the debate revolves around how many and what sort of demographic should be allowed. The Trump administration has expressed a preference for white-skinned, well-educated young adults, once even calling out Sweden as an ideal candidate. Of course, Swedes have it quite well in their own country, and one would not find a large number willing to come here. If an education test were applied to my parents, they wouldn’t have qualified. In fact, I would venture to guess that ninety percent of our immigrant forefathers would never have qualified. The school in my father’s village was shut down due to a lack of teachers, and he ended up with an equivalent of something like a fourth grade education. My mother had eight years of formal schooling, followed by some technical training in shopkeeping, leading to her work as a cashier. They had no money when they came to America. Mom found a job in a Levi’s jeans factory sewing blue jeans, and later on took jobs cleaning houses and working in the local school cafeteria. My father worked as a mechanic, concrete laborer and a millwright in a factory before retiring.

Immigrants from what we would deem as ‘first world countries’ will generally fall into the well-educated category, arrive with some level of financial means, and would soon be able to fit into society and thereby stay off of our welfare rolls. These immigrants have gone through rigorous screening, and have likely prepared themselves for the transition by studying our language and culture. Some will be inclined to resent fellow immigrants who have come in illegally or as refugees under a quota system, who have not learned the language and culture, and who have a propensity to stay within their own ethnic groups. Nevertheless this describes the overwhelming numbers of our immigrants, be it Irish, Italian, German and more recently Latin, Asian and Middle-eastern. It takes several generations for the assimilation into the greater society to take place. When the assimilation is slowed, ethnic tensions increase. In the end, however, assimilation does happen. I see first hand suburban communities with Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, and even Arabic immigrants living next door to second, third and fourth generation Americans.

If our immigration policy is skewed highly to the well-educated and financially secure, an imbalance occurs in the working population. It is no secret that the lowest tier jobs in this country are dominated by recent immigrants, from agriculture and construction to cleaning, janitorial and food services – jobs not desirable to middle-class American citizens. Bottom-line, we need unskilled immigrants as well as the educated.

The solution could very well mean that we need to offer language and job training, as well as civic education. This means they need to learn our language, laws and systems of governance - not from their neighbors but from a structured curriculum. If this were done, the assimilation process might occur quicker and less dramatically.