They Are America

EditorialThey Are America
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Published: May 2, 2006
Warnings of a crippling immigrant boycott did not come true yesterday. The economy survived. But what may not survive — we hope — is people‘s willful misunderstanding of the nature of the immigrant-rights movement.
The worst among our citizens and politicians are eager to depict illegal immigrants as criminals, potential terrorists and alien invaders. But what we saw yesterday, in huge, peaceful rallies in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, Denver, New York, Atlanta and other cities, were regular people: the same types of assimilation-minded moms, dads and children we wistfully romanticize on holidays devoted to, say, St. Patrick and Columbus.
If these extraordinarily positive events were a protest of anything, it was the idea of the immigrant as temporary and unwelcome guest worker. The marches flew in the face of theories that undocumented workers want nothing but to labor unnoticed and separate from the nation that employs them to make its meals, trim its hedges and slaughter its beef.
These immigrants, weary of silent servitude, are speaking up and asking for something simple: a chance to work to become citizens, with all the obligations and opportunities that go with it.
Our lawmakers, to their discredit, have erected barriers within barriers, created legal hurdles and bureaucratic hoops, and dangled the opportunity for lowly guest-worker status without the citizenship to go with it. It is an invitation to create a society with a permanent underclass deprived of any ladder to something better. It is a path to creating a different, and lower, vision of our country and ourselves.
It is not only the border-obsessed Minutemen who should be shamed by yesterday‘s joyous outpouring. Lawmakers who have stymied comprehensive immigration reform with stalemated name-calling and cold electoral calculation should listen up. A silent, shadow population is speaking with one voice. The message, aimed at Washington but something the whole country should hear, is clear: We are America. We want to join you.
It‘s a simple message. It should be sinking in by now.
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