I just received yet another email about the evils of today’s immigrants and the scourge they are upon our land. I’m not a great debater. I don’t usually broadcast my opinions. My point here isn’t to piss anyone off. I just want to state my view of the issue. Part of my family has been here since the 1600s, and I’m a third generation Californian, so I figure I have a right to my opinion, at least that’s my excuse. This is not a simple issue, so I’m going to give you some background, to tell you who I am and to explain my position. I come from four distinct families, and I’m going to introduce them to you.

My mother’s mother’s mother was an orphan who came to New York from Germany sometime in the mid-1800s. She married another German and they took a clipper ship around Cape Horn to Northern California, where they bought land, established a ranch and had 11 children. German was spoken at home, but they were good citizens and paid their taxes and farmed their land and got along with their neighbors, who were originally German, French, Portuguese, Mexican, Dutch, Italian, African, Scots-Irish and English. My great-grandmother’s sons went to Europe in WWI and killed Germans in the name of the America that was their home. Many of them were decorated members of the Rainbow Division. Still, it was a time that few of them would speak of, and those that did always had tears in their eyes. Maybe it was just the horrors of an unspeakable war, but I’ve always wondered if they knew they were just kids in uniforms, wondering if it was their own family wearing the other uniforms.

My mother’s father’s family was German and Scots-Irish. Scots-Irish means they were Scottish emigrants who were given land that had been taken away from the native Irish by the English invaders. The potato (now THERE was a nasty immigrant!) famine took care of most of them, so they came here because there was no place else to go. They also became good citizens, marrying German immigrants in Pennsylvania, then traveling across this country in covered wagons. The story is that they picked up a little Klamath Indian baby on the way, and she became my other maternal great-grandmother. I don’t know if it’s true, but I like to think so.

My father’s mother’s family was Irish, English, Welsh and Scottish, and came over sometime in the early 1800s. My dad’s grandmother was born in Missouri in 1865, and married and lived in the part of the country where people were (and are) still proud to call themselves Rebels and Confederates before they call themselves Americans. They eventually moved north and west and ended up marrying into my father’s father’s family.

Now they were the REAL Americans. They had been here since the 1600s, when the English ran them out of Ireland and took their land. Of course they weren’t originally Irish, they were French, but they had married into one of the oldest Irish families and considered themselves as Irish as the turf that warmed their homes,if not more. The two brothers got kicked out and their land was seized by the British crown. One brother went to Denmark, the other to Holland. They both married “foreigners.” Well, they were the immigrants, so I’ll leave it to you to decide just who the foreigners were. Then the brothers tried to get their land back. Of course, that didn’t go well, so they were “transported” to “the colonies” where they settled in Virginia and the Carolinas. That did go well. The Americans, pardon me, the Indians, generally were pretty friendly. Of course the “colonists” didn’t bother to learn the Americans’ languages or customs. They just kept moving west and taking their land away. If the Americans, pardon me, the Indians, didn’t like it, well, they just killed them.

Oddly enough, we suspect that some of those original Americans/Indians absorbed immigrants from Portugal in the 1300s, Norse in the 1000s, Irish in the 700s and even Phoenicians ca. 1000 BC. There have been Phoenician inscriptions and coins found as far south as Brazil, as far north as Massachusetts and as far west as Ohio. There are also reports of blue and green eyed, blond and red haired Indians all the way back to the first settlement times, far more than could be explained by the European immigrants who found them. And we can’t forget that the Asian influence in America was just that, Asian, from immigrants who made their way across land bridges in the north Pacific, paths that no longer exist. I find it fascinating that the closest linguistic relatives to Navajo and Apache are the Athabaskan languages spoken in northwestern America and Canada and the interior of Alaska, and no place in between. Just another odd piece of the puzzle.

Okay, we’re changing the subject now. Let’s move on and address the benefits that we all expect as Americans, fair pay for reasonable work, decent working conditions, the expectation of decent treatment in return for paying our taxes and giving an honest day’s labor. We think of that as distinctly American, but much of it originated in the labor movements of Europe, and the social changes that came out of the mechanical innovations that produced the new Industrial Age and its inhuman factory conditions. Those immigrants came to America and brought the labor movement with them, and the Americans already here benefited from the hard won lessons and victories of the Europeans.

My real point is this: Everyone came from someplace else, since time began. People have always migrated. Emigration and immigration are relative terms. We CAN’T stop it anymore than we can stop people from breathing, nor should we. That is the history of the world and it has made all of us who we are. We’ve all benefited from those who came before us and from those who came after us. The rights that new American immigrants are fighting for are the same rights that we might not have today if earlier immigrants hadn’t brought them from other places. And the odds are that the new Americans will fight for benefits and rights that we haven’t thought of yet, but will become accepted mainstream ideas within the next century.

And who knows what the new Americans will contribute in years to come. I had a friend in high school. She was the oldest of 13 children, all American citizens. Her mother was born and raised in Chicago, an American citizen of Mexican ancestry. Mom was in her 50’s by the time I met the family, and she still hadn’t learned English. Oooh, BAD! But they raised 13 GOOD Americans, hard working, well educated, and always contributing to their family and their country. Mom was grateful to be American and so were her children. And they were proudly raised speaking Spanish AND English and eating Mexican food. They were Americans, but they were their own breed of Americans, forging their own path through the culture. Their children will do their own living and changing, but that heritage will always be a part of them.

Most of us wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t been forced to come, whether by governments and laws, poverty and starvation, capture and kidnap or escape, or just having no place else to go. Sometimes it was just wanderlust and curiosity. Frequently it was because someone wanted a better life for their children, a universal desire. That’s the way of the world. It has always been thus, and it will always be thus.

Do you think maybe there’s a chance some day we can accept that fact and find a way to work together for ALL of us to have a better place to live? Governments have never done that, only people have. I hope that someday we can remember who we were, and who we wanted to be. And maybe then we can make it all work for everyone. We’re more related than we like to realize and we can only increase who we each and all are by finally accepting that fact.

P.S. By the way, according to the bottom paragraph of the email I received, it was sent while the writer was at work. I suppose it was break time, or lunch time, and I’m sure they reimbursed their employer for the cost of the internet connection. I mean fair and honest is the American way, right?