The Daily Item
August 20, 2024
One April evening back in 2017, my wife and I found ourselves on a once-in-a-lifetime cruise. Not too many hours earlier, we had been in Barcelona, and now it was night on the Mediterranean Sea. The ocean was calm, and the wind but a whisper. The moon was nearly full, and its light shimmered on the waves.
My wife, Willow, commented on the moment’s beauty. She was right; she usually is. But ever the realist, I replied that however peaceful the moment, somewhere beyond our moment, beyond our view, others were bobbing among the waves on dying boats praying that their god or any god would protect them through to Europe and a future more filled with hope than had been their pasts. Our luxury cruise ship sailed on, oblivious to the struggles of the night’s other travelers.
We live in difficult times. War, famine, disease, political upheavals, and yes, climate change have brought desperately poor people to a point where, to save their lives and the lives of their children, home becomes a fading memory as hope beckons them to take the road to someplace else. Making the lives of impoverished immigrants worse, however, seems to be what some of us do so well. We have gotten oh-so good at branding immigrants as drug dealers, terrorists, rapists, invaders and general cheats while our ship sails on. Overwhelmingly, most immigrants are two things. They are poor, and they are desperate.
The other evening, I was watching the Olympics, and after one of the floor exercises, I said under my breath, “Beautiful.” The woman I was watching was Simone Biles, now the world’s most well-known athlete and a person of color. Now, back before a few of us branded Black history as Critical Race Theory on the path toward “let us forget about that chapter of history,” we knew that millions of Africans found themselves kidnapped from their homes and forced to immigrate to work the fields of European Americans.
Simone Biles is the descendent of immigrants from long past. Much of the 594-member U.S. Olympic team is rooted in a past beyond America’s shores. The team’s makeup includes 3.7% foreign-born with another 7% being children of recent immigrants or first-generation Americans. Most of the remainder are descended from those who chose America generations ago or were forcefully relocated to this land. We truly are a nation of immigrants, and we are beautiful.
If some of our politicians had their way, part of this American team would not be in Paris, let alone call America home. We are Americans not by our skin color, let alone by the lands of our parents or own birth, but rather by the creed we live by — life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. We talked biblically of being a city on the hill, a shining light to the world. A place of hope.
For those of us who would fence out the world, who are you?
Joseph R. Fischer
Northumberland