This is Immigration

by Diane Petryk

July 14, 2024

While starting to write about immigration and the violent reaction of some to a constant stream of asylum seekers, I recalled all the fretting about Vietnamese refugees coming to America in the mid-1970s.

I wrote: “Remember the fall of Saigon in 1975? People clinging to the outside of planes, so desperate were they to get to the United States. Americans wrung their hands. So many Vietnamese! Why should we have to take so many? Where will they go? About 120,000 came to the United States in that initial migration and then there was Operation Babylift, which rescued 3,300 children; then between 1980 and 1994, the United Nations brought in 500,000 additional refugees. The Migration Policy Institute estimates 1.37 million Vietnamese refugees came to the U.S. Where did they all go? Many settled in California, but overall, you don't see them, they are completely assimilated. Does anyone even know a Vietnamese?”

I was being facetious of course, just trying to show how immigration problems can disappear. I had just written that sentence yesterday when I opened the door to my Airbnb guests at my son's house in upstate New York. They were Vietnamese -- Thoa and Andy, mother and son. I soon heard their story. Thoa's brother had to escape from Saigon because their father worked as a photographer for American correspondents during the war. The communists didn't like that. Her brother, Toan, was picked up by a Norwegian boat and taken to Norway. After years of language learning and work, Toan was able to sponsor Thoa and she went to Norway in the mid-1980s, and from there to the United States, setting in Massachusetts. Andy was born there the year Toy Story 2 came out. Both mother and son are employed American citizens.

Andy arranged this trip to attend an event at the Star Trek Original Set Tour in Ticonderoga, NY. He had a ticket to a William Shatner talk.

I showed him my Star Trek room and we talked TOS, TNG, VOY, Strange New Worlds and episodes therein into the evening. I showed him his absent host's Spock costume from when he was in 5th grade. We had a fine time.

That's immigration.

The centerpiece – or showpiece – of Donald Trump's re-election campaign is the demonization of immigrants. He promises to deport 15-20 million illegal aliens. He claims immigrants are job stealers, criminals, rapists and are “poisoning the blood of the nation.” Demonization of a large group of people, with the promise of their eradication “...if only you will vote for me” is a fascist technique. Hitler made it work targeting Jews. It seems to work to attract a following, but nevertheless is neither logical, moral, or feasible.

It is based on fallacies so big we should no longer be fooled by them.

Job stealers? Immigrants often work the jobs that others won't take and for less pay, making employers more profitable so they can hire you, perhaps. Rapists, etc? There is no link between increases in unlawful immigration and violent or property crime, according to Robert Pozen, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Now grasp this: Immigrants in the country unlawfully nevertheless work and pay Social Security tax, but they can never collect benefits. So if you like your Social Security, thank an illegal immigrant for shoring up the funding.

When did we start to ignore the poem on the Statue of Liberty – “...give us your huddled masses yearning to be free” – and think more like, “I'm here, now pull up the drawbridge.”?

Unless you're a Native American, you're from an immigrant family. People yearning to be free are just like us.

I am a third generation immigrant. I can see my Ukrainian great-grandparents in photos. In the Ukraine, my paternal great-grandmother, posing in her best clothes for a rare picture, was barefooted. She raised $100 by selling a cow and sent her oldest daughter to America. The teenage daughter and her girlfriend had one shawl between them for covering over them in the steerage bunk. She was my grandmother, Anna Petryk, who went to work, at 17, in textile mills in Massachusetts and New Hampshire just before WWI. In the 1950s, a hernia ended her wage-earning life after 15 years on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. She still worked, growing vegetables for an entire neighborhood on Detroit's west side. Her son, my father, worked straightening heat- treated steel in a shop where just looking inside the door seemed like arrival at the gates of Hell. Then a great Land Grant university, Michigan State, accepted his daughter and she earned two college degrees.

That's immigration.

House Republicans just released a report claiming that illegal immigration costs $451 billion a year, taking into consideration health care, law enforcement, education and housing, among other things. But the House GOP has a candidate to support. FAIR, the Michigan-founded Federation for American Immigration Reform, puts the figure at $150.7 billion. But the Southern Poverty Law Center calls them a hate group. So who knows the true cost?

But we do know this:

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the current surge in migration will boost the US economy by about $7 trillion over the next decade. They announced that Wednesday, according to Bloomberg news.

If Trump could deport the targeted 15 to 20 million illegals, that would shrink the labor force by 6.4 percent over twenty years with a trillion a half-dollar loss in GDP, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Also, by one calculation, it says, deporting 1 million immigrants would lead to 88,000 additional employment losses by other Americans. The opposite action, it says, giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, would add a trillion or more to GDP. Moreover, it would increase the earnings of all Americans by $625 billion and create an average of 145,000 new jobs per year.

No such blessings if Trump succeeds. Unlikely, first because there are only an estimated 10 million illegal migrants. And remember, he couldn't even build more than 52 miles of border wall, but say he tries.

You don't just kick them over the border. Paperwork is required to determine their status, if nothing else, and a court ruling. Of course Hitler's troops didn't bother with such niceties when shoveling Jews into cattle cars, but let's just say we haven't sunk that low yet. We would try to send them home, however dangerous that may be for them. But some country has to be willing to receive them and that country has to be asked. So while illegals may be rounded up – by the National Guard, Trump says – they will have to be housed somewhere while Homeland Security or some agency sends a note to their homeland. While waiting for the RSVP, Uncle Sam will have to house the illegals. They will have to be concentrated in a place where they can be guarded – a concentration camp – and fed. There will be medical needs. Our shame over the Japanese internment of WWII shouldn't bother anyone, should it?

Will they be abused? Trump has repeatedly called for police to rough up suspects – before they are even charged with a crime. Abuse is inevitable. We already abused babies and children, tearing them from their parents' arms at the southern border. Could abusing immigrants we don't like be a stretch?

MAGA enthusiasts will cheer. Abuse and violence is their thing. Melania Trump walked to a border crossing jail wearing a coat that, on the back, said “I don't really care, do you?” I do care. We know she doesn't.

My Vietnamese guests came back from Ticonderoga late yesterday. Andy brought me his picture with William Shatner. We talked about a poster of Spock with the quotation, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's mantra, “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.”

Star Trek always envisioned a positive future for mankind.

Andy Phan of Worcester, MA, with William Shatner at the Star Trek Original Set Tour in Ticonderoga, NY July 13, 2024.

This is the second in a series called Avoiding Catastrophe.

Author Diane Petryk can be reached at bloomplanet@gmail.com.