A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES : Community Essay : Migrants: Sure, it’s unsettling for the well-off to intersect with the very poor, but turning away in distaste is no solution. The first step is sensitivity to others’ lives.
They are always there. On a certain street corner of my well-to-do suburb, migrants from Mexico wait for work with a shuffling patience. Every day. They are there on mornings when the California sky is so blue that radio deejays urge commuters to take the nearest exit and head for the beach. I see them, too, on drizzly weekends when the grass in the park is too wet for peewee league soccer practice.
Day after day, in their weathered caps and rumpled jackets, these workers watch and wait. Sometimes a cocksure landscaper in a four-by-four will tell a lucky few to hop in. Sometimes a local homeowner will hire them by pointing toward a weedy slope and mispronouncing trabajo, the Spanish word for work.
I see these workers as I head for the freeway or car-pool my kids to enrichment classes and Scout meetings. And as I sit in my air-conditioned car with its digital dashboard and stereo tape deck, the disparity of our lives is driven home to me.
Though the fact wouldn’t be touted by the Chamber of Commerce, these men are my neighbors. We buy our tortillas from the same wide-aisled grocery store. We ride our bikes through the same intersections. Like me, they see the moon rise over Black Mountain, but their view is from a cardboard lean-to in a hidden canyon, and mine is from an off-white couch in a color-coordinated living room.
Our different perspectives are hard to explain without cliches like “the luck of the draw” or “a twist of fate.” If I had been born in a poor Mexican town where education and opportunity were scarce, I, too, would probably have high-tailed it north, and be standing on the curb right now, hoping to earn my share of calluses and dollars.
And if that dark-haired young man with the droopy mustache had been a child of middle America and grown up with plenty of time for birthday parties, piano lessons and homework, he’d probably be driving past me, listening to the Judds on the radio and telling the kids in the back seat to settle down.
There are people in my community who are rankled by the presence of these strangers. They criticize the priest who says Mass near the migrant camp and the planning board that proposes decent housing for the workers. “Those aliens don’t belong here,” they’ll say. “We should call the Border Patrol and send them back.” And they’ll talk about “our children’s safety” and “health issues.” But I wonder if a large part of their concern isn’t simply aesthetic. Because poverty, you know, can spoil a perfectly good ocean view.
Some people argue that, yes, something should be done, but they’ll point in the direction of large-scale legislative changes and broad bureaucratic solutions--the kind that take years. Possibly decades. And they tell you that donating a pair of work boots today or a bag of rice tomorrow solves nothing. “It’s like treating a multiple fracture with a Band-Aid,” they say.
Maybe they’re right. But I don’t really think so. Solutions, especially to social problems, are never tidy and perfect. But they can only start to work when we begin to see each other as people: the graying man with the mud-splattered sneakers, the young fellow with the sunburned neck, the woman with the jingling car keys.
Sometimes when I’m at the grocery store, I see a few of these men standing together, quietly waiting their turn in the “12 Items Or Less” line. And I wonder what brought them here. Did they cross the border legally or the more dangerous way, darting across the freeway like rookie fullbacks out of the backfield? Does the young man who looks no older than 15 wish he were back in his village? Did the man with the wild eyebrows leave a family behind?
Sentimentality isn’t the solution, but sensitivity is a start. And the answer lies somewhere in the common ground between our shared glances.
