"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
My understanding of immigrants was formed many years ago when I was a youngster bumming around the Southwest with a backpack and tent, living in tramp camps and working out of day labor pools with a couple of friends that I had met on the road/rails. The Mexican immigrants without papers would stand on the corner down the street from the labor pool office waiting for people in pickups to come by and give them some work for the day.
The work you got out of these day labor pools was liable to be anything, with one thing in common, hard manual labor. A lot of the work was on construction sites where there was both undocumented and documented workers although the two groups mostly stayed to themselves. I started to notice over time that a lot of the building trades had a Mexican American who spoke fluent Spanish to run the Mexican crews. Now I was a manual laborer my whole life, farms, factories, and foundries. I have always thought of myself as a good worker, but I’m here to tell ya, The blistering pace set by the Mexicans all day long put this white boy to shame. You can’t blame people for hiring them, you get twice the work at half the price.
It started with a drink of water.
One blazing hot summer day on a construction site in Utah, we were taking our afternoon 10 minute break. We were digging trenches for the water/ sewer lines with picks and shovels where the backhoe couldn’t get to. We had brought water jugs with us but the Mexicans hadn’t. Come to find out it was because they had no easy access to water where their camp was. They had to go a long way to fetch water. Now I bet there are many Republicans that would drink their water in front of people desperate for a drink and feel good about doing it. But I’m no Republican.
There were five or six of them. Us white boys sat on overturned five gallon buckets while the Mexicans squatted. It didn’t look all that comfortable to me, but oh well, to each his own. Only one of them spoke any English at all and one of my buds spoke a little Spanish, so we got by. They seemed really grateful for the water.
Now our 10 minute break was over when the boss said it was and our boss, being a Union Man, decided that 10 minutes really meant a half hour. No argument from us. So we shared our smokes with them too and although I had seen the Mexican immigrants every day this was the first time I had actually talked to any of them. I was curious about what life was like in Mexico and asked some questions.
He told me in broken English about being part of a large family who were so poor that his mother struggled every day to provide the family with one meal. One meal per day, that’s it. And it was always the same thing, day after day. “Sometimes we had beans with our tortillas, sometimes we didn’t.” Those words have stayed with me all these years. It’s all I need to know about Immigration. All they want are beans with their tortillas, that’s all it is.