My wife and I were on vacation without internet access last week, so I was unable to post about my personal reaction to the tragedy of the Dream Act's defeat last weekend. That defeat struck very close to home for me, because while I'm a white Anglo who was born in this country, my late mother told me a story in the last couple of years of her life that illustrated just how tragic this kind of inhumanity can be.
My mother was born in 1911, and grew up as a Baptist. The minister of the church she attended as a child and teenager had served as a missionary in China, and while living there, he and his wife had adopted a Chinese baby who was an orphan. Upon returning to this country, they brought their adopted daughter with them, and my mother grew up as a good friend of this girl.
The problem was that back then, it wasn't Latinos that the American xenophobes were afraid of; it was the "yellow peril" from China. And apparentely, if you were born in China to Chinese parents, you were precluded from becoming a citizen or being admitted to permanent residence once you were legally an adult, even if you had been adopted by American citizens. As a result, my mother's friend was ordered deported to China once she became an adult.
I had long known the story of the adopted Chinese girl who was the friend of my mother and who had been deported, but it wasn't until the last couple of years of my mother's life that I had heard the rest of the story. By this point, my mother was in the middle stages of Alzheimer's Disease and could remember very little that had happened recently, but often talked about things that had happened in her youth, which she continued to remember quite clearly.
By the time her friend was ordered deported, my mother had decided to become a missionary (plans which changed when she met my father), and was attending the Baptist Missionary Training School in Chicago. (As a completely irrelevant aside, I recently saw an item on the internet accusing this all-female institution of infecting the liberal Baptists with the idea that women might be ordained, or have any leadership position in the church.)
Her friend, upon being ordered deported, had attempted suicide, and had been hospitalized in a mental institution near Chicago for treatment. At some point, she escaped from the institution where she had been hospitalized, called my mother at the Baptist Missionary Training School, and asked for her help. My mother told my wife and me, in an obviously emotional state, that she had called her friend's adoptive parents and told them where her friend was. They then reported that to the mental institution, which returned her to the institution until she could be "cured" sufficiently to be deported to China.
My mother told me that her friend had written to her parents and to my mother for several years after her deportation, describing how bad things were, how difficult it was to get enough to eat, how her health was deteriorating, and how she was getting large sores on her skin. My mother then said, in tears, "and then the letters stopped." And then she asked me, "Do you think I did the right thing by telling her parents where she was?" (For those who are wondering about my response, I lied and told her I thought she had done the only thing she COULD have done, since telling her that I thought she should have helped her friend hide would have accomplished nothing besides making her even more miserable. And besides, without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I'm not sure I would have thought that helping a friend who had attempted suicide to escape from a mental institution was doing them a favor.)
At this point in her life, my mother sometimes forgot that my father (her husband of 49 years) was dead, and frequently forgot which of her siblings were alive and which of them were dead. But she remembered the tragedy that was caused by the deportation of her friend who had really known no country other than this one, and still experienced anguish at the thought that she was in part responsible for that tragedy.
I have no doubt that the failure of the Dream Act will cause tragedies that are little different from the one that haunted my mother almost to the day of her death. I have spent time in small villages in Mexico and Central America, and this much is perfectly clear to me: It's one thing to be in such villages as someone who has spent your life there (as the people I met had done), or to visit there for a short time as a Norteamericano who has a home to return to, but it would another thing entirely to be dumped there as someone who has known nothing other than this country as an adult or older teen, and to know that this was now your only home.
I have no doubt that, if every member of the Senate had been present for the conversation I had with my mother near the end of her life about the deportation of her friend to China, the Dream Act would have passed by a comfortable margin. In fact, if every citizen of this country had been present for that conversation, they would descend on Washington and DEMAND that Congress do the right thing by these young people.
I am convinced that our country will some day do the right thing on this issue, but I weep for those whose lives will be devastated before that day arrives. If there is justice in this world, the members of the Senate who permitted their xenophobia or political cowardice to triumph over their decency on this issue will, near the end of their lives, be haunted by anguish about whether the tragedies caused by their vote can possibly be justified.