By Kevin Hershey
Imagine a middle school girl. She is slightly overweight and doesn't wear quite the right clothes. Nevertheless, the cool girls who aren't overweight and do wear exactly the right clothes take her in and make her one of their own.
Now that she is popular, how does this once homely girl start treating the unpopular girls?
Any of us who can remember middle school would answer that she distanced herself and slowly becomes a mean girl. Why? She is insecure in her new position as "the cool girl" and fears being betrayed by her newer, cooler friends.
This is an all too common phenomena that has been in the back of my mind since I returned from the Moreau Center's Border Plunge this Spring Break.
I thought I had escaped these insecurities and corrupt power dynamics after graduating eight grade, but I saw them resurface on the U.S. Mexico-Border as well as on the UP campus.
I think it is fair to say that while the U.S. is a land of immigrants, it can also be a land of ignorance, bigotry and strong anti-immigrant sentiment. I'd like to point out that many students on this Catholic campus are of Irish, Italian, or Polish descent.
We're better than Mexicans, right? Wrong. Almost everyone who is here, particularly Catholic-dominated ethnicities, was once an immigrant to the U.S. and experienced the same type of hatred and discrimination that Mexicans receive today. Back then, the Italians were violent and the Irish were drunkards. Today, the Mexicans are dirty and lazy.
So what is the difference between us? The difference is that most of us whites have had several generations of predecessors to do the hard work for us, whereas recent immigrants have to start from scratch.
However, many people who have been established in the U.S. for generations are apparently still insecure and paranoid about their place in U.S. society and thus make life harder for immigrants, considering them a lesser class.
Rather than seeing his or her great grandfather in the face of a hardworking Mexican immigrant, many Irish or Italian-Americans choose to see someone dirty, someone who needs to pull themselves up (despite the network of societal barriers that hold them down) or get out.
A culture in which a previously oppressed class gains power and hoards it rather than shares it is no different from the middle school girl culture I discussed earlier. It has the same roots in fear and stereotypes.
In the case of immigration, many Americans and even educated UP students believe that immigrants take over our land, take our jobs and steal our tax dollars. These are all great excuses to mistreat a group of people, but I'd first like to ask, what is our land?
It is important to note that "our land" (also known as Texas in many situations) that immigrants cross onto was indeed Mexico until our government decided to sequester it through violence and force. Now, ironically, our economic policies force Mexicans to cross back into land that was once their ancestor's.
Second, what are our jobs?
I challenge any UP student who really wants to spend 12 hours each day picking tomatoes in the sun for less than minimum wage, scrubbing toilets or wiping someone else's baby's behind, to find the Mexican who took his or her job and ask for it back.
You may be able to make a quarter of your tuition in a year, but at that point you'd be working too much to go to school anyway.
Third, undocumented immigrants pay several million dollars in taxes each year, although many fear using the public hospitals or calling the firefighters that they pay to support.
My experience on the Border Plunge interacting with migrants, those who support them, and those who oppose them made these issues real to me.
One of the most painful things to go through was to eat dinner at a migrant shelter in Mexico with men and women who had sacrificed everything to travel for days by foot across the desert in order to feed their families, only to see a literal cage full of human Mexicans the next day on our visit to Border Patrol headquarters.
I also cannot erase the image of 75 human beings dressed head to toe in chains being processed before a judge as part of our new immigration justice strategy known as Operation Streamline. I have never seen anything like it other than paintings from the African slave trade or one of the bizarre death-eater hunts in "Harry Potter."
Nor can I forget the stories of the thousands of dead bodies found in the desert each year.
I cannot say that I experienced immigration issues firsthand. Even going on a grungy Spring Break trip like the Border Plunge is a major privilege that costs money, time, education, and association with an expensive private school.
However, I can say that I have seen the human face of immigrants and it is important that we remember this.
The next time you see a bumper sticker or sign that says something like "Welcome to America, Now Learn English" think about it from a realistic human perspective.
Think about if you could learn to speak fluent Spanish with a fourth grade education, no family living within thousands of miles, a full time job as a lettuce picker, and three children to support back in your homeland.
After you send a portion of your menial salary back to feed your family as well as allot enough to feed, clothe and house yourself, what are the chances that you will have hundreds of dollars, not to mention the time and literacy to sit down with a Rosetta Stone and learn a brand new language? All it takes is to put yourself in the shoes of another person, but it takes recognizing them as a person before doing that.
Even the most white, upper-class, Christian, heterosexual male on this campus is likely the descendant of an immigrant and therefore must identify with the oppressed deep inside himself. Don't be the middle school girl who rejects her nerdy past just to protect her glamorous new status.
Kevin Hershey is a sophomore Spanish major
