Also, just a sideline to discuss immigration in general, philosophically, because it's come up twice in the past few days in our family.
First, took my old man out for his birthday this weekend. Now that he's alone, he's doing a lot of reminiscing, and wants to talk about family history and whatnot. So he got talking about his parents, including the chapter where my grandfather and his family fled CDMX under a flag of truce during the revolution, probably around 1912-13. They were loosely affiliated with the regime, and had a price on their heads, so they hauled ass with what they could get in a wagon and headed north. My great grandfather knew a man he'd done business with in Del Rio. He reached out to him when they reached the crossing. The man -- god knows who it was -- was an angel to my family. He had an extra small house that was unoccupied, and he told my family they could stay there as long as they needed to. And they did. They eventually got jobs, paid rent, etc., although they never moved back to CDMX. When the heat died down, and my grandfather was older and working in Del Rio, he would eventually go back to visit, and ended up buying a ranch in northern Mexico and moving his family (including my to-be-born dad) there.
So, bottom line....a chunk of my family arrived in Texas literally as refugees fleeing a war, just over 100 years ago. They found safety and shelter here, provided to them by one Texan in particular. It provided them a launching pad to rebuild their lives, and provide for the next generations. I am a grandson of not just immigrants, but a refugee.
And the second story was the message from my son today, in Berlin. He's over there to study, but he still needed to go through the German immigration office process to get his study visa. It's an intimidating process -- lots of information, details, and paperwork, and you know, orderly Germans. And, an 18 year old boy who often has his head up his ass. He had to take two trains for an hour to get there. He arrives, and their rule is that you need a KN95 mask (everywhere else, a surgical mask will do). So in the 6 minutes before his appointment, he sprints down the street to buy a pack of masks. He comes in, and there's an Iranian dude at the window, facing the same conundrum -- "I don't have that kind of mask." The boy breaks open the three pack and says "I got you, dude," helping out a grateful man in the immigration office. He commented that the office was full of a cross-section of humanity, all there to do some work towards their status in Germany.
The interview was entirely in German, and the boy's German is...ok, but not fluent (that's why he's there). He had to walk through the whole bureaucracy, worried about whether he would get his visa, stumbling through the interview some. But he got it. And when we talked through the process after he got home, he said "the visa I was applying for was one of the easiest ones to get, the rest are harder. Mad respect for immigrants in ANY country." That thought really hit me. He's a young man with resources, people who really helped him get prepared, and plenty of safety net behind him. Many immigrants are not. They are living their lives out on a limb, working and hoping for that next chance, for the visa to come through, or even just not to get caught so they can stay safe and alive in a country illegally.
We all can and should believe both that countries should have borders, and an orderly system, AND that human beings crossing borders should be treated humanely, and that we should be as generous as we reasonably can be with opportunities. I'm here because of compassionate people in America who opened their doors to a refugee. A lot of you probably are, too. It's a huge part of our national story. It's a huge part of who we are.