Dirty Pretty Things

Ian and I watched "Dirty Pretty Things" the other night, and since then, immigration in the U.S. has been a lot on my mind. Well, actually, it's been on my mind all summer.

I haven't really written anything about our trip to Krakow and Berlin, but that's mostly because there was just so much to take in. Because Ian got a grant to go, we did a lot of stuff having to do with the Holocaust for a project he's working on. I've been interested in the Holocaust for a long time, and one of my favorite classes in grad school was "Literature of Atrocity." I even wrote my Masters thesis on trauma. So the trip sounds worse than it was. Most of the stuff we went to was fascinating. A trip to Auschwitz, the new Jewish Museum in Berlin, a piece of the ghetto wall in both Krakow and Warsaw, the spot where most of Warsaw's Jews were shipped off to death, the Holocaust Manmahl in Berlin, among other more touristy places. I've visited other Holocaust memorials and sites on other visits to Europe and Washington DC. I know the story.

Or I thought I did. One of the things you learn in Europe and when you're skipping over what I think of as "beginner's" history of the Holocaust is what the United States' role in the Holocaust was. We all say, "We helped as much as we could!" But it's not true. The U.S. was rampant with racism and fear directed toward the Jewish population of the world. When we knew (and we did know--we bombed military-related sites near Auschwitz knowing exactly what Auschwitz was), we did nothing to stop it. We knew where the crematoriums and gas chambers were through aerial photos and never bothered to let a bomb go.

But what does this have to do with immigration? We knew all of this and we didn't allow people to escape the murders occurring in Europe. We could have allowed so many more people to immgrate to the U.S., but we didn't. We said that we didn't have room or that we had hit the quota, but people were being killed. How can we not have room for people heading for the gas chamber??? Our racism got in the way. We were just as bad with our ideas of who the "right" and "wrong" people are. The "wrong" people were the Jews, so they weren't allowed in.

We like to think that we're not like that any more, but we are. There are people being killed in many countries in Africa, but we only allow very few to immigrate to the "land of the free." There are people living in abject poverty in Latin America who risk their lives to move to the U.S. to support their families, and we don't let them in. These aren't people who won't or don't want to work. These are people who are willing to do anything to raise their families in a safe place. For them, America is that dream. But when they come here, legally or illegally, we treat them like shit. They're the "wrong" sort of people.

We have quite a large hispanic population here in Danville for the size that we are. They're called "Mexkuns" here. No one has bothered to see if they are really from Mexico. They work in restaurants, paint houses, do yardwork. Yesterday, a woman came into my building to measure the windows for window treatments because they're renovating a large room upstairs. She asked my (white) coworker when the painters were going to be finished, even as a hispanic painter was walking by. My coworker told her that he was a painter and she should ask him. She said in a Kentucky drawl, "Y'all gonna be finished Saturday?" (Even I could barely understand her with her accent and because she was speaking so fast.) He nodded his head vaguely, but you could tell he didn't understand. Instead of asking him again, she just rolled her eyes. I've also been told that "those Mexkuns" squat in buildings by the railroad tracks.

How can we condemn what the Nazis or the Hutus and Tutsis or Pinochet have done to their own people when we won't allow them inside our borders, or once we do, we treat them like trash?

I'd just like to know.