'Illegal immigrants': Consider those who belong here

I SPENT Wednesday afternoon in Marlton, N.J., trying to prevent a father of two little boys from being deported. Success in this type of scenario is relative, since keeping someone from being sent home in handcuffs doesn't mean that the trauma to the family is erased or diminished. There is the Damoclean sword that still hangs above its collective head, with no definite hour set for the final plunging. But at least there is the warm body that gets to stay, for an indefinite while, with loved ones.

To many of those who oppose any sort of immigration reform, these facts are unimpressive. To them, "illegal immigrant" is the beginning and the end of the conversation, requiring immediate punishment and a wiping of the hands. I understand that sense of "They broke the law, why should we care?" even though I find it to be particularly cruel when little children are involved. I also don't see anything racist in wanting lawbreakers to be held accountable, since most of those being hauled before ICE agents have at the very least broken through our national gates without permission.

But the more I see in this job, and the longer I spend trying to sew together fraying families, I have to wonder if our sense of outrage is somehow misplaced.

There is anger from so many corners of this glorious country, the one that millions have risked their lives and livelihoods to claim as a second homeland. A large part of it stems from this sense of injustice, the reaction of the native to the invasion of the unentitled. Many Native Americans felt the same way when the "White Man" charged in and appropriated land that they, in past lives, had taken from other tribes. And the "White Man" comes back and says, "Get over it, it's history," and we try to move on.

But if an immigrant today, particularly an undocumented one, would dare to say the same thing to an opponent of amnesty, the heavens would open and the lightning bolts of nativist thunder would crash through the clouds. "How dare they even make that analogy?" would be the cry of outrage.

And they'd be right.

None of us who slipped in and took ownership of this great country at whatever stage in her development has the right to stand, smug and tall and say, "This is my land, not yours." There are levels of ownership, and while the felicitous happenstance of being born on this soil gives me and a lot of my native-born sisters and brothers some definite advantages, this country truly belongs to those who love it and are willing to die for it. That also includes those who are willing to get into it, in my admittedly biased opinion.

I am not calling for open borders. I am calling for open minds.

We need to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and keep the good while disposing of the toxic. There are many, many immigrants in this country who don't belong here and who bring nothing but evil and destruction. The drunk driver who wantonly kills a nun, the illegal miscreant who rapes a little girl, the undocumented cheats who steal Social Security numbers and wreak havoc with the credit history of good, hardworking citizens. All of them should be rounded up and sent back to the country that bred them, beasts that they are.

But what do we do with the father of two little boys, like my client, who spends most of the day making pizzas at one job and cleaning offices at another, then comes home to play with his sons before collapsing into bed and starting the cycle all over again the next morning? Do we, because he crossed the border under a watchful, disapproving moon, kick him out and effectively send his American family with him? Is that the hallmark of our homeland?

The past few weeks have been difficult ones for all of us, liberal and conservative alike, struggling with an incompetent administration and recalcitrant congress. We've focused on the things that divide us, economic mumbo jumbo that ultimately means nothing more than we, the people, have failed. I tend to blame the Democrats as much as the Republicans, because you cannot wage a war without two willing factions, and neither side of the aisle has been willing to reconcile their stubborn differences.

But I persist in believing that this country is still the greatest of all possibilities, and am not surprised that so many of those who weren't granted the right to live here by taking their first breaths on star-spangled soil will wade through rivers and scale mountains and, sometimes with fatal consequence, cross burning borders into vast deserts to celebrate along with us.

That's what matters. The desire to be here, to stay here, and the footprint we leave here. The rest is irrelevant.