Immigration Thoughts
I know no one really reads these toots into the darkness, but on the off chance one person does, I’m going to post this anyway. I’m not going to be politically correct like I usually try to be. This is raw and unfiltered, so forgive me in advance.
I’ve been thinking a lot about immigration lately, especially with the ICE atrocities we’ve been seeing, and also with the recent outcry over Bad Bunny at the NFL halftime show. All of this has been rattling around in my head from different angles.
A cousin of my mother’s, who lives in Delaware and is part of the LGBT community, said something to her that genuinely pissed me off. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist was: “I tell everyone not to come to Delaware if you’re American. It’s great if you’re a foreigner—you get everything handed to you. But if you’re white, fuck you.”
That statement is disgusting on multiple levels. It’s racist, for one. And it’s coming from a man with a very high-paying job in finance. He is not struggling. He is not relying on public assistance—assistance that, by the way, you generally need to be a citizen to access. That whole diatribe is something I hear echoed constantly by people on a certain side of the political spectrum, and it is complete bullshit.
My mom, who genuinely tries to be on the right side of things, said something that didn’t sit well with me either. When conservatives inject their views into conversations, she has a habit of not rocking the boat and kind of going along with it. It’s a flaw—we work on it—and she’s not a lost cause.
What she said was this: “If you want to come to America, you are an American. Not African American, not Mexican American. American. You learn our language and customs, and you come here legally.”
First of all, I reject the concept of people being “illegal.” That framing is bullshit. But even if we play devil’s advocate and pretend that’s a reasonable category, “coming the right way” is a luxury—one reserved for people with money and stability.
On average, legal immigration can cost upwards of $12,000 in filing fees, medical exams, legal help, and required steps. The processing time can take years—not one or two, but five, ten, sometimes more, because of massive backlogs.
Now here’s the part people refuse to confront: Most of the world makes less than $10 a day.
Guatemala, for example: $6–$12 a day. Not an hour. A day.
Even a minimum-wage worker in the U.S. makes $7.25 an hour. That’s nearly $60 in an eight-hour day. People fleeing Central America aren’t choosing between comfort and luxury—they’re choosing between survival and death.
In many of these countries, gangs and warlords recruit children as young as ten years old. Refuse to join, and they don’t just kill you—they kill your family. These are horrors we do not experience here. And if you’re honest with yourself, truly honest, you know damn well that if you or your children were facing that, you would do whatever it took to get out.
Then there’s the outrage about the halftime show: “We couldn’t understand any of that shit. Speak English.”
I don’t speak Spanish beyond “hello” and a handful of words I’ve picked up over the years. And you know what? That doesn’t make me angry—it makes me sad that I only know English.
Most people around the world grow up multilingual. They learn their mother tongue plus one or two other languages, sometimes more. So is this really about immigrants “not learning English”? Or is it misdirected shame that people from poorer countries often speak multiple languages while you’re sitting here with just one?
Would it benefit someone immigrating to the U.S. to learn English? Of course. It helps you navigate life and protects you from being taken advantage of. But learning a new language is hard, especially as an adult or elderly person. And language tutors cost money—money most people fleeing poverty and violence simply do not have.
So let me say this plainly: I love our immigrants.
I love the people who come here trying to escape horror, poverty, and violence. I do not hate you. I do not expect you to erase who you are. I do not want you to give up your identity.
You are who this country was supposed to be for.
And if that’s not true—if we don’t believe that anymore—then tear down the Statue of Liberty. Remove that fucking plaque that says:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore…”
Because if we are not a melting pot, if people of different backgrounds and languages cannot live together in peace, then admit it was all a lie.
I don’t believe that. And in my heart of hearts, I don’t believe most people in this country do either.
So I’m calling on all of us to be better. We should be better. We must do better.
----Addendum-----
Something hit me after I wrote all of this, and it matters.
A huge portion of the people coming here without papers are fleeing countries where the United States directly intervened, over and over again, for decades. We propped up dictators, armed death squads, destabilized governments, crushed labor movements, and backed “strongmen” because they were useful to our interests — not because they were good for the people living there.
We’ve been doing this for over fifty years. Not just in Central and South America — but let’s be honest, that region has been our favorite playground.
And every single time, it blows up.
We help break their countries. We help create violence and corruption. We help destroy local economies.
Then we sit here, shocked — shocked — asking why people are fleeing and calling it an “invasion” at our southern border.
If this is a crisis — and that’s a big “if” — it is absolutely a crisis of our own making.
You don’t get to spend decades lighting fires in someone else’s house and then act outraged when the people inside run toward the nearest exit.
Instead of vilifying people who are fleeing for survival, maybe we should own our hand in it. Maybe we should sit with the fact that the misery driving migration didn’t come out of nowhere — it was engineered, funded, and tolerated because it was convenient.
And if that truth makes you uncomfortable, good. It should.