“I did the right way, why can’t they?”
That’s was how my uncle, who immigrated to the United States from Colombia in 1980 said when defending Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.
My uncle was born outside Bogota in a town where “Communists regularly shot children in the streets.” He said it was an ugly town, a rough place to grow up and FARC killed many of his friends whom he grew up with.
When he was 17, he left the town to move to Bogota and at 23, he decided to come to America.
He had to apply and wait for a visa, a process he said took “at least a year” and then to stay in this country, he had to have relatives who were here vouch for him and he had to have a job lined up with
“But I wanted to do it all by the books, I wanted to do it the right way.”
It took him a long time to get his green card and 14 years to get his citizenship. For the record, my uncle has always, ALWAYS, voted Democrat. In 2008, he had an Obama sticker on the car.
So it came as a surprise to me when he said he heard Donald Trump talk about throwing out every illegal immigrant and building a wall, and he was in agreement, and that he voted for him in November.
In my uncle’s mind, it isn’t fair that so many people in this country got to skip the arduous process he went through. If I had to do it “by the books,” why are we allowing over ten million people to skip the process entirely and then allowing them to stay here...and worse, offering them “amnesty,” the ability to become legal residents “without doing it the way I did.”
The problem is the best argument we could make for him is that there are too many of these people here and kicking them out would be detrimental to our economy. A problem he doesn’t seem to care about. If our economy is so reliant on “criminals,” he said, then we deserve to take the economic hit getting rid of them will trigger.
“Sometimes, we have to be willing to take the hit to fix a problem,” he said, noting that the left is willing to cause economic problems in order to “break up banks” and “get rid of insurance companies” (something he said he didn’t disagree on)
I explained that his wife’s grandmother, who immigrated to the U.S. from Italy, lied and said she was from France in order to get around a quota on immigration from Italy, but he just shook his head.
“Then she should have been deported too,” he said.
Easy to say seeing as she's been dead for 32 years.
I told him to see the movie El Norte as an example of how many undocumented immigrants came here and he scoffed.
He’s seen it and calls it “liberal propaganda”
“I came from a war-torn country where there were radicals who wanted to kill me and I still came here legally.”
Bottom line is he was happy to hear that a deportation force might be put together to throw out undocumented immigrants. He says he even is for it if families get broken up.
“Yes, even if it divides families. If you didn’t want your family divided, you shouldn’t have come here illegally. Stop using your kids to justify your illegal actions.”
The one thing that keeps me sane is that polls have shown most Americans support a path to citizenship, but big whoop since they don’t seem to vote that way.