I've noticed a few posts and comments on Disaboom wherein people have expressed concern and indignation about people who have immigrated to this country illegally. I even saw one post that suggested that "illegals" take away resources for disabled US citizens. That, in other words, the government should tighten security against those who mooch off of the US' prosperity and put those resources into technology and availability of care and assistive devices for US citizens with disabilities.
I agree that both the way government handles disability issues and the way it handles illegal immigration are broken and in sore need of repair. I also know that, as much as I'd like to help everyone, we cannot simply snap our fingers and be able to provide for everyone. Whatever good solution exists will be complicated and hang some people who don't deserve it out to dry.
But the kind of division people are talking about, non-citizens versus the red-blooded Americans with disabilities, is exactly the wrong way to look at this. I think that everyone who is disenfranchised should stick together, whatever the reason for their disenfranchisement. I don't think that anyone gains freedom by saying "Someone's got to get the bum deal here. I've done everything right/nothing wrong, so the person who gets the bum deal has to be you and people like you."
I understand that citizens are concerned about non-citizens being treated too much like citizens, especially non-citizens who have broken our country's laws. But I really think that people need to take a step (or a roll) back from this and think. Think about Ellis Island, the whole "the US is a melting pot" theme, the Statue of Liberty. What was all of that? Wave after wave of immigration.
Yes, people will say, that's true, and we should be proud of it. But that was legal immigration! This is not.
To which my response is, "do we know that?" Obviously it was not the kind of illegal immigration we are seeing now, and I understand that that fact makes a difference. But those people who were immigrating back then were not respected, and they were desperate. Does anyone really think that those people never cut deals under the table? That no one just snuck in?
I am fourth-generation Greek. That's far enough back that I don't speak the language and have never been to Greece, not even on a tourist's visit to gawk at the Parthenon. But that's not so far back. I eat the food, dance to the songs, know a folk song my Grandmother loved though I can't understand the words. My last name is, to the vast majority of people around me, unpronounceable.
Which doesn't make me foreign, no, nor does it make me a non-citizen. But it makes me someone for whom "immigration" and "immigrant" are something other than dirty words. That was us.
And it makes me someone from an immigrant family, someone with a history that has to do with all this mess, and a person with a disability. I can't untangle those things. I can't think about these people as a mass of alien, unwashed, free-riding nondisabled folks. If I have a disability and an unpronounceable name, what about Ms. Rodriguez with no job, a baby, and a bum leg? What accommodations does she deserve?
Y yo he hablado con esa gente en su idioma. I've spoken to them. They're not all that different from you or me. They're people with hopes and dreams and fears. They're people that want work and take work. Any work they can get. The work the rest of us spurn and scorn because we think we deserve better. They have things to say, and they're the same things everyone everywhere have to say. Pero parecemos que su idioma es algo mal, algo extraño, algo que hay que parar. ¡Hay que hablar como nosotros inmediatamente! Y yo no entiendo esto.
When the bilingual signs went up in my city, people around me worried. There was something wrong, something out-of-order, about such a concession. Everyone fretted about it. "They have to learn English." Then the signs went up, and... funnily enough, no one even noticed. I liked the opportunity to practice my Spanish, but that was it. I never saw anyone even so much as grumble after the signs went up.
It's actually quite strange. Very few countries are proud of being monolingual. Most other countries provide a lot more education in foreign language than this one, while we in the US wander around the world without any education, trusting that everyone else will have learned our tongue. How arrogant is that? People who live in non-English-speaking countries aren't born knowing our saintly language -- tienen que aprenderlo en la escuela.
And yes, we do teach other languages, including Spanish, to kids in high school and/or college. But this emphasis on English, on never being tainted by other languages as a way to maintain our citizenly purity, can only serve to isolate us from others. It's a bad idea. And it feeds right into another bad idea: referring to people as "illegals," as if there is illegality in the person herself, rather than in her actions. Why is she "an illegal", one of the "illegals"? What she did is not who she is. What she did is a response to poverty or desperation.
So "she's an illegal" makes no sense. Nadie es ilegal.
