Wish You Were Here

A nightmare. Finding one’s self being taken from home, merged into a holding place; people rounded up like cattle. Being stripped of everything you own, including driver’s license, job, but especially of family, friends, and community. Country.

I try to imagine what it would be like if I was forced to go back to a place I lived in my childhood. A place not so pleasant. For any one of us, let’s imagine if it was a place of poverty, crime, torture, unrest. What would that feel like? To lose everything you have now in America and be forced to leave, to go back to a country you do not recognize, where you do not have friends, likely no family, no job. Nothing.

Live your life there, not here is what DACA immigrants (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) are facing.

Yes, there needs to be respect for the law, to follow immigration policies to enter and/or remain in our country. Yet those who came here as children really had no choice. But here they are living their lives, contributing to America (students, doctors, teachers, military, blue-collar workers). This is the country they know. This is the country they respect. This is the country they love. A path to citizenship is something they deserve.

I sent a letter to my congressmen in January about this. Here is an excerpt:

“How can an American stand back and watch the cruelty of leaving DACA immigrants struggling to breathe, struggling to trust, to understand his/her life’s values (while being) shaken about like loose change, waiting to be tossed into a wishing well: Maybe you get a chance, maybe you don’t…

“How cruel to make one linger in anguish. Is this not a form of torture?...Is this not inhumane? A lack of basic spiritual principles?...

“Will our America now be known as a nation of inhumane torturers?” Or we can help the DACA immigrants get a path to citizenship and thus be seen as a great nation worthy of being called “UNITED.”

Whatever your views on this, simply remember the sweat, the blood, the tears, the sorrows, the inhumane treatment, the shunning - of your own immigrant ancestors.

Yet here we are. Theresa M.

Quote: “If we fail to suffer with those who suffer, even those of different, religions, languages, or cultures, we need to question our own humanity.” -Pope Francis