Friends:
I appreciate Dr. Alvaro Huerta's "confession" and it should provide a helpful perspective on how his mother never stole an American job. Hence, no confession is necessary, but I appreciate the satire (see below).
What folks need to know, however, is that when his mother crossed the border, it was no more a "crime" than running a red light. Yes, it was more like a traffic violation as opposed to a criminal offense at least until Bill Clinton came along.
So disgraceful, President Clinton for signing the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) that criminalized immigration with changes that took place on April 1, 1997.
I remember 1997 well. It was a tough year for those in the know and, most especially, for those directly affected by it—a regime that continues through to the present.
For those that want to research this, the IIRIRA was enacted as Division C of the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act of 1997, introducing significant amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act passed in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Immigration historians notwithstanding, I found Wikipedia's discussion of the IIRIRA to be quite informative.
My grandmother was U.S.-born and grew up in Bisbee, Arizona, right on the U.S.-Mexico border. In her era, the border was called "la linea," because it was little more than a line in the sand with people moving freely back and forth not unlike our ancestors who moved freely up and down the continent.
Knowing this is why I often think that we didn't cross the border at all, but rather the border crossed us. As Mexican Americans from the Southwest, like my grandmother whose ancestors were Indigenous, there was never anywhere "to go back to"—as we're often told—because they were always home.
Borders are thusly powerful and historic fictions and social creations that get codified in statute.
That said, social creations like Greg Abbott's $4 Billion biennium expenditure of troops and his militarizing of the border termed "Operation Lonestar" (2022 numbers) are insanely costly creations that are and should be the onus of the federal, as opposed to state, government. All of that money could have funded the entirety of K-12 public and higher education and still leave some change for health care, and investments in clean energy. Not being prudent with these dollars is costly, too, as we know. Symbolically, it signifies not wanting to empower our low-income Black and Brown communities.
Posturing represents an enormous cost to taxpayers. It provides great fodder for campaigns and builds a Republican constituency in South Texas by giving people jobs.
Families simply can’t live on an annual salary of $40k or less, especially in this economy. Not all benefitted equally, if at all for many, from Biden’s post-pandemic economic stimulants. Hence, the Biden Administration and Kamala Harris, directly associated with it, could not compete with the living wage that "migra jobs" provide, especially for folks with a high school diploma.
Sadly, though, folks have been hoodwinked into believing that Trump’s economy will be better for them as his impetus is to bilk the economic purse—our precious taxpayer dollars—for payback to the billionaire class that supported him and to which he identifies. These are concerning times. Still, we must organize and call for unity in the face of this consolidation of power.Dr. Huerta, I do agree that migration is a human right and, most especially, to seek asylum to escape persecution as laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the U.S. still has not signed for reasons that are probably obvious. Never mind that Eleanor Roosevelt played a major role in its development.
Álvaro, God bless your dear mother's memory, and keep doing what you're doing!
-Angela Valenzuela
Opinion: My immigrant mother 'stole' American jobs: A 'confession' from a child of Mexican immigrants
Dear America,
I have a confession to make, just like when I was a good Catholic boy at Santa Teresita Church in East Los Angeles. My late immigrant mother “stole” American jobs. Yes, my mother Mejía Huerta was a “criminal.” While she was never convicted of 34 felonies in New York, she was a “Mexican immigrant criminal,” nevertheless!
As a U.S.-born citizen, I was in denial about my mother’s “thievery” for many years. It’s time that I come clean about how she “robbed” hard-working Americans of their precious jobs for several decades. Since “all” Americans aspire to engage in hard work, as part of the Protestant work ethic that the sociologist Max Weber wrote about over 100 years ago, it’s only “fair” that they reclaim these “immigrant jobs” from these “brown criminals.”
When my extended Huerta clan migrated in the early 1960s from a small rancho, Zajo Grande—located in the beautiful state of Michoacán—to Tijuana, Baja California, they experienced abject poverty in this Mexican border city. It was in Tijuana that my mother first worked in el norte as a transborder domestic worker. Securing a U.S. visa, she worked in San Diego, California, for days or weeks at a time, cleaning the homes of affluent White Americans. She would then return to Tijuana for a few days and then repeat the brutal work schedule for several years.
During one of her many work trips to el norte, when she was pregnant with me, she planned for me to be born in Sacramento, California. When I eventually joined my familia in Tijuana, as my mother continued her rigorous work schedule in el norte, my older sisters, who were in their teens, helped with childcare duties. That included working as minors in Mexico and the U.S.
As my memory is fuzzy during my first four years in Tijuana, I sometimes wonder how my mother “stole” her first American home to clean. Did she break into their home in the middle of the night and start to clean when the middle-class, White family was asleep? Did she help feed little Brad and Jenny breakfast while their parents were enjoying their beauty sleep? Or did she enter the house through the chimney, like Santa Claus, and leave the house sparkling without a trace? While I hold a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in City and Regional Planning, I have yet to resolve this conundrum.
Now that America will “miraculously” be “great again,” especially with expected draconian measures against immigrants, where millions of hard-working immigrants (like my late mother) will be targeted, I’m sure that countless of MAGA parents will raise their children to forgo college and reclaim these “immigrant jobs.” While there’s no shame in cleaning houses for a living or working as farmworkers, like my late father Salomón ChávezHuerta, I’m wondering how they will enjoy (or enter) the American Dream that “immigrant jobs” offer in terms of financial compensation, benefits (or lack thereof) and upward mobility opportunities?
As for all the American-born workers who delusionally think they will replace and compete against workers with the “Mexican immigrant work ethic,” like we say in East Los Angeles, no te rajes / don’t quit!
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