LETTER FROM HOME:...No, Immigrants Are Not "Animals" ...They Continue To Work, To Build America...That's A Fact...

 

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

McALLEN, Texas |...The racist Republican candidate for president yesterday again told us that he believes immigrants coming to this country are "animals, not humans." He's wrong. They are more human than he will ever be, but we all know Donald J. Trump's world is a Bizarro World, an alternative universe where he, and only he, gets to decide pretty much everything. 

Has he seen the hard labor they perform for America and that's why he says it? Has he seen them perspiring like dogs to build our roads and highways, our roofs, our cute suburban landscaping, to work the meatpacking plants? Has he seen it and decided, man, that's too much work. He wouldn't do it.

And we would venture to say that many, many of his well-heeled, air-conditioned Republican pals would never do it, either. Hey, it's hard work, so hard that the country acknowledges that Americans would never do that sort of work. An American picking cotton all day in the hot sun, harvesting our fruit and vegetable crops?

Where? When?

No, kids, immigrants (. . .and we speak of dark-skinned immigrants because that's who Trump has in mind when he disrespects them) are not animals. They are our salvation, coming in waves as we need them, coming to do the jobs Americans will not do, coming to be berated by our comfortable wealthy, coming to work, coming to make sure we have apples and lettuce at the dinner table.

Locally, I do not hear the counter message. Trump gets a pass on his often-stupid utterances. It's national politics, they say here in the passive, subservient Rio Grande Valley. It's the former president, the one we know as a rabble-rouser. Trump's just being Trump, silly and absurd.

But elsewhere is where you'll find Americans who know the score, who know what immigrants have meant - and continue to mean - to this ever-ungrateful shank of land said to still be the home of the brave and the land of the free. 

We publish this sentient letter to The Los Angeles Times in its entirety: [ To the editor: Thanks to Lorraine Ali for her thoughtful column about the immigrant workers who died in the Baltimore bridge collapse.

Yes, we are happy to have immigrants perform the jobs that are too dangerous, dirty or onerous for our delicate hands and sensibilities. But we hate them and wish they would stay out of sight.

We need immigrants who care for our elderly parents, watch our young children, clean our homes and tend our gardens. We may even consider them "family" as we illegally pay them under the table without reporting their wages or contributing to their Social Security.

But we hate them for entering illegally, if they work for someone else.

Yes, these workers who lost their lives are someone’s family members who work difficult and sometimes dangerous jobs to try and give their children a better life. We need them to make our lives comfortable and keep our country functioning.

Some say these people should "stand in line" and immigrate to the U.S. legally. Now, tell me where the line starts for construction, farm and domestic workers? You can't, because there isn't one.

Welcome, immigrants, to the United States — democracy or hypocrisy?

- Laurie Jacobs, San Clemente ]

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Well said and pretty much a bullseye.

I reel at reading about what Trump and his Republican ilk say from one day to the next. It is as if we're living in a washing machine at the local laundromat, all of us in the spin cycle wishing the damned thing would finish the job. The much-awaited November General Election cannot come soon enough and our hope that the courts at last put this man on trial (four criminal cases, some 80 felonies to be dealt with) gets no relief.

To date, Donald J. Trump is above the law. Perhaps that will change one day.

What won't change is our dependence on hard-working foreigners willing to come here to do our dirtiest jobs while being called names you would never hear in church. Their women caring for children and the elderly, cleaning them when Americans disdain doing it for little Timmy and Grandma Mavis.

Animals, he calls them...

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