border patrol

I keep coming back to that image in my mind, from an AP line on Sunday May 28. The 'Minutemen' walking the border behind a line of American Flags: a bunch of white men with leather gloves on, protecting this country from illegal immigrants.

Driving to a job today I pass an agricultural field full of greens, something big and leafy, maybe cabbage or cauliflower. A group of dark-skinned men, also wearing leather gloves, are digging weeds by hand and hoe from among the plants. There is not a single white man out there employed in this hard, low wage labor.

Antonia Carr, my Great Grandmother, was a migrant worker. I don't know what she did for work or if she wore leather gloves but I do know that she freely traveled between her two homelands in the south and in the north. She just happened to be on the Texas side of the border when the border was officially closed. She became a citizen of her northern home by default and she considered it a lucky roll of the dice.

Maude Cassidy, another of my Great Grandmas, came over with a wave of hungry Irish immigrants seeking a better life. Like all Americans, even those we refer to as Native Americans, the people of this continent have come here seeking a better life for themselves and their children. This has been a land of plenty for more than 10,000 years.

As I watch the fence go up, an old song runs through my head: "Don't fence me in" "Don't fence me in!" Dammit I don't want to live in a country with fences or a country of selfish people unwilling to share their abundance. I don't want to live in a country of immigrants who somehow think that God granted them special status because they got her first. First, before who?