Our forefathers used to be immigrants
by Pete Cunningham
*As printed July 4, 2007 in The Homer Index

This Fourth of July we celebrate 231 years as Americans. Across the country, skies will light up reminding us that at the end of everything this nation has gone through, our flag was and is still there.

Less than a week ago, a bill was voted down in the senate which would have granted amnesty to over 60 percent of the current illegal immigrants currently in this country. The bill would have also given temporary status and eventual citizenship rights to another 25 percent of illegals. Rough estimates figure this constitutes roughly 10 million people. Due to the loosening of such laws, experts predicted that the immigration into the United States would have increased by 500 percent. 

Without turning this into any more than a bunch of jumbled statistics than it already is, I think I can speak for us all when I say that’s a whole lotta’ people.

Chat rooms, town halls, and dinner tables across America continue to be filled with discussions of increasing border security, building larger and more fences, and I’m convinced somebody out there probably at some point suggested a mote of molten lava.

The one thing that all of these answers to immigration have in common is that none of them solve or even help the situation. Not even a little bit.

Immigrants who come here come from various different backgrounds. Whether Mexican, Chinese, Russian, or Sri Lankan, every man woman and child who comes here seeks one common goal, a better life.

An old joke my dad likes to tell me is that the first Cunningham came to America “clinging to the side of the Mayflower.” The message basically being that we weren’t of privilege, but of great aspirations. Once arrived, the theme remained. My grandpa grew up dirt-poor and left school and home first chance he got at 14. He traveled north from Tennessee to Michigan because, as odd as this may sound today, that’s where the jobs were.

Once arrived, the “fence” of WWII didn’t keep him from living a long fulfilled life. The “fence” of a fourth grade education couldn’t stop him from keeping a good job and providing a decent life for a wife and six children. It would be extremely naïve of anyone to believe that a couple of chain links and barbed wire, or any type of “fence” for that matter would stop him from seeking a better life.

Luckily, such a fence was never built across the Mason Dixon Line, and he was able to come north. Lucky for the fence that is. Like most of us, he was fortunate enough to be born on the better side of an imaginary line, and so opportunity greeted him instead of I.N.S.

The tangent I’m digressing toward doesn’t solve the fact that there are not enough jobs or resources for the U.S. to facilitate everyone who wants to come here actually being allowed to, but what I would like to suggest is that a different approach be taken.

We learned in high school biology that in osmosis water molecules travel across semi-permeable cell membranes until, eventually, equilibrium is met. Our biggest fear in America is that such equilibrium might have us meeting our less fortunate neighbors on our way down. It, however, does not have to be that way.

Instead of spending billions building fences at home and burning bridges over seas, funds need to be allotted in an effort to create an equilibrium state with our neighbors. The thing about border security, fences, and even motes of molten lava are that they are all in a way “semi-permeable”. Some how and by whatever means necessary, they can, and will, be crossed.

Although idealistic and very far down the road, this is the only solution which can actually solve the problem. Anything else is a temporary fix. Fences are meant to climbed, rivers are meant to be swum, and molten lava is meant to be crossed however the heck molten lava is crossed.

As we honor our forefathers this Independence Day, remember that before our flag was here, the men and women who made it had to cross an ocean beforehand. There’s no doubt they would have made it past a fence. The lava…that might have given them some trouble.