Immigration 8/2021

I grew up in Bensenville, Illinois and moved to Miami in 1971.  I have said many times I wish I was more proficient in conversational Spanish.  Had I stayed in Bensenville, Spanish proficiency would still be a plus. 

On a lark I looked at the census figures for my home town Bensenville, in 2020 49.3% of the population was Latino or Hispanic.  Some of the best tacos, tamales, and burritos I've ever had were found in or near Bensenville

Fifty years ago when I left Bensenville it was a different place.  O'Hare was big and it has gotten much busier and bigger and folks left the city and moved to the suburbs and folks moved from one town to other towns.

Living in Miami and working for Miami Dade County, I supervised offices that provided job related services to literally thousands of entrants into this country from the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama for a long time.  Locally floods of people have made existing problems worse but in the long haul this is a country of over 330,000,000 and things have a way moving forward.  Folks learn English, get jobs, start businesses and often do work that others avoid. 

It is as it has always been.  This country has a problem with folks from every where else that is different from them who were the last group or wave of folks that entered the country.

But even before immigration we were more than unkind to indigenous folks through selective genocide where it was expedient. 

To infer that many of these folks entering the country these days spread COVID19 and ignore the behavior of our own citizens in the spread of COVID 19 makes no sense.  It's a hot button, easily exploited but not a real policy.

The dynamics of immigration and the pandemic are global and need to be dealt with as economic and public health issues.