Letter submitted to the Defiance Crescent-News
Dear Editor,
I spent most of my sixty-seven years on Earth living in rural Ohio. Outside of a few years in California and Arizona, I lived my formative years in Northwest Ohio, attending schools in Bryan, Harrod, Farmer, Ney, Deshler, Mt. Blanchard, and Findlay. My travels put me in close contact with Mexican migrant workers. While most of these workers would come and go depending on what crops needed picking, some of them stayed in Ohio after their work was done. Migrants, many of whom spoke little English, assimilated into our culture, taking jobs, marrying, and raising their families. Over time, multiple generations of Mexican families made rural Northwest Ohio their home. They have, in every way, added to the richness of our communities, even though racist epitaphs are still hurled their way.
Many of those migrants who originally stayed in our communities are undocumented; people Donald Trump and the Republican Party call “illegals.” Trump would love for us to believe that all of these undocumented workers are “undesirables” who must be immediately rounded up and deported to Mexico. Suppose Trump and his MAGA cronies have their way. In that case, more than eleven million undocumented people — most of whom hold gainful employment and pay taxes — will be violently ripped from their communities and families and returned to countries many of them have never visited.
Republicans and Democrats agree that the United States has an immigration problem; that conditions at our southern border are unsustainable. How to fix this problem is where disagreements arise. Trump wants to ship undocumented workers back to where they came from, wholesale, and in doing so will tank the U.S. economy. Democrats want to see meaningful paths to citizenship for everyone here illegally. If they are gainfully employed and don’t have serious criminal backgrounds, we must provide a way for them to become legal. Trump’s policies, and those of Project 2025, hail to the days when we rounded up indigenous people and Japanese-Americans and locked them up against their will in internment camps or reservations.
Just remember, that dear Mexican family who lives next to you may have parents or grandparents who are here illegally. Do you want to destroy their families so that you can defend the mythical Great Replacement theory? We can and must fix our southern border, but not at the expense of people who have played an essential part in our communities and workforce.
Bruce Gerencser
Ney, Ohio
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I wonder if the Crescent printed your editorial. It used to be a pretty conservative paper in my day. I tend to agree with what you wrote. It presents no solutions though and unfortunately the only ways to bring it under control are going to inconvenience some folks. I hate to agree with trump in the slightest way but his threat of mass deportation may be a way to bring some order out of the chaos. It was done before and it might be instructive to look back at what happened that time. As a child of immigrants I am certainly not against immigration but I am against lawlessness and disorder and I believe illegal immigration promotes disrespect for law and order. Thats only an opinion I can’t support with data so perhaps I’m wrong. However if history says deportation had a desired effect before, it’s evidence that it may do so again.
Mass deportation will cause chaos and economic collapse (besides destroying families). We say we are a “Christian” nation, yet immigration proposals coming from Washington are anything but Christian.
I agree that we have a big problem on the border. We must find a compassionate way to bring order to chaos. This will require political will to accomplish, and, for that reason I’m not confident we can do so. Sadly, our political system is broken.
While there are millions of Mexican immigrants, and some are undocumented, the vast majority of undocumented migrants crossing the southern border are not Mexican. Many are from Central and South America, but some come from as far as Sudan and Pakistani. They’re coming through Mexico because they can’t come directly through the US. I read an account of a Haitian woman who worked for a family in Brazil so she could earn the money to pay “guides.”
The cynic in me says that Trump and his minions don’t actually want to fix the problem. For one thing, their businesses employ undocumented immigrants because they can be paid less and bullied more than native-born workers. At the same time, Trump and his allies can use “illegals” as bogeymen to scare and rile up poor and working-class white voters . “They’ve coming to take your jobs and your wives. Boo!”
I live in an area with the largest per capita Hispanic population in Ohio. While we have some non-Mexican immigrants, most come from Mexico. Several local businesses and restaurants were raided by Immigration. More than a few undocumented workers.
Most non-Mexican immigrants around here tend to be Asian, Middle Eastern, or Indian. Typically, they work in the medical field. (They work here and put up with our racism to get established in the US. They typically move away as soon as they can. Polly’s Muslim gynecologist recently moved to Ann Arbor to get away from the racists around here.) Some local manufacturers use temporary workers from Guatemala and Honduras.
Bruce, I don’t doubt that Mexicans are the largest Hispanic or immigrant group in your community—as they are in many others—most of the undocumented migrants crossing the border now aren’t Mexican. Perhaps I didn’t make that clear enough.
As for working in the medical field: I read that in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, many women’s health care providers—even those who weren’t doing abortions—have moved from places that have imposed bans or restrictions. Sometimes they actually take pay cuts because hospitals and clinics in the restrictive areas offer higher salaries to attract doctors and other professionals. Hospitals and clinics in places like New York, Boston and California don’t have to do that. I wonder whether there’s a similar pattern among the Asian and Middle Eastern medical professionals. Oh, and I suspect that those OB-GYNs and other women’s healthcare providers were facing harassment, just as the immigrants are.
It will be interesting to see if they print your letter. I was raised in an Evangenital Christian home (No, not a typo… they hated gay people, brown people, people with dyed hair, people who had piercings and tattoos) and it’s amazing how many people they hate. It’s what brings them together.
Yep. My parents were John Birchers — racist through and through. They loved Jesus, but not people of color. I learned words such as nigger, spick, and wetback from my parents by the time I entered first grade. I remember this because I called my Mexican schoolmates and neighbors wetbacks — not knowing what the word actually meant. I quickly learned I shouldn’t repeat what Mom and Dad said. 😂
I personally would like to keep a lot of the immigrants and exile a lot of our “native citizens”. Most immigrants come here because they can generally find a place to live that has basic public services and relative safety. Yes America has a crime problem in some areas, but nothing like Mexico. Their desire is to find work and get their children educated.
I don’t blame Trump as much as I blame our media for stoking fears of immigrants. They focus on negative stories like the young men who attacked a police officer in NyC on a subway and then flipped off the cameraman when they bonded out. Yes, these assholes should be immediately deported, as far away as we can send them. But this is not indicative of most immigrants, so stop portraying it as such. Trump, being the grifting opportunist he is, just latches on to this to peddle his narrative that he hopes will win him the election in the fall. I agree with Velovixen, that Trump has no real incentive to do anything substantive to secure our border. As long as we see videos of immigrants overwhelming our Border Patrol Visigoth-style, he will have the means to portray himself as the Emperor Constantine who will save the empire, if you will just give him the power to do so.
There was a bipartisan immigration/border bill a few months ago that Trump single-handedly put the cabosh on because he wanted to harp on immigration for his campaign.
More than 1/3 of my coworkers are either immigrants or 1st generation Americans. They are some of the best employees at my company. All have legal status, and some have become US citizens. We haven’t hired undocumented workers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the landscapers,construction workers, kitchen staff at our restaurants, peiple stocking shelves at the supermarket, or people pumping gas were undocumented workers. These are jobs that need to be filled, and lokk around – are the GOP folks complaining about “illegals” pissed that they’re not working these jobs?
“If you’re not a Native American, you or your ancestors came here as immigrants or slaves.”
Of course most of these racists don’t much like Native Americans, either…
True enough. I live in California, and you’ll see a lot of dynamics here that you won’t see on other places . There’s a lot of controversy about the Hidalgo Treaty, Spanish land grants, the Spanish mission system, among other things– but the REAL driver of large amounts of immigration is decades upon decades of very un- democratic and un- American meddling in both South American and Mexican politics! Using paramilitary and mercenary forces to prop up corrupt, abusive dictators and ruling elite families,who held their citizens in grinding poverty so they’d be easy to control. It was NOT about stopping Communism at all- that was just a trope. Corporations and three- letter agencies were deeply involved in all kinds of atrocities related to controlling resources,like United Fruit Company, amazing ng others. Keeping awful people like Bautista in power there in Cuba,leading to the Castro brothers, the Bay of Pigs, that’s just ONE example . Allowing these tyrants to compel their fellow citizens to live worse than livestock, no free schooling, no medical care, wages too low to support families, no birth control,of course, while cops and soldiers run amok among them. Who wouldn’t want to escape all that ?? People to in the US had no clue what our ” patriotic personnel” were up to down there, until the Internet and the civil war in El Salvador showed how violence leads to mass immigration. Not to mention all the employers who really wanted to keep wages low,cut benefits,big business leaders had their ally in Ronald Reagan, who for this reason was a huge fan of immigration on a large scale, as he was against unions, and the wages/ benefits that people relied on until Reagan was ushered into office. I’ll always wonder, had the Kennedy brothers not been taken out, how peace in the whole region, especially if they adopted the Scandinavian models of government and economy, would have played out. I’ve talked about this with Latinos when I can. They see what a cure it would be for the entire continent,if globalist and conservative Catholic politicians could be forced out. This is true for all countries with bad conditions, yet there’s these evil leaders who plan on keeping the status quo, and use violence to enforce it! I know of people who won’t hire American drywallers, painters, even though they do better work, because they prefer to pay peanuts to foreign painters and builders,instead. Undocumented immigrants can’t complain about safety violations, no benefits, sex harassment,etc. At least since the late 70’s, certainly the 80’s, this has been the case. When people complained about how immigration was affecting local conditions, they were ridiculed by corporations and politicians. These same leaders didn’t create more housing for all these newcomers, because of the high rents that result from low vacancy rates for apartments and houses! Such competition triggered the homeless crisis we see everywhere. The immigrants themselves are victims,along with the locals who get priced out or displaced. Greed rules the US,in ways I never realized until seeing these changes firsthand. So, these same politicians who scream about the sky falling over immigration,are the very same ones who were all for it, in the 80’s, as it fit in well with Neoliberalism that Nixon and Reagan touted. Democrats were silent while all this took place under the radar. The Narcos,as we call them here in Los Angeles, also benefitted from such policies. And they DO have allies in US government, always have! The irony of hearing Republicans complain now, about something they actually supported for decades until recently, is almost comical. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember how enthusiastic conservative economists like Friedman and Greenspan, both Ayn Rand fans, promoted these ” Libertarian” ideals. Here in Cali, there are Republican candidates for Governor, who still claim uncontrolled immigration, desperate competition lead to prosperity for business!! Just use the police to keep order, draconian laws they say. All this is so creepy! People are hating on each other, wh n it’s the leaders, and corporations who caused this issue,and benefit from it. Both parties are total failures here. They lost interest in repairing infrastructure, and basic living standards, the lifespan has been dropping steadily. But one points out these problems, they were labeled,” unpatriotic.” Sorry for the long rant here, almost 70 years of changes and hidden evil just in Cali alone, is very painful to know about,and live through. Immigration is a fake cause for the hard right,who promoted the very thing they’re slinging in the media now, for the last 12 years.