Page 11 - Sonoma County Gazette July 2017

IMMIGRANT cont’d from page 10
Now I’d like to tell you about a couple of my clients who live right here in Sonoma County. Let’s call them Antonio and Maria Carreno; that’s not their real names, but their story is true. And I want to tell you about not only their lives but how our government’s laws and policies have changed, and how those changes have affected them.
Antonio and Maria both came from villages in Michoacan, in Southern Mexico. Antonio came from a poor family with many children. He had to drop out of school to help support his family. When he became an adult, there were no jobs for him. There was little industry there and limited opportunity in Michoacan in the 1990’s (and that is still true today).
Antonio and Maria.
So Antonio and Maria left their
home, their families, everything that
was familiar and moved far away so
that they could find jobs and feed their family. It was not an easy move to make, but it was necessary for them to survive.
At that time, in Sonoma County, there were a lot of jobs in the vineyards, in the farms, in our wonderful agricultural industry here. There was a growing economy, opportunity, a multi-ethnic community that accepted people who spoke broken English, or no English at all. He and Maria rented a small apartment. Maria nurses the children, Antonio works long hours in the fields; together they are raising their family.
Antonio and Maria didn’t have a visa when they came here. They had no “papers”. They were not formally invited. Like many others, before them and after them, Antoni and Marysia just came and, at first, we as a society accepted him. They needed work, we had jobs to fill here, and they gladly have done the work. Antonio and Maria work hard, pay their bills, pay their taxes, make sure their children do their best in school. On Sunday, they go to church, and they live a good moral life like most Americans.
Their son, Tomas grew up in a poor family, safe and secure, a wonderful community, full of immigrants and their children,diverse and accepting of diversity. Tomas attended grade school and high school here, and is now studying at Sonoma State. He has obeyed our laws and hopes to make
something of his life.
However, unlike my father, Tomas does not have
US citizenship or even legal permanent residence. Although he came here as an infant and spent virtually his whole life here, Tomas does not even have the right to be here. Tomas was unlucky enough to come from a different type of immigrant story than me.
Until recently, the lives of these two families were not really that different. Then, in the last 10 years or so, everything started to change. We as a
nation decided that our immigrant workers were not welcome. In most states, we decided that they could no longer get a driver’s license. We decided that they could no longer get a social security card. And now, our federal government has decided that it should employ “deportation forces” (in the words of President Trump) to hunt down these immigrants for deportation, just simply for being here without a visa.
The fact is we’re not just building a wall to keep out future immigrants; we’re telling Mexicans and other immigrants that now they are no longer welcome. We are applying these new policies to persons who have been living here for decades, whose labor was needed and wanted when they came, and whose families are now integrated into our society, like Antonio, Maria and Tomas.
How did this happen? What is different about our attitude toward immigrants like Antonio and Maria from how we as a nation thought of Antoni and Marysia? I would argue that the biggest reason for the new hostility toward immigrants is related to certain false myths about immigrants, prevalent in our society and perpetuated by the current Administration. In the months to come, I want to share with the readers some real facts about immigrants and immigration in this country, and try to dispel some of these myths, some of these “alternative facts”
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on the subject. We are and we always have been a country of immigrants.
Christopher Kerosky is a lawyer and a member of the Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights. He and his family live in West Sonoma County.
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