Have the last few days been Deportation Sob Story Week with 6,820 articles about repatriation appearing? And are four years more of same planned by top media? There has been no shortage of the sad stories of appealing foreigners who just “came for a better life” and stayed for the American jobs, education and an array of free-to-them stuff. (A 30-day search for Trump Deport got 233,000 results as of August 13.)
But now the illegals are being forced to go home, to places like Mexico — hardly a poor backwater with its #15 world GDP rank. As a rule, the mainstream press hatefully regards America as being evil racist capitalist, except where illegal immigrants are concerned, and then the United States becomes the idealized land of dreams.
Today’s tale of trauma appears on the front page of the New York Times showing an illegal mom who will take her son to reunite the family with her deported husband. It’s nice to actually see some of the mythical Mexican family values about which we’ve heard for so long.
It might work out well for Mexico in the long run to have citizens who expect more out of government and society than to be loaded with crime and corruption from top to bottom. Deportee demands for social and economic reform might start something worthwhile — if they decide to bother. We’ll see. The United States cannot be the spare country for billions of dissatisfied people on the planet.
The article is reprinted in the Santa Fe New Mexican where there is no annoying paywall, so click away for additional sappy sentimentality about lawbreaking, job-stealing, resource-looting illegal aliens:
Stay, hide or leave? Hard choices for immigrants in the heartland, By Jack Healy, Santa Fe New Mexican via New York Times, August 12, 2017
HAMPTON, Iowa — It was quitting time. Edith Rivera took one last lunch order, dropped off a basket of tortilla chips and set off from work, heading out to the farm roads where other immigrants feared to drive.
Like them, Rivera, 33, had no legal status in the country where she had lived for 18 years. She had no driver’s license, apart from the long-expired North Carolina identification she held safe, like a talisman, in her wallet.
But as she skimmed past the northern Iowa cornfields on her way to her son Steven’s seventh-grade track meet, she did not share other immigrants’ fears. Not of being pulled over. Not of raids or deportation. Not of the man in the White House. Not of the new Franklin County sheriff’s quest to make sure this rapidly diversifying community of hog barns and egg farms would never again be known as an immigrant sanctuary.
Her American journey was waning, and she had little left to lose.
Her husband, Jesús Canseco-Rodriguez, was already gone — deported to Mexico in 2015. Rivera had jettisoned their apartment and sold off what the family had built in Hampton: their small business power-washing hog barns, Canseco’s work truck, their furniture.
Now, at this tense juncture for immigrants and their adoptive hometowns across the conservative swaths of rural America, Rivera planned to sever one last tie. She was returning to Mexico — and to her husband — with Steven, 13 years old and American-born.
Some politicians call it “self-deportation.” She called it her family’s only hope of being together.
