There’s dignity in the “low-skilled” immigrant labor that Donald Trump and his administration have trashed as of late—I learned that from my mother, a Mexican immigrant. She worked as a housekeeper for nearly 30 years, until she decided to retire this past summer. I shared some of her story last year, following his attack on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, whom he denigrated as “Miss Housekeeping”:
When I was a little boy, I kept the fact that my mom worked as a housekeeper from my friends. I was so afraid of being labeled “the poor Mexican kid”. It seemed like the kids at my grade school all lived in big houses and had parents who worked in nice offices. My mom worked cleaning them.
It took growing up for me to finally understand the meaning of the word “dignity”. My mother’s work has never been insignificant to her. It allowed her to support her family and kept her independent after leaving an emotionally abusive husband. Most importantly, she was happy. So why should it have ever been insignificant to me?
Following Trump’s racist proposal yesterday to slash legal immigration in half in favor of a “merit-based” immigration system—this is code for “white” immigrants—it felt personal yet again. After all, this is a man who has imported hundreds of these so-called “low-skilled” workers to staff his businesses and resorts. Good enough to work for him, but not good enough to work for themselves and their families, apparently.
So I tweeted this:
I certainly wasn’t expecting anything else to come of it, but then people started tweeting their own immigration stories at me, of immigrants parents who also worked as “low-skilled” laborers, many as farmworkers. Some eventually opened their own successful businesses. Others were able to send their kids to college, or themselves to college. All persevered through their work, despite not knowing English well and some facing an undocumented status. Our parents, the original Dreamers. And it doesn’t get much more American than that.