by Tsu Dho Nimh

Created on: November 20, 2008   Last Updated: January 21, 2009

Better life? How about I would have no life at all if it weren't for illegal immigrants? My great-grandmother's decision to sneak across the border from Canada with her daughters made it possible for my grandparents to meet, marry and produce my father. If he had not been born, I wouldn't be here. It's not that I would be a Canadian, I would never have been born.

She was, it's true, a special case. What about the rest of the illegal immigrants, the millions who are supposedly sucking up our tax dollars by the billions for bailouts and having lavish parties at government expense? Oops, it's our legal citizens, the managers in the banking industry who are doing that. And the people who sent the real estate sector into the toilet? More legal citizens making risky loans to legal citizens. Oil speculators who drove the cost of gasoline to $4.50 a gallon weren't illegal immigrants either. The hiring manager who decided to outsource my job to China was a legal resident, a citizen, just following higher profits.

What have illegal immigrants done that can compare with wrecking the economy like the citizens did? They do a lot of yard work in the rich suburb down the road, but that's not all. Until the plants got raided, they helped produce most of the kosher chicken that is sold in the United States. During the building boom (before the legal citizen bankers ruined the boom times) illegal immigrants were building houses they could never buy. Even now I could go into the kitchen of almost any restaurant in town, shout "viene la Migra!" (the immigration cops are coming!) and half the staff would bolt for the back door. Are they taking jobs away from American citizens, food out of the mouths of American babies? I doubt it. The supervisor for the roofing company that recently re-roofed my house was looking for more help, was willing to pay twice minimum wage for a beginner, and has 10 openings in a down economy. It's hard work, it's honest work, and it's obviously work that legal Americans are unwilling to do.

Some illegal immigrants - I know of several - have been willing to risk deportation to do the right thing. They were the guys in the battered pickup truck, who waved down help for a hit-and-run driver's victim, loaned me a cell phone and stayed to help me talk to the 9-1-1 dispatcher until the cops and ambulance arrived. They were nervous, they spoke no English, they were almost certainly illegal, but they stayed. The victim's life is certainly better, because those illegal immigrants got him help before he died of respiratory failure. My life that day was better because I got to get bloody and save a life.

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