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My Immigration Experience [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-09-18  

This is just a quick diary regarding J.D. Vance’s anti-immigrant comments. I grew up in Galveston County, Texas, just south of Houston. I have experienced in my lifetime (55 years,) not one, not two, but three large influxes of immigrants. Hispanic, primarily from Mexico, Southeast Asian, primarily from Vietnam, and South Asian, primarily from India. Vance is correct that this sometimes causes problems, but those problems are more than offset by the benefits.

Any time a resident population confronts a population of newcomers, complaints invariably ensue. It is not necessary for the two groups to be all that different in any way. Recently, I witnessed the merger of two churches. The two populations segregated along predictable lines. This was an ethnically homogenous merger, to go along with the two groups sharing both a religion and a denomination. Later, at the same church, but at the regional level, two women’s groups merged. The incoming group had a more Hispanic flavor. You can just imagine how that went. I see it now, with a large migration of people from Houston to the hill country, where I live. Regardless of the details, you hear the same complaints. (As an aside, when you read about Houston turning blue, it’s due, in part, to this migration.)

For many years, I lived in Houston. The diversity I experienced there rivals that of any other location on earth. I used to joke that my favorite thing about Houston was that you could travel the world at suppertime. At different times, I had neighbors from Mexico, India, Pakistan, Vietnamese, and Persia. That’s just the ones I remember! I’m sure there were others. It didn’t seem important enough to write it down at the time. I can only remember one “problem.” Shortly after one Thanksgiving, the pipes from my sink backed up. Maintenance was called, blah blah blah. To make a long story short, I had a humor laden conversation with my Persian immigrant neighbor about the fact that not everyone is born knowing everything. Now, everybody in the apartment block knew that there was an upper limit to how much you can stuff down the garbage disposal in your sink. Basically, scraps okay, leftovers, not so much. A bonus point was learning new curse words (in Spanish) from the maintenance guys.

One of my favorite stories about my Dad concerned immigration. Back during the Vietnamese “boat people” days, quite a few settled on the Gulf Coast, around Galveston. Due to their own efforts, they came to dominate the local shrimping industry. You may vaguely remember the KKK becoming involved. Well, the involvement included a rally in the small town where I grew up. I remember joking with my Dad about whether he would like to to attend the rally. He laughed, and said it would be just his luck that someone would take a picture. He worked at NASA, and that wouldn’t exactly go over well.

I’m sorry to have prattled on so. In conclusion, Vance just needs to relax. It all works out in the end.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/18/2271187/-My-Immigration-Experience?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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