Today, I went to Boston to go to a meeting on immigration issues and how they relate to family homelessness. During the meeting, the Massachusetts state legislature debated this year’s budget just half a block away under the golden dome of the state house. I brought two participants of our shelter program with me. They are wonderful people.
One of the women brought her one-year-old son, and on the train ride home I helped him stand up on my knees and we watched the other trains as we left North Station. He smiles and giggles a lot, especially when his mother brings her hand close to his face and then pulls it away just before she touches him. I’m not sure how long she has been in this country, but she has had a difficult journey. She used to live in poverty in a very dangerous city in Latin America. Her family was in constant threat of violence.
The other woman has two teenage daughters. She searches everyday for jobs and housing. There aren’t any, but she keeps looking. She takes pride in how clean she keeps her shelter apartment, in her appearance, in her graduation from a recent self-advocacy class, and in her daughters. One is going to graduate from high school this spring, and has been accepted into a local college. Her daughters came to America before she did. They got visas through their father. She needed to be with her daughters. So, she found a way.
I work with a lot of mothers. Mothers whose sons are being deployed to Afghanistan. Mothers whose kids are away at college. Mothers whose children have passed away. Mothers whose kids are at home with them. Single mothers who take care of their families on their own (there is a special kind of strength in a single mother that exists in no other creature).
I never understood, on a personal level, the reality of our wars until I saw my coworkers cry as their sons were being deployed. One jokes about flying to Afghanistan with him to keep him safe. He’s in his 40s. I’m not sure she was joking.
Mothers do anything for their children. To be with them, to feed them, to protect them, to nurture them, to help them grow.
I can’t look at the world and separate out the kinds of lives people should live based on borders. I can’t. Mothers whose children are at risk of starvation, murder, rape, drugs, and war can’t either.
I am really close with my own mother. When I need proof that love exists in the world I think about her. I am convinced that if Wisconsin during the 1990s had been a place ravaged by violence and poverty and there was some other place that was reported to be a safe haven—a place where her kids could be safe and go to school and grow and live in peace—that she would have uprooted our whole family and gone there, whether or not she had permission from anybody else’s laws—or even if she understood them or was aware of them. As if a government could legislate a mother’s need to take care of her children, a mother’s instinct.
At the meeting we talked about the budget discussions and what that means for emergency assistance for the poor. If the budget passes as it is now, immigrants without documentation will no longer be eligible for shelter, even if their children are citizens or legal residents.
Punish a mother for being a mother? Punish children? If families with an “illegal” head of household don’t have safe housing, their children will be taken from them.
This is not worth lower taxes for the rest of us.
I was sitting in my living room a few minutes ago, with a still smoldering anger and desire and passion to change things, and it struck me that if every person in the country had been on the trip to Boston with me today, with those two mothers, that no one would think it that large of a sacrifice to keep funding affordable housing, food stamps, and WIC. If only you all knew these two women! And watched the little boy laugh!
There are other ways to cut the deficit. I’m not claiming to be a politician or an economist or a sociologist. I’m just claiming that these people are worth it. Every penny. If I'm ever a father I pray that I will have the an ounce of the courage and strength and love of an immigrant mother.
I am in contact with the organization that ran the meeting today, and they are going to let me know when and who to call at the State House to advocate for these people. I hope you'll help.
If this doesn’t change, some beautiful people will be on the streets on July 1st.
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