Three years ago, I was unloading some 50-pound bags of landscape pebbles from the trunk of my car when I felt a four-inch blade of molten steel jab into my lower back.
Middle age had officially arrived, and my doctor ordered the permanent closure of Eshman Lifting and Schlepping, Inc. It was time to find younger men with stronger backs to do my dirty work.
That’s how I met Luis.
As I was driving out of Home Depot with more bags of rock and soil, I pulled over, and a dozen day laborers rushed to my window. I motioned to Luis and another guy, and they scrambled inside.
We exchanged names, and I went back to listening to National Public Radio — a “Weekend Edition” interview with the singer Neil Sedaka about his new album of Yiddish melodies. Halfway through Sedaka’s rendition of “My Yiddishe Mamme,” Luis, who was in the front seat, turned to me.
“I always thought his voice had a feminine quality,” he said.
“I didn’t know he was Jewish,” Luis went on. “He must be Sephardic.”
Luis, it turned out, was studying music theory at a community college. He had left southern Mexico years before and worked at a traveling circus in the United States and Canada.
He eventually landed in college, where his goal was a degree in neuro-computer science, or, as he explained it, “the interface between the brain and computer technology.” He was also a student of religion.
Raised Catholic, he became a devout evangelical, then studied Judaism, and now, at 40, had settled into regular Buddhist meditation.
Luis was my first illegal alien. His presence in my life forced me to rethink every aspect of a debate that never seems close to being either rational or resolved.
Everyone benefits
One thing Luis’ biography made clear to me: If he was the first illegal immigrant I willingly and knowingly employed, he certainly wasn’t the first from whom I benefited.
Furniture stripping, gardening, moving and storage, hauling, food service — these are just a few of the jobs Luis has worked, so employers could keep prices lower for us consumers.
Every one of us benefits from illegal labor in our daily life, at the very least by paying less for myriad goods and services.
But I also know that one anecdote does not good policy make. Proponents of harsher anti-immigrant measures might point out that not all the nation’s 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants have clean records, study neuro-computer science and know that Neil Sedaka is a Sephardic Jew.
They make up 6 to 7 percent of the prison population (not 30 percent, as conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan claims). They burden social services like schools and health clinics.
Perhaps most damaging is that these immigrants take jobs unskilled Americans could otherwise take, helping to create a permanent underemployed, undereducated class of Americans.
Early this decade, as the unemployment rate of 18- to 64-year-old natives without a high school education rose from 10 to 14 percent, it fell from 9 to 7 percent among their foreign-born counterparts.
So what is a humane, non-hysterical, mutually beneficial approach? What can American Jews support, given their awareness of the good that hard-working outsiders can bestow and the dangers that xenophobia can wreak?
Recently, in an address to the Pacific Council on International Policy, Jorge Castaneda, Mexico’s former foreign minister, outlined one set of solutions.
Castaneda — the son of a German Jewish mother and Mexican father — said that any deal must take into account the pull of economic opportunity in the United States and the push of poverty and poor social policy in Mexico.
Mexico should agree to enforce its southern border, a thruway for migrants from Central America; to stop people from leaving the country illegally; to reward those who stay with better benefits; to penalize families whose members emigrate; and to provide development and job opportunities to those who stay.
The United States should agree to better enforcement at the border and with employers, a tamper-proof ID system and an expansive guest/temporary worker program.
Two-thirds of immigrants prefer to come and go, Castaneda said, working for U.S. dollars but living in Mexico. Tighter border controls under the Clinton administration only locked illegal immigrants in, not kept them out.
Finally, the United States needs to create a simple and expedited path to citizenship for the 12 million or more Mexicans and others in the country today.
Just 4 percent of the population, they will eventually be assimilated into the fabric of the country — a country that over the last decade, I might add, they helped build.
Castaneda, who is also the author of “Ex Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants” (The New Press, 2008), pointed out that Americans seem to favor a humane and sensible approach.
The Jewish community needs to be loud and supportive of such moderation. We can’t leave all the heavy lifting to Luis.
Rob Eshman is editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
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