Maybe it’s not American greatness that brings immigrants here

My mother left a small village in western Ireland when she was 17.

She had good reason. Her public education ended at age 14. At the time, public high schools did not exist in Ireland. The fifth child of a Irish farmer’s 10 children could only get a secondary education with a scholarship to a private school. And she did not get that. Many people in her village in County Mayo were migrant workers, traveling to Scotland to pick potatoes.

She didn’t want that life. So she left. So did most of her sisters.

And decades later, she’s still angry.

“It wasn’t right,” she recently told me at our kitchen table. “Can you imagine doing that at age 17? It wasn’t right.”

I can’t imagine my oldest daughter, now 17, crossing an ocean by herself. My wife and I don’t feel comfortable letting her venture 50 miles from home.

When you make that kind of journey, it’s the only choice you have left.

The discussion of immigration on the federal and state level ignores that fact.

The Trump administration treats immigrants as commodities, pushing them around and locking them up. It sets arrest quotas for those without legal status. The president plans to use raids to punish political enemies.

Here in Alabama, we’ve made it difficult to drive people without status around. And we have a new statute requiring law enforcement to collect the DNA of immigrants without legal status in custody. They don’t have to face criminal charges. They just have to get caught in a system that makes it next-to-impossible for anyone without a major degree or a large wad of cash to come to this country legally.

And we have local sheriffs and police chiefs eagerly signing up to throw these men and women in jail.

You don’t pass those sorts of laws unless you assume that anyone from a foreign country is a threat. In this view, immigrants are opportunists, eager to leech off the greatness of the United States of America or the aspirational mediocrity of Alabama.

So we dehumanize people. And we look past the pain they carry. But you’ll never understand immigration without seeing those wounds.

It’s hard to leave everything behind, even when everything you leave is screwed up. Many people will stick with the misery of the familiar rather than set foot into the unknown.

When you do, it’s because you can’t do anything else. Building a new life in a new country — finding housing and work, or learning a new language — strains the body and taxes the mind. It can wring a person out.

Now imagine doing that in a country where the benefits of immigration are ignored; where a man who deals in paranoid caricatures dictates immigration policy and where people have to fear those charged with upholding the law. My mother dealt with a lot as an immigrant, but threats from law enforcement were not in the mix.

What does it say that people still come to the United States in the face of that harassment?

Many would say it shows our inherent greatness. All the people trudging through Ellis Island in those black-and-white newsreels, it’s thought, came out smiling; ate meat three times a day and found jobs that gave their children a springboard to a better life and their grandchildren the chance to find homes in the suburbs.

Even the most rabid nativist thinks the huddled masses at our borders validate American exceptionalism.

But let me suggest that immigration is less a reflection of our shining virtues than of the desperation of the immigrant.

It’s less about us than what awaits them at home. If you will endure the struggles of building a new life and risk the chance of legal harassment here, it’s because the alternative is worse.

This hardly factors in discussions of immigration, even from defenders. We tell or tolerate egregious lies about suffering human beings, casting them as criminals or sponges, blinded by a belief in some American charisma foreigners can’t resist.

But there is no divine light drawing immigrants to our shores. They are borne here by heartbreak. The heartbreak of a birthplace that cannot be a home. The agony of choosing between likely suffering in one place and guaranteed suffering in another.

A kinder country might re-center the discussion of immigration on that pain. It could even lead to a more humane and logical policy, one that understands that the poor and the desperate, not the wealthy and educated, are most likely to immigrate. It would give people of good faith the space to build their lives. The opportunity to find the lives their homes couldn’t provide.

That wouldn’t erase the core sorrow of the immigrant experience. But it wouldn’t pile needless suffering on top of it, either.

And it would allow immigrants to find a way forward, as my mother did, without finding their path blocked by a masked man with a gun.