[Mb-civic] Á ngels in America By JOHN TIERNEY

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Ángels in America
By JOHN TIERNEY

CHICAGO

Ángel Espinoza doesn't understand why Republicans on Capitol Hill are
determined to deport Mexicans like him. I don't get it, either. He makes me
think of my Irish grandfather.

They both left farms and went to the South Side of Chicago, arriving with
relatively little education. My grandfather took a job in the stockyards and
lived in an Irish boardinghouse nearby. Espinoza started as a dishwasher and
lived with his brother in a Mexican neighborhood.

Like my grandfather, who became a streetcar motorman and then a police
officer, Espinoza moved on to better-paying jobs and a better home of his
own. Like my grandfather, Espinoza married an American-born descendant of
immigrants from his native country.

But whereas my grandfather became a citizen, Espinoza couldn't even become a
legal resident. Once he married an American, he applied, but was rejected
because he'd once been caught at the border and sent home with an order to
stay out. Violating that order made him ineligible for a green card and
eligible for deportation.

"I had to tell my 4-year-old daughter that one day I might not come home,"
he said. "I work hard and pay taxes and don't want any welfare. Why deport
me?"

The official answer, of course, is that he violated the law. My grandfather
didn't. But my grandfather didn't have to. There weren't quotas on Europeans
or most other immigrants in 1911, even though, relative to the population,
there were more immigrants arriving and living here than there are today. If
America could absorb my grandfather, why keep out Espinoza?

It's been argued that Mexicans are different from past immigrants because
they're closer to home and less likely to assimilate. Compared with other
immigrants today, they're less educated, and their children are more likely
to get poor grades and drop out of school. Therefore, the argument goes,
Mexicans are in danger of becoming an underclass living in linguistically
isolated ghettos.

Those concerns sound reasonable in theory. But if you look at studies of
immigrants, you find that the typical story is much more like Espinoza's. He
dropped out of school at age 16 in southern Mexico, when his family needed
money for medical bills. He paid a coyote to sneak him across the border and
went to the Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago, a metropolitan area
that is now home to the second-largest Mexican population in the nation.

Espinoza started off making less than $4 an hour as a dishwasher in a
restaurant that flouted the minimum-wage law. But he became a cook and
worked up to $15 an hour. He switched to driving a street-cleaning truck, a
job that now pays him $17 an hour, minus taxes and Social Security.

By age 24, he and his wife, Anita, had saved enough to buy a house for about
$200,000 in Villa Park, a suburb where most people don't speak Spanish. Now
27, Espinoza's still working on his English (we spoke in Spanish), but his
daughter is already speaking English at her preschool.

There's nothing unusual about his progress. More than half of the Mexican
immigrants in Chicago own their own homes, and many are moving to the
suburbs. No matter where they live, their children learn English.

You can hear this on the sidewalks and school corridors in Mexican
neighborhoods like Pilsen, where most teenagers speak to one another in
English. A national survey by the Pew Hispanic Center found that nearly all
second-generation Latinos are either bilingual or English-dominant, and by
the next generation 80 percent are English-dominant and virtually none speak
just Spanish.

Yesterday, the Senate seemed close to a deal letting most immigrants become
legal residents. But it fell apart when Republicans fought to add
restrictions, including some that could prevent an immigrant with Espinoza's
history from qualifying.

Bobby Rush, a Democratic representative from Chicago, is trying to pass
protections for the Espinozas and other families in danger of being
separated. The issue has galvanized other Chicago public officials and
immigrant advocates, who are planning to take the families to Washington to
press their case.

I'd like to see Republicans on Capitol Hill explain to Espinoza why he's
less deserving than their immigrant ancestors, but that's probably too much
to expect. Espinoza has a simpler wish: "I would like them to tell my
American daughter why her father can't stay with her."

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