As a Peace Corps volunteer and technical trainer in Guatemala in the 1990s, I met a dozen people who’d worked in the United States without the proper paperwork. Exactly zero of them had any goal save to improve the lives of their families.
With the money they earned in the U.S., my Guatemalan friends and acquaintances bought refrigerators and ovens, built additions on their houses to support their growing families and paid for their children’s educations. None of the above would have been possible on wages in Guatemala.
Each of the 12 performed jobs no American wanted to do. In Guatemala, one of my friends worked as the manager of a local bank. In the States, he’d also worked at a bank — cleaning its floors and toilets from midnight to 8 a.m. He made four times the salary in the latter job.
The majority of people now in the crosshairs of our country’s cruel and self-defeating immigration crackdowns doubtless have similar hopes. Or they’ve come to the United States because life in their countries has become unsustainable, unbearable and even deadly. They are not drug mules or fentanyl pushers or gang members or criminals. They are decent human beings who have become integral members of our communities. They are our friends, acquaintances and neighbors.
Instead of setting ICE on law-abiding, hard-working people who were not born in the United States but could contribute to making us a stronger and more prosperous country, the U.S. government ought to offer them a carefully considered but expedited pathway to citizenship. West Virginia should be a leading voice in calling for immediate immigration reform.
Given our state’s dire plunge in population — West Virginia was one of only four U.S. states to have fewer people in 2020 than it did in 2010, and deaths in our state have outnumbered births for the last two decades — we should welcome an influx of immigrants. We need—and will continue to need—people to fill critical roles in our cities, towns and hollers, including as caretakers of the young and the elderly.
To do nothing would be to accede to an intolerable status quo in which fewer and fewer people will be around to sustain our infrastructure—from roads to community centers to hospitals to retirement homes. We’ve tried to lure people to our state with incentives, including a $12,000 bonus to remote workers, but we need a bolder and better plan.
To be a destination for people who want to become Americans and pursue the American Dream would be to revitalize our state.
The Trump Administration’s portrait of the typical “illegal†immigrant as a criminal or a gang member is no more accurate than are vicious stereotypes of West Virginians. But as a tactic to scare us—and our state’s major office holders are cynically abetting this strategy—it’s effective. Sadly, it’s scaring us out of what’s in our best interests—and what’s humane and decent.
Mountaineers are always free, and we ought to welcome people who seek similar freedom — freedom from poverty and violence, freedom from oppressive governments, and freedom from what handcuffs human potential and dignity.
For our own sake, let’s leave the ICE age behind. Let’s be wild, wonderful and welcoming.
Mark Brazaitis is a WVU professor, a former Morgantown deputy mayor and the author of “American Seasons†and eight other books.
