An ode to the immigrant family
I was thinking about my in-laws today because it's the anniversary of my father-in-law's death, 20 years ago. We were married 2 years ago, so I never met him, and I'm sad about that.
My wife's family were immigrants from India, who were allowed in under the "new" rules Ted Kennedy forced through in the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. Before that they would have been excluded as potential immigrants.
I want DU to think about that for a second. Before 1965, most south Asians and east Asians were simply excluded from official immigration because the program had been designed to keep America white. When Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about the long-reaching tendrils of White Supremacy, remember that is one of them.
My father-in-law, whom I am very sad I never met, was an electrical engineer, who got his green card and worked for Boeing in San Francisco. Oddly enough, though I hadn't even met my wife yet, my own Masters thesis cited his dissertation (I was studying control systems, which were his specialty -- damn, I wish I had met that man).
My mother-in-law, meanwhile, was a liberal arts graduate who was interested in fonts and page layout, and so she started a print shop in San Francisco. At its height it employed 15 people. She sold it when she retired, but I think it still employees 10 or so.
My point is just that I want to express how much the immigrant experience in the US really, really reflects the importance of family for this country. My in-laws came to this country with literally the shirts on their backs and a bag of clothing, and were welcomed (thanks to Senator Kennedy). They were able to build their lives here thanks to their extended family.
A disadvantage of white supremacy, I think, is losing how important extended family is. I know I have second cousins, and I know who they are, kind of (one is a pitcher for the Red Sox now), but I couldn't really talk about them. In contrast, my wife calls her second cousins "bhai" ("brother"
and they call her "bahin" ("sister" . That's the kind of network immigrants have to have. But with that, they build some amazing stuff. Like my mother-in-law's print shop. Even as a very poor white person (I grew up on AFDC, SNAP, and WIC; she didn't) I didn't have that kind of sense of family.
Anyways. I just wanted to put that out there. (Legal) immigration is the lifeblood of the American economy. The people who give up everything and everyone they know to come to America, chasing whatever dream they have, are exactly who we need to be here. The 1950's nuclear family was the white dream Ta-Nehisi keeps writing about. It's not sustainable. We all need to know our communities and our families more than we do now.
My wife grew up in the East Bay back when that was mostly other immigrants like her family. She fluently speaks Bengali (her parents' language) along with Tagalog and Vietnamese (her two BFFs' languages). Nowadays the East Bay is different, but that's still to me the dream of America: people can and do and must come here and raise families that defy their own expectations. When that stops, we stop being America.
So, that's all. Just a paean of praise to the immigrant family and what it has meant to our country.
