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Dinner and Immigration Just Don't Mix

The occasion this past Saturday night was a happy one. Nine individuals were assembled around the dining room table of a friend, an excellent cook and superb…

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The occasion this past Saturday night was a happy one. Nine individuals were assembled around the dining room table of a friend, an excellent cook and superb baker, all eager to enjoy her wonderful cooking and celebrate her husband’s 68th birthday. Those present were highly educated, allegedly extremely intelligent, and members of minority groups who, at one time or another, had personally felt the sting of prejudice and discrimination.

The conversation was pleasant until the topic of immigration came up. When one of my dinner companions asked what I did for a living I explained that I was an immigration attorney. His face darkened and his previously congenial tone turned chilly. He asked me what I thought about the pardon President Bush had extended to the Border patrol agent who had been convicted of shooting a Mexican national with stated ties to the Mexican drug cartels. Before I could fully formulate a response, others at the table jumped in. Statements were made like: “Well, these Mexicans are breaking the law. They are breaking into our homes and we have the right to shoot and kill them once they’re here in order to protect our country. All these immigrants do is get welfare and fill our hospitals. They deliberately sneak into the country to have babies in order to stay here. They should be thrown out, along with their babies”. Shell shocked, I momentarily thought that I had mistakenly wandered into the middle of a Lou Dobbs or “Twilight Zone” episode rather than into the suburban home of a friend. As I attempted to rebut each wrongful allegation point by point I realized that I was engaged in a losing battle.  I knew that I had to focus on the most outrageous of the many misstatements if I was to have any impact in dispelling these lies which anti-immigrant groups gleefully spout and spread. 

I asked my dinner companions if they truly felt that entering the U.S. illegally was akin to breaking into someone’s private home. Several of them nodded their heads in vehement agreement while I sat there, dumbfounded. Fortunately, two of my dinner companions, a husband and wife team, were criminal attorneys and engaged the main “bear baiter” in a heated and lengthy discussion, explaining that in the state of Pennsylvania our citizens are not permitted to go on hunting expeditions and shoot individuals for immigration violations.

How, I thought, could I possibly reach this one man who minutes ago had seemed so kind and charming and now was seething with hate? What had happened to him to make him hate a whole group of people who he had never before met? Had he lost his job to a foreign national? Questions like this were on the tip of my tongue but I recognized that they were not the subject of “polite” dinner conversation. Instead, I bit into my much awaited dessert, finding that its expected sweetness was now infused with a dose of bitterness. I realized that until and unless economic prosperity returns to the U.S. xenophobia will continue to fester and desserts eaten in the previously “liberal” suburbs of Philadelphia not taste as sweet as before.

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