Man, I Really Hope They Were Kidding

This article is going to be published in the Lumberjack on April 19.

As I was walking to class a couple weeks ago, I stumbled across a rudimentary, 18-inch high wall made of cardboard lying across the pedway. A girl was sitting down on the ground in front of the wall, saying something about illegal immigration and secure borders through a megaphone. I shook my head in disbelief, laughed and made some sarcastic comment.

Later that day, I found myself pondering the protest. It occurred to me that it had all the marks of irony – an ineffective wall that people were walking around, someone sitting down spouting meaningless drivel about border security and immigrants and people laughing at it. I’m really hoping this was indeed a brilliantly ironic caricature of Russell Pearce and the Minutemen, although I suppose it could have been some tragic and misguided sincerity. Irony or not, it’s eerily close to the actual discourse surrounding immigration today.

We have the wrong ideas about immigrants. They aren’t evil. They aren’t a security threat. They’re people looking for work.

I spent the weekend after Spring Break learning about the lives of immigrant farm workers in the city of Santa Barbara and in Ventura County, California. I got to see some substandard housing where farm workers lived, some Habitat for Humanity housing projects and I got a lesson from some farm workers on how to pick strawberries. I was struck by how poorly we treat the people we depend on for our food. One of the strawberry growers in Ventura County was our host – he was a really nice guy, and took pride in the fact that most of his workers return year after year to keep working for him. He paid them as well as he could afford to pay them.

It occurred to me that no one person is the bad guy in this situation, as liberals and conservatives would both have us believe. The immigrants are just trying to find work, the grower is doing the best he can to treat them well, and his distributors are trying to negotiate the fairest prices possible. They’re all just people.

To further cement the injustice we as a nation perpetuate against the people we depend on, there was an air show taking place right above our fields. Fighter jets flew by at the speed of sound and launched missiles into the desert to wow spectators. How many million dollars was that? Strawberries cost two or three bucks a package. We’ve got some pretty great priorities, don’t we?

I really want to believe that those people with their ramshackle wall out on the pedway were joking.