For as long as humans have been migrating, but not conquering their host countries, they have been demonized. Check out the Jews under Hitler. The Arabs in France. The Pakistanis in England. And all the jokes about the Poles/Irish/ Mexican (fill in ethnicity of the most reviled group of) immigrants in your ‘hood.
So, the Thanksgiving story about the young boy who was rescued by a Mexican who had just crossed the border in southern Arizona was miraculous in a number of ways.
Without the intervention of a 26-year-old Mexican called Jesus Manuel Cordova, things might have ended badly for the 9-year-old son of an American woman, who lost control of her van in a remote area just north of the Mexican border, and eventually died while awaiting help.
As the local county sheriff, Tony Estrada, reported to major news outlets, Cordova came across the boy, told him that everything was going to be all right, gave him a jacket, built a bonfire and stayed with him until about 8 a.m. the next morning. That’s when hunters passed by, called authorities–and the boy was flown to hospital.
The story was miraculous for the way it got all the major news outlets casting an “illegal immigrant” named Jesus as an angel.
What wasn’t miraculous about the story was how the boy’s rescuer then got taken into custody by the Border Patrol, who, assumedly, will deport him.
So, while it’s depressing to read the ugly comments at sfgate about “illegal immigration,” unfortunately, they aren’t at all surprising.
Call me a bleeding heart legal immigrant who, yes, had to pay through the teeth to get her green card, but I’d argue that millions of “illegal immigrants” are angels every day, as they look after the children, homes, gardens and farmlands of a nation full of people grown rich on the spoils of their own historically illegal settlement.
Kinda demonic, ain’t it?