I hopped on the bus today here in DC and saw this Jamaican bus driver trying to help out a 17-year old kid who couldn't speak any English. The busdriver made a pretty good attempt at fake Spanish and held up the bus for three cycles of the light to try and help the kid, but it was a lost cause.
Being more or less fluent in Spanish, I jumped in and asked the kid if I could help.
He was looking for "downtown" (the busdriver thought he was saying Georgetown, which is where the driver was going to send him), you know, where people work, where there's a market, so he could find work.
The kid was from Mexico. I asked him some questions. Do you know anyone here? No. How long have you been in the U.S.? I just got here today. What kind of work are you looking for? Anything, restaurant, anything.
I thought, holy crap, this poor kid is dying to work and is completely without clue. I started explaining where the bus goes that he's on and where he might want to go. Tried to send him to Adams Morgan or Columbia Heights, Hispanic neighborhoods where he might be able to hook up with some resources or people who could, at a minimum, explain where the day laborers might congregate and explain it in his language.
He asked me if there were Mexicans there. I suddenly felt really bad for him. Even the idea of Salvadoreans, the predominant Latino group here, would be foreign to him. Heck, he'd probably have culture shock from an encounter with someone from Mexico City (as opposed to his home state). Brave kid. Or naive/dumb, I couldn't tell.
As our bus passed the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument, he asked me where the White House was and if George Bush is there and can people go see him. I couldn't resist letting out a torrent -- as much as my SPanish would allow -- about how Bush is a bad man, very unpopular, who spends as little time here in Washington as he can. And no, nobody can go see him. "Does he hide?" Yes, I answered.
I got to thinking that in the upcoming political cycles we are going to see immigration as a huge issue. Perhaps the gay marriage of 2006 and 2008. Bashing of "illegals". It is true that kids like this -- I am assuming he didn't ahve papers, I was not about to ask -- cut in line when they come here and they're breaking the law. But they're coming becuase they want to WORK, and to work their asses off -- I've seen it firsthand over and over.
What we need is to find a way to make it legal for people to come here and work. It's that simple. If there is a crime in all this, it's the bastard who picked this kid up and plopped him down in the streets of DC with nothing but a sack of lies about streets paved with gold. I'd like to find that coyote and beat him senseless. If we liberals want to get tough on immigration, let's go after the traffickers. The overeager workers are guilty of just that, being overeager. It's a trait we value in this country and we need more, not less of that.