Kendal Unruh has watched the TV news reports of the immigrants- rights demonstrations from her living room in Castle Rock with growing anxiety.
The demonstrators wave Mexican flags and carry signs with messages in Spanish, she said. “I’ve heard about the nationalistic movement. They have vowed to take our country back for Mexico. I’m not the only one who feels this way.”
The grassroots conservative political organizer said she believes the very foundation of U.S. culture is at stake in the immigration debate roiling the country.
“These criminals need to not be here anymore in my country,” she said. “They need to go back to their homeland. They’re obviously nationalistic and proud of it. They should go.”
When I told Gonzalo Garcia about Unruh’s perceptions, he was puzzled.
He didn’t participate in the demonstrations March 25 because he was working, but he admits to being sympathetic with the estimated 50,000 marchers who took to the streets in Denver. And he’s pretty sure the message they were trying to deliver was much more benign than any intent to colonize the world’s biggest superpower. “The main point people were trying to say was simple: ‘We are just here to work,”‘ he said. “That’s all.”
Garcia, who was a schoolteacher in Mexico before he swam across the Rio Grande and entered the U.S. illegally 13 years ago, said he came here with one thing in mind: “I just wanted a better future for me and my family.”
He was earning $300 a month in Mexico. Even at $3.75 an hour, which is what he was paid to separate aluminum cans from piles of junk on his first job here, life was better.
Unruh doesn’t buy it. She said if immigrants want a better life, they should work to improve conditions in their own countries instead of wrecking the U.S. “They come here and they don’t assimilate,” she said. “They keep their heritage. It’s duplicitous.”
She described their effect as insidious. They won’t take the U.S. by force, she said. “They’ll do it through a process of coming across the borders illegally in huge numbers and having a lot of kids.”
That mystified Garcia. “I don’t think anybody is thinking of that,” he said. “We’re happy if we can just work.”
Furthermore, most immigrants are eager to become part of the American mainstream, he said. When he came to Denver with his wife and daughter, Garcia worked from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. and went to school each day to learn English. “That was my schedule for about four years,” he said in crisp, fluent English.
His family obtained documentation as soon as possible. Garcia is now a U.S. citizen.
Unruh is highly critical of the Bush administration’s guest worker plan or any proposal that would legitimize those who crossed the border illegally. She said she supports mass deportation and most of the rest of U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo’s immigration plan. “Everything but the wall,” she said. “I don’t want to live in a country that has a wall around it.”
I asked Garcia if he was concerned that his family might be swept up in a roundup of immigrants and sent back to Mexico just as tens of thousands of U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry were during the mass deportations under President Herbert Hoover in the 1930s.
“No,” he said, “I’m not worried. I could be mistaken, but I don’t think that will happen. I understand that there always are going to be people on one side and people on the other. There will always be different opinions. It doesn’t matter what I say, people will believe what they want.”
Unruh remains suspicious. “These aren’t just people who want to work in the construction industry,” she said. “They’re gangs of criminals coming from Mexico. They need to be deported.”
“I know who I am, I know my family, I know how we behave,” Garcia said. Where you come from and what you look like doesn’t matter in America. “All that matters is how we behave.”
Ah, it’s a beautiful dream.
If only it were true.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
