Today’s Chronicle runs a story by Zeke Minaya on protests by immigrants in favor of immigration “reform” that concludes as follows:
For Gladys Chibez, a 54-year-old housecleaner from Houston who was at the rally, change cannot come soon enough.
She crossed illegally into the United States through McAllen in 1989.
“I came here like so many other people,” she said, “I came in the dark.” During her time in the United States, Chibez was absent for the death of her parents and missed the birth of her grandchildren back in El Salvador, she said. Chibez did not dare return home because of the fear that she would not be allowed to re-enter the United States, she said.
If repatriated in El Salvador, Chibez would have doomed her family to crushing poverty without the dollars from her American wages, she said.
“The United States country is a country of opportunity,” she said. “And I live with the hope that one day I will be allowed to become a part of it.”
Certainly, Miss Chibez’s vision of America as a “country of opportunity” is laudable. However, the fact is that she is in this country illegally. While the Chronicle writer may well sympathize with the woman because she missed the death of her parents and birth of her grandchildren, the fact that she is an illegal alien is not trumped by the touching anecdote.
Immigration reform may well be smart policy, but we wouldn’t especially know one way or the other from this story.
