This summer I learned a lot about heat. Before driving south to spend a term in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, I never fully appreciated how HOT 106 degrees Fahrenheit really is. I didn't sweat buckets. I sweated barrels and kegs. By 10 a.m., my steering wheel could melt flesh.
I learned about more than profuse sweat on the Texas-Mexican border, though. Interested in immigration policy, I suppose I thought that by spending the summer in an area in which the issue is of immediate concern, I'd find a solution to the whole immigration dilemma, an issue right at the heart of our national identity.
You know, twenty-year-old Government major finds the elusive way to reconcile philosophical ideals of opportunity and charity, economic ideals of free trade and efficiency, and a nation's right to protect the security and integrity of its borders.
Yep, I was seriously deluded.
Obviously, I didn't find any magical solutions. What I did find was a more holistic picture of the issue. One problem with the immigration policies we have adopted is that they seek to maintain a line of defense on the border without dealing with macroeconomic issues or the pull of jobs in the United States or the push of desperate poverty in a floundering Mexican economy.
Economics links our country to Mexico. American firms, who operate in Mexico in order to profit from cheaper labor, open factories known as maquiladoras. The Mexicans who work for them spend years saving enough to add a concrete floor to their homes. But the American managers and technicians live in huge new houses with swimming pools. Although their lifestyles could not be more different, the international trading partnership creates a strange link between the two communities.
Besides immigration, I actually learned a lot about what it means to be an American this summer. Legal permanent residents, people in the United States to stay, pay taxes and have the potential to make valuable contributions to our economy. Willing to travel two thousand miles for the chance of a job in Michigan or Indiana, they were some of the hardest-working people I have ever met.
But the resident aliens I met in Texas felt politically powerless, and their limited political rights impacted the quality of their lives. Half a million Texas immigrants live in rural colonias -- substandard housing developments without paved roads, sewage, and clean drinking water.
Working as a community organizer, I watched several communities learn about local government and how to take group action to make improvements in infrastructure. The key to the success of these communities was participation. People felt a sense of individual responsibility. By motivating them to take an interest in their community, the organizing accomplished far more than giving them a handout. When people participated in serving their own needs, those needs were better served. Schools and churches became more actively involved in neighborhoods, and several colonia women developed into community leaders, taking great pride in their work.
Not all colonia projects are this successful.
Many suffer from a lack of interest and cooperation by residents. They fail because they do not start with the people themselves, inviting their participation, trying to understand their needs, and giving them a sense of power. Without that sense of power, people have no impulse toward action.
Over the summer, I came to value the ability we have to participate in and influence decisions that affect us. Most of us at Dartmouth are relatively well-off, and we have a great deal of potential political power. But when we take that power for granted, we become as inactive and disenfranchised as the poor and powerless residents of Texas colonias.
When I arrived home at the end of the summer, I felt strange to be surrounded once again by the new ranch houses and well-manicured lawns of Midwestern suburbia. Although the same country, it was practically a different world.
In Texas I had lived with three amazingly cool nuns -- definitely a change from life at Dartmouth. They were women very dedicated to service to the poor and to social action. Although I learned about politics on several levels, I also learned a lesson from these women, who believed in service, in simplicity, and in appreciating what one has. I hope that lesson remains long after my memories of summer heat and sweat evaporate.
