Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
“Dang illegals taking honest work from honest men.”
I was stuck at the table with him again. My wife and his wife got along great, but him and I, well, our views on life didn’t match. But side-by-side we sit at another church potluck.
“Oh, you want to work in the fields in 100-degree heat in the summer?” I couldn’t help but prod him.
“No. I’m retired. But you know, someone could.”
“Yes, I suppose.” I debated if it would be bad to take a third turn around the dessert tables, not to pick something up but to get away. “But then they would have to be paid minimum wage and given safe housing. I think the studies show that the price of produce will double, unless we start underwriting it like we do the meat industry.”
“Harumph. We don’t underwrite the meat industry. Farmers are hard workers.”
“Yes they are. God’s own.” This time I wasn’t sarcastic. My brother and the family he married into operated a farm just outside of town. “I thank God for them three times a day. Every meal is possible because of them and the immigrants they hire.” I should have stopped before I added the part about immigrants, but “welcome the stranger” had been drilled into me by my Southern upbringing. I don’t know how others didn’t get the same message.
“Dang immigrants. Always sneaking across the border. We need to get that wall finished.”
“You know, there is a solution to stop immigration, better than a wall.”
“A wall is the best thing.”
“Walls always fail. The Great Wall of China didn’t keep the Mongols out. The wall the Romans put up to keep the wild Scots out after they conquered England was a complete fail. The Berlin wall fell in our time.” I gathered my wife’s cardboard plate and my own to take to the trash.
He followed me with his wife’s stuff. Of course he followed me. “So what would be your solution?” he hissed, like nothing could beat a wall except his hard head.
I leaned against the foldable wall carefully, the one usually dividing the fellowship hall into classrooms. “First, you need to define the problem. And it isn’t immigrants coming here, but why they leave where they are. Stop and think a moment. How bad does where you are has to be to make you leave everything behind and go to a country where you don’t speak the language or understand the laws. Where you have no friends and no support? Your family gone, your community gone. Think about that situation. People don’t come here lightly.”
“They hop the border all the time.”
“They cross desert. Sometimes walking hundreds of miles. Why would a person walk hundreds of miles from everything they know? They have to believe where they are going is going to be better than where they came from.”
“Exactly. They’re lazy no-goods wanting to take our social security.”
“I thought you said they were stealing jobs?”
The red either side of his neck started going up. I had promised my wife I wouldn’t get in a yelling match with him again.
“Back to the solution that is better than walls. I am working from the hypothesis, and I admit I could be wrong, but immigrants are always functionally refugees. That sounds bad. My white male privilege is showing. Sorry. But essentially where they are has become inhospitable to them or their family. Either no chance of a better future for their children or things are actively endangering them. They see our ‘Land of Opportunity’ as being better than where they are; a chance of survival and maybe even thriving. Despite language differences and uprooting their entire lives.”
He crossed his arm and braced his legs. I chose to ignore two of the gossips at the next table watching us like we were their soap operas.
“Based on that premise of why they are coming here, which, you have to admit is more important than what they do before they get here, right?”
“Right.” He nodded.
“There are two solutions, better than a wall to prevent them from coming, because anyone willing to walk hours, days, weeks even, through a desert isn’t going to be stopped long by a wall. Right?”
“Right.”
“The solutions are: one, make things better where they are, so they don’t need to leave, or, two, make things worse here so they don’t want to come.”
He frowned.
“A good international presence, working to make lives better for everyone—”
“And send our money to foreigners?” He cut me off.
“To help our neighbors, as Jesus told us to do.” I snapped. A quick inhale and exhale had me refocused. “Safer places to live mean people don’t feel the need to escape to save their children.”
“Still, sending money overseas sound like socialism to me.”
“Well, the other option is making America so inhospitable and dangerous no one wants to come here.”
“That isn’t going to happen. We are making America great again.”
“That should do it.” I started walking to the table where our wives sat. My beautiful, loving wife saw my approach and picked up her purse from under her chair.
(words 873, first published 6/21/2025)