The largely silent people who comprise the immigrant Latino population in this region are scared in the current political climate, so much so that no one is willing to talk—except one.
“America: Love It or Leave It” was a derogatory slogan in the 1960s and early ’70s aimed at anyone who opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Some of their convictions were so strong that people did, in fact, “leave it” and made new lives for themselves elsewhere, Canada being a preferred destination.
Today, most immigrants in this country do “love it,” for various reasons, and they desperately don’t want to “leave it.” But many are confronted with uncertain futures and the prospect of deportation. They are mostly from Latin America, they are a legion among us, and they are the principal force behind this story.
It’s All Come Down to This
On any given night, headlights shine through windows at 2 a.m. and shut off quickly when unrecognized vehicles drive up. Full pickups and cars park haphazardly in the dark. Doors opening and closing make a loud thump after mattresses and other rudimentary furniture are hastily loaded and unloaded. School children, making no eye contact as they hurry by, scramble to catch the bus in the morning and scurry to open front doors whence they came after being dropped off in the afternoon.
Spanish-speaking men in landscaping-company T-shirts, 17 of them in all, file out of a parked Winnebago motor home and into a Mexican food takeout on a day when tacos are the special. An English-speaking construction worker waiting in line says to no one in particular, “I bet they even live in that thing.” One of the braver young men speeds to the front door atop a stand-up Gravely mower to pick up his own quick lunch so he can get back to work, maybe unnoticed. Short-order cooks across the city usually just nod and smile when asked a question as they try to find somebody else to answer it while they slave away over a hot grill.
Anyone who speaks anything but English seems more frightened these days, with seemingly constant looks of distrust on their faces. In at least one case, a man admits that even his wife, a Canadian, is now apprehensive about living in the United States.
But still no one wants to tell their story, and understandably so.
No One to Do the Work
For those having watched these scenarios and at least indirectly allowed them to play out, the old saying “Be careful what you wish for” is now rearing its ugly head. The impact of deportation and other crackdowns on illegal immigrants goes mostly unnoticed at worst, and underappreciated at best, until it starts to affect the lives of larger and larger parts of the consumer population.
The more affluent among us have begun noticing that fewer workers are available to perform menial tasks like tree-trimming, fence-building, swimming-pool digging, housekeeping, and landscaping. For example, as anecdotal accounts have it, weekly lawn-mowing last summer had gone to every two weeks, attributed mostly to the worker shortage.
Hit especially hard—and well-reported by local media—has been the seafood-processing industry, where visas for temporary seasonal Mexican laborers last spring went from “first-come, first-served” to a lottery system with no guarantees. According to Tom Jockel, a manager at Annapolis Seafood Market, “The visa lottery has had a big impact on both product and availability—and thus price.” Those temporary visas for migrant workers are what kept the same people coming back to the Eastern Shore for decades “just to pick crabs and shuck oysters,” Jockel explains. “And nobody local wants to do that work.”
From someone who helps run one of the largest retail seafood operations in the area, Jockel says “the atmosphere has a lot of people nervous—what the next ‘rule change’ is going to bring to immigrant status in general.” The bottom line for this part of the business, Jockel warns, has changed at an astonishing rate in less than a year: “One of the packers we buy from got no visas for their annual seasonal migrant workers, and the company’s production is only at 30 percent. No one else local wants to step in and do the work at entry-level wages. Even base-pay raises haven’t worked.”
One wholesaler of Chesapeake Bay seafood products is reportedly considering moving his entire operation to Mexico, seeing it as more cost-effective to bring the jobs to the workers and not buy into the current visa trend.
In Search of Immigrant Stories
We wanted to learn first-hand how immigration policy is now affecting the “American Dream” for immigrants. We started by speaking with Ward 5 Annapolis Alderman Marc Rodriguez, a native of Mexico, soon after his return from a trip in August to Dilley, Texas, which was covered thoroughly in The Capital. He had assisted at the South Texas Family Residential Center for asylum seekers with children separated from their mothers before what is called a “credible fear” interview. Most are from the triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and, Rodriguez says, “they had been literally running for their lives.”
Tying that experience to Annapolis, the alderman says that Central American organized-crime groups more easily “threaten and extort” their countrymen in this region because asylum seekers are afraid of local law enforcement officers, the main reason being that they have never had good experiences related to people with badges. He told us that he might be able to persuade a couple he knew to talk to us. But after a rather long wait, the Mexican man and woman he was pursuing decided against it.
Rodriguez suggested that we contact Adriana Lee, the city’s first full-time Hispanic Community Services Specialist, who is a font of knowledge concerning the exhaustive services being made available to help immigrants in Annapolis. But telling the stories of some of the people she has helped, much less hooking us up with someone willing to talk, was understandably out of her purview. So, she offered the business card of Sean Schneider, executive director of Centro de Ayuda (Center of Help), with the motto “Building lives for new Americans.”
Women pick crabs at the W.T. Ruark Seafood Co., on May 17th, 2018 in Hoopers Island, Maryland. Due to a new lottery system this year several seafood companies failed to get temporary H-2B visas for their mostly Mexican workforce that has been coming to the Maryland eastern shore for over two decades to pick the crab meat that is sold in restaurants and stores on the east coast. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
According to Schneider, the nonprofit center’s mission is “to assist all immigrants—not only Latinos, but, to date, also people from Macedonia, Korea, Japan, China, and Bangladesh—to integrate into the local society.” He offered to try finding someone who would agree to an interview, but our conversation went in an unexpected direction. “No wonder you’re having a problem getting people to talk,” he says, “because there’s that fear among them that is pervasive, especially among Salvadorans.” Schneider went on to recall an article he wrote last spring for the Capital-Gazette, promoting an event his organization hosted. “I subsequently received vehement emails, with racial epithets and threatening violence. And they all hid behind anonymity, sending their messages from trash email accounts.”
A Conversation with Salvador
At this point, it was decided to go with the one and only interview we had done with an actual immigrant. Because of his home country, we’ll just call him “Salvador.” And he will remain anonymous here, not because he demanded it, but because we didn’t want this discussion to have any repercussions.
A word here about anonymous sources: In politics, they are a dime a dozen these days, when the only consequence to the source is perhaps losing a plum position in government because he or she secretly tried to undermine the boss. In top-tier journalism, anonymity is equally pervasive, most often because it has become the only way to get to the “truth”—using here the classic definition of that term. When it comes to expressed views and reports on immigration reform—especially from the people it affects the most—the stakes can be quite high.
Here’s what Salvador had to say in our interview, edited here for brevity and clarity and with his approval:
What made you come to the United States?
Family. I’m always willing to help. My family is hungry for help. I have four brothers and four sisters. Neither my mom or my dad had a professional education there. They and their parents were born to generations of being poor. Education wasn’t too much there to reach out.
What is the major difference between there and here?
They don’t have jobs like I have here—six days a week, making certain money. To get what we need, the trouble was a lot. Now, I have a daughter here, and I have to look out for her. But I do send a little bit of money home to my parents.
What was it like to be a child in El Salvador?
I started work there at about 11 years old. My parents couldn’t buy us all shoes or clothes. So, every time we had a chance to do something to make some money, we did it. Me and my brothers went through a lot. Sometimes we were hungry, not having much clothes, only had one pair of shoes and wore them until they were no good anymore. We were poor, and it was bad.
What happened that gave you a way out?
I do have a few friends from school here in the U.S. I told my mom one day, I said ‘Look, the first opportunity I get to live the American dream, I’m gonna take it.’ My mom looked at me and said ‘I don’t want any of my children to separate from here. I want to keep them all.’ But I said I wanted to buy my little brother shoes. I wanted to buy my sister a dress. And that’s what I did. A few friends from here told me they could help me out.
Did you go to school?
I went to school in El Salvador to the ninth grade. We had English class three days a week. So, I started to learn the basics, like how to say hello to someone. But I couldn’t really keep up a whole conversation at that point.
What things frustrate you about living here?
Sometimes people don’t realize that we come from different cultures and different countries. They just pretend that we all come from the same place. I’m not Mexican, and neither are a lot of us. But people call us that. I’ve never been to Mexico. I came here to do better. I don’t want to do anything wrong and do want to keep my record clean. No one has anything on me that they can judge I did anything wrong.
How has violence affected life in your home country?
Violence in my country now is getting worse. My brother had a bad experience a few months ago. Where he used to work, one of the gangs killed one of his coworkers. So my brother said he had to leave the job site because he was scared that they would also come and look for him, only because he was working with that other person. But my brother—any of my brothers—have nothing to do with gangs. My parents are very Catholic, and they taught us well. But yes, it is very dangerous and getting worse.
The gangs go against each other. The bigger problem is, they don’t just hurt each other, they hurt innocent people. They threaten, they steal. If you have a business in one of their territories they come and make you pay monthly for being there. Supposedly, that way, they don’t hurt you or hurt your business.
The way that President Trump started, he started pretty hard, judging a whole group of people based on only a few. You can’t just judge a whole group that way, when you don’t know who they are and where they’re coming from. It bothers me. I know some people do bad things, but that’s their choice—and it’s their problem, not mine. When you judge a whole group, that means you’re judging me.
I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just here doing the job I’m supposed to and being a good father and a good son and a good employee. Every time I have a chance to help someone, I help. Nearly all the money I make I’m spending in this country. I don’t send it all home.
Would you like to bring your family here?
I wish I could bring my family here. I wish I could bring my dad and my mom. I’d like to try to get them a visa somehow. They’re getting older. It would be easier for them to get a temporary visa. You have to prove that you own something there (in El Salvador), property or animals. Now my plan is to work harder, to buy them something in their name. They know that they would have something and they would not need to stay here. I have a cousin, and I’m pretty sure she can help me out with that, so I can see my parents again.
Is your “American Dream” coming true?
My American dream is getting there. I’m very busy. I work six days a week for the last five years. I’m okay with that, and I like what I do. Good people who are trying to do their best are all affected by the bad people. That’s the sad part. I want for everybody to know what I do and that when I work for people they can trust me. On my day off, I take care of someone’s house. It’s a big house owned by business people who treat me like a son. They trust me. Not all of us are the same. We all have different points of view.
What’s your biggest fear about the future of El Savador?
The gangs are an infestation out of control. The police are not keeping up. It’s everywhere now. The only quiet places are out of the city. I’m from north of San Salvador city, close to Honduras. Elections are next year. He [the leading candidate] is already doing more right now without being president. The past few presidents stole money from the country—millions of dollars.
You seem to be well acclimated to living here. What’s your secret?
I’m keeping my head up and trying to do the best I can and trying to help others. And I always have a good appearance, because that helps in the long run.
