Will Bunch: A ship crashed into a Baltimore bridge and demolished the lies about immigration

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/baltimore-bridge-collapse-immigrant-deaths-20240328.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/qoeGc


From the day in the mid-2000s that a then-20-year-old Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval crossed the border into America, he never stopped working. The youngest of eight children, Suazo was fleeing numbing poverty and a dead-end career path in Azacualpa, a small rural village in the western mountains of Honduras.

The undocumented Suazo wound up in greater Baltimore, a magnet for Central American refugees with its relatively cheap housing for the bustling Eastern Seaboard, a friendly climate toward migrants, and lots of opportunity. With American dreams of entrepreneurship, he took menial jobs like clearing brush, then launched a package delivery service, and — when COVID-19 ended that — started working overnight construction for a Baltimore contractor, Brawner Brothers.

Suazo was described by friends and family as happy, outgoing, and tireless. He had to be. While supporting a wife and two kids, he was also sending $600 to $800 a month back to Azacualpa, enough to help family members buy a small hotel and even support youth soccer. In Baltimore, he was what his brother called “the fundamental pillar” for a growing number of relatives who made it to Maryland. Home from the grueling construction work at 5 a.m., he was out working again by noon, picking up extra dollars cleaning yards, painting houses, or landscaping.

“He always told us that you had to triple your effort to get ahead,” the brother, Martín Suazo Sandoval, told the Associated Press from Honduras. “He said it didn’t matter what time or where the job was, you had to be where the work was.”

*snip*

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Excellent writing.

[Comfortably_Numb]

2. The scumbag POS republicans will never see this, and those of us with an ounce of empathy know that this story repeats

millions of times in this country. I despise, abhor, fuck it——hate these republican fearmonger liars. Hate them.

[erronis]

9. When the RW says they want to protect US from immigrants

they really mean they want to protect their own white cushy lives to any comparison with people who know how to be productive and care for their families.

[colorado_ufo]

3. This brought tears to my eyes.

My father was not an immigrant, but he was a worker, like that.

God bless this dear man's soul and his family.

[thesquanderer]

4. Look at that... they ARE sending us their best.

Seriously, it's not easy to leave everything you knew in order to make a better life for your family. People of responsibility, ambition, determination and fortitude.

[Sogo]

5. Tears....

[elleng]

6. ;-(

[AverageOldGuy]

7. How many . . .

. . . "hard-working Americans" were on that bridge, in the cold, patching potholes??




HINT: None of the six men who died on that bridge were "hard-working Americans."

[Caliman73]

8. As another poster said, excellent article...

The people who appreciate it, don't need to see that to understand that immigrants, even those who are here without documentation are typically here for a better life and are not engaging in nefarious efforts to destroy America. The people who most need to understand that immigrants are typically fine people, will not care about the details of the article. They stopped thinking at the sight of "undocumented" and simply plugged in "Law breaker" and other more bigoted ideas about this person.

My family and I recently saw a musical about Larry Itliong a Filipino Labor and Civil Rights leader who helped to create the farm worker movement in California. When the Philippines were still a US colony after the Spanish American War, Filipinos were literally recruited to come to the United States to work on farms picking crops. They were subjected to all of the bigotry and discrimination of other immigrant groups. The city where I live is somewhat famous for the bombing of a Filipino community center and the locals (read White people) running the Filipinos out of town.

Currently, almost 100 years from the event, people in the community are fighting the predominantly White and currently Conservative school board to teach ethnic studies the way it was designed as an academic discipline and to get teachers and administrators trained properly

America touts itself as the "land or Immigrants" but often those immigrant groups have been treated like shit while they work to build the country and make certain people very rich.

[Martin Eden]

10. TSF wants to round them all up for detention and expulsion from the USA

That would not only be cruel to millions of hard working good people, it would severely damage our economy.

[rubbersole]

11. And $20 salads.