JOHN TIERNEY

John Tierney (b. 1953), has written for the New York Times since 1990, where he is now a regular columnist. He is the coauthor of a comic novel, God Is My Broker (1998), and the author of The Best-Case Scenario Handbook (2002), which tells readers how to cope with such unlikely things as an ATM that keeps disgorging money. We reprint one of his columns written for the New York Times in April 2006.

Ángels in America

Ángel Espinoza doesn’t understand why Republicans on Capitol Hill are determined to deport Mexicans like him. I don’t get it, either. He makes me think of my Irish grandfather.

They both left farms and went to the South Side of Chicago, arriving with relatively little education. My grandfather took a job in the stockyards and lived in an Irish boarding house nearby. Espinoza started as a dishwasher and lived with his brother in a Mexican neighborhood.

Like my grandfather, who became a streetcar motorman and then a police officer, Espinoza moved on to better-paying jobs and a better home of his own. Like my grandfather, Espinoza married an American-born descendant of immigrants from his native country.

But whereas my grandfather became a citizen, Espinoza couldn’t even become a legal resident. Once he married an American, he applied, but was rejected because he’d once been caught at the border and sent home with an order to stay out. Violating that order made him ineligible for a green card and eligible for deportation.

5 “I had to tell my four-year-old daughter that one day I might not come home,” he said. “I work hard and pay taxes and don’t want any welfare. Why deport me?”

The official answer, of course, is that he violated the law. My grandfather didn’t. But my grandfather didn’t have to. There weren’t quotas on Europeans or most other immigrants in 1911, even though, relative to the population, there were more immigrants arriving and living here than there are today. If America could absorb my grandfather, why keep out Espinoza?

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It’s been argued that Mexicans are different from past immigrants because they’re closer to home and less likely to assimilate. Compared with other immigrants today, they’re less educated, and their children are more likely to get poor grades and drop out of school. Therefore, the argument goes, Mexicans are in danger of becoming an underclass living in linguistically isolated ghettos.

Those concerns sound reasonable in theory. But if you look at studies of immigrants, you find that the typical story is much more like Espinoza’s. He dropped out of school at age sixteen in southern Mexico, when his family needed money for medical bills. He paid a coyote to sneak him across the border and went to the Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago, a metropolitan area that is now home to the second-largest Mexican population in the nation.

Espinoza started off making less than $4 an hour as a dishwasher in a restaurant that flouted the minimum-wage law. But he became a cook and worked up to $15 an hour. He switched to driving a street-cleaning truck, a job that now pays him $17 an hour, minus taxes and Social Security.

10 By age twenty-four, he and his wife, Anita, had saved enough to buy a house for about $200,000 in Villa Park, a suburb where most people don’t speak Spanish. Now twenty-seven, Espinoza’s still working on his English (we spoke in Spanish), but his daughter is already speaking English at her preschool.

There’s nothing unusual about his progress. More than half of the Mexican immigrants in Chicago own their own homes, and many are moving to the suburbs. No matter where they live, their children learn English.

You can hear this on the sidewalks and school corridors in Mexican neighborhoods like Pilsen, where most teenagers speak to one another in English. A national survey by the Pew Hispanic Center found that nearly all second-generation Latinos are either bilingual or English-dominant, and by the next generation 80 percent are English-dominant and virtually none speak just Spanish.

Yesterday, the Senate seemed close to a deal letting most immigrants become legal residents. But it fell apart when Republicans fought to add restrictions, including some that could prevent an immigrant with Espinoza’s history from qualifying.

Bobby Rush, a Democratic representative from Chicago, is trying to pass protections for the Espinozas and other families in danger of being separated. The issue has galvanized other Chicago public officials and immigrant advocates, who are planning to take the families to Washington to press their case.

15 I’d like to see Republicans on Capitol Hill explain to Espinoza why he’s less deserving than their immigrant ancestors, but that’s probably too much to expect. Espinoza has a simpler wish: “I would like them to tell my American daughter why her father can’t stay with her.”