No Amnesty Not Again!
Lately I have been thinking about my life. I really don’t want to but the resent talk of giving illegal immigrants amnesty forces me to remember some horrific times. No one should have to live though what my two sons and I survived, at least not in America the land of milk and honey.
The year is 1986 twenty long, long years ago. Ronald Reagan has just announced amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. At the time I didn’t think much about it until I saw hoards of people streaming though my yard 24/7. I had lived in Tucson, AZ for nine years and had seen an occasional person with a backpack, suitcase or garbage bag carrying jugs of water but this, was surreal. Month after month it continued and every day on the news more and more dead people would be found in the Sonoran Desert. If I knew then what I know now I would have packed up my children and moved back to Illinois.
So this is where my story begins and I have no doubt it was the same for many others. I was an uneducated divorced single mother, who worked to put her ex-husband though college. But after he got his degree I was deserted and left to make my own way. Life in Tucson wasn’t to bad but the cost of living was astronomical because of the Snowbirds, Northerners who would make Arizona and Tucson their home during the cold winter months, then go home in the spring. Life revolved around our Snowbirds and it was feast when they were there and famine when they left, so you saved as best you could but eventually I would apply for food stamps and AFDC, welfare. Back then welfare amounted to about $265.00 a month for a woman and 2 kids and 120 dollars in food stamps. Not near enough to live on so I would baby sit, do yard work whatever I could find. I even learned how to skin palm trees and climb as high as 125 feet to make a buck.
But then Amnesty came and our lives were turned upside down. The next four years were horrific. If you weren’t bilingual or educated there was no work for you. Welfare became a way to survive a vicious circle that surrounded and strangled you. When I went to the welfare office I sat there with mostly white undereducated single mothers who also had become the victims of Reagan and the Republicans Amnesty for the illegal aliens. We were Americans and illegal’s had taken our jobs. Companies who once paid us four or five dollars an hour were now paying $1.25. Even welfare was getting harder to hang onto. If you did work a few hours a month they would take it all away even the food stamps.
What about child support , fat chance in the state of Arizona. Recently I learned that my ex-husband did pay but $14,000 went missing between California and Arizona. I tried to find a lawyer to help me retrieve the money I’m owed but that amount is just petty cash and no one wanted to take on both states. Yes, I am accusing both the state of California and Arizona of EMBEZZLEMENT. So someone either in California or Arizona fed their kids with our money while mine starved. Yes we starved. I suffered from gout and my oldest suffered with a scalp ailment that made his hair fall out in clumps. Just a foot note but my social worker Trudy killed herself. I heard they found her hanged in her home. When I think back poor Trudy had to listen to my story from every woman she was trying to help. Her job working with woman who had no education and barely any hope of ever getting off welfare must have been overwhelming. She had to look into the crying faces of the women and take away the meager welfare they received because for whatever reason they no longer qualified. I liked Trudy and many times thought about taking the easy way out myself.
My children and I became homeless (more than once) and slept in our car because the shelter in Tucson would be full of the mentally ill patients other states would give a one way ticket to Tucson. Finally I had to swallow my pride and go ask my mother and step father for money. I’d a rather slit my wrists then ask my step father for money, but that’s another story.
Life was up and down, on and off welfare. Endless cold and hot hours spent standing in line outside for government commodities of cheese, butter, beans and rice. Many nights I would go hungry so my children could eat and sometimes even they cried because they went to bed hungry. I thank God for free school lunches but summer would come and so would the desperate hunger. Pay the rent and lights or eat and become homeless. And forget about paying for school clothes, shoes, little league, soccer and all the things that make for a happy childhood for your children. I thank God for the generosity of the Salvation Army and once even the Red Cross. I thank God for my Mother slipping a few dollars she would skim off the mean step father and I thank God for my big sister who gave us shelter when we needed it most but was murdered by her boyfriend. I miss her.
Life goes on, the world keeps turning and time moves on. The boys are grown and both have turned out well. My oldest works in a music store warehouse and DJ’s and wants to be a paramedic. My youngest will soon receive his 1st LT bars in the Alabama National Guard and will graduate from the University of Alabama with a degree in Political Science. He wants to help people, American people first he says, so no children will have to be hungry and homeless in the land of milk and honey. Who knows maybe someday he will become a Senator or God forbid the President of the good ol U.S.of A. Then again wouldn’t that be something.
So my message to all you Senators, Representatives and greedy Corporations when you grant amnesty and hire illegal aliens you will sentence another generation of American single mothers and their children to poverty and suffering. By your hands you will take the bread from their mouths and the roof from their heads and give it to people who broke the law when they illegally came into the United States of America. I’m truly sorry the illegal’s must leave their home countries, but like my own country their government just doesn’t give a shit about their own people.
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