Dear Editor,
My ancestors on my mother’s mother’s father’s side of the family emigrated to this land during the French and Indian War.
My father’s father’s father was an immigrant from Luxembourg, here at 16, married another immigrant and moved west through the territories.
My mother’s father’s father emigrated from Poland, sired seven sons who emigrated all across these U.S. One settled in Salt Lake City.
My dad was in the Navy and fought the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. My mother’s parents spent three-and-a-half years in an internment camp in the Philippines during the “war to end all wars.”
My folks studied in Paris after the war, and dad went to work for USAID and for 25 years took us with him all over the world. Sister born in Paris. I was born in Taipei. A sister was born in Saigon. Another sister was born stateside during a rotation back in Washington, DC.
I grew up all over the planet, spent parts of my life in the U.S., Colombia, China, Viet Nam, Turkey, North Africa, West Africa, Pakistan. We were welcomed in every country we lived and traveled, and I was raised and taught by people of every race and creed and nationality and sexual orientation. Every one of them, and every one of the amazing people, who for 25 years have welcomed me and my wife to settle into this remarkable place, are good and generous people.
We are a nation of immigrants.
People of Spanish descent were here long before the arrival of any of our most recent European ancestors. Latin American immigrants are among the best. They are kind, work hard, many in jobs nobody wants, and they contribute more to our economic health and well-being than many of us who have been here for generations. Children born in this country have always been Americans, wherever their parents came from.
ICE is an abomination, enabled by a tyrant, and antithetical to everything we are as a nation and a people.
Rob Kerchen
Moab
