Anyone who casually follows the news knows that on March 26, a 984-foot container ship sailing under a Singaporean flag smashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, sending it into the Patapsco River.
The ship is massive. Standing on its end, it would almost reach the top of the Eiffel Tower or rise to almost two-thirds of New York City’s Empire State Building. The ship is called the Dali, named for Spain’s most famous surrealist artist, Salvador Dalí. The collision itself seems surreal: After departing from the Port of Baltimore, the crew issued a mayday call that the vessel lost power, and they could no longer steer the ship, even though the bridge had proper clearance for enormous container ships. It hit a pier, and that was it.
On impact, the police had enough time to stop traffic, but could not reach the top of the bridge to warn the eight construction workers on duty. They plunged into the river with the debris. Two were rescued; six died. Attention has focused on the financial losses to Baltimore and the nation because of the importance and size of the port in the American economy, and on how long it will take to clear the wreckage and rebuild the bridge.
But who were the six workers who died?
The Baltimore Sun recently ran a front-page lead story on the lives of these men. All six who died were from Mexico or Central America: Their names were Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera. Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes. Carlos Hernandez. Miguel Luna. José Mynor López, and Maynor Suazo Sandoval. They supported their families in Baltimore. They supported their families in their homelands. But they remained in the shadows because of what the Sun calls their “murky” immigration status, “subject to political vagaries.”
In early April, I argued in these pages that deeply researched studies definitively prove that increased immigration is critical to the growth and stability of the nation’s economic wellbeing. The Sun story points out two key elements: Americans want immigrants in the labor force, but have no interest in allowing them to become American citizens.
Let’s be clear about two things: First, we’re addressing legal immigration along with strong border security; and second, Congress, not the president of the United States, has the sole role to legislate on these matters. The U.S. Constitution states that “Congress shall have the power … to establish a uniform rule of naturalization,” period. The mess at the Southern border lies principally with Congress.
The last time Congress made significant steps to rationalize the immigration system was nearly 40 years ago. Many people who came from Latin America in the 1980s benefited from President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform bill. Others have not had that advantage, but they seek a better life to escape violence, crime, and corruption in their homelands.
The reason is simple but frustrating. Immigration reform has miserably failed to pass Congress since Ronald Reagan was president. In 2006, the late Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy worked with the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain to overhaul the system. It came to nothing. President George W. Bush, working with Senators McCain and Lindsay Graham (R-SC), tried again in 2007, but to no avail.
Just this past February, the very conservative Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma led a bipartisan group in the Senate in an effort to strengthen border security and find pathways to citizenship for undocumented migrants. It failed miserably: the Washington Post declared that Congress was “paralyzed” on immigration issues.
In an interview with the Sun, Tom Perez, a White House senior advisor and a former U.S. secretary of Labor, noted that immigrants “are building America, quite literally. They’re building bridges, they’re building roads, they’re building buildings. And they don’t have that bridge to citizenship yet, even though they can work, and they’ve been here for 30 years, and their kids are U.S. citizens.”
A friend of one of the construction workers who died put it simply: “Nobody wants to say it, but we are the workforce that this country needs. For any job, because there we are. We never say no.” So who are these people? On the Island, they are construction and landscape workers, teachers, business entrepreneurs, physicians, nurses, and on and on. They are our neighbors.
Congress can fix this system, but has dismally failed. Meantime, the very people that we need are forced to remain in the shadows, subject to a dysfunctional system that has failed under every presidential administration since President Reagan actually did something about it.
Jack Fruchtman lives in Aquinnah. His paternal grandfather immigrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century from what is today Lviv, Ukraine.
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