This commentary is by David Moats, of Salisbury. He is editorial page editor emeritus at the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
Two Americas were in evidence in Middlebury one Saturday in October
One America was present at Middlebury College for a football game against the team from Bates College. This is the America where higher education is a common rite of passage, where international travel is a frequent avenue of adventure and cultural enrichment, where travel on the nation’s highways occasions a feeling of liberation, where home ownership is taken for granted. It is where people stand for the national anthem and the commonly felt message is: This is America.
But there is another America, also present in Middlebury that Saturday. At the Champlain Valley Unitarian-Universalist Church, a steady stream of people arrived during the day to meet with officials from the Mexican consulate in Boston. They were migrants seeking Mexican passports, mostly young men, but also women and children. The sanctuary was full, and the mood was relaxed and friendly, but the families there were all too aware of the danger around them — the arbitrary detention and deportation that could come crashing down on them at any time.
The visit by Mexican consular officials is an annual event meant to serve residents from Mexico. But the Latino population in Vermont consists of more than the Mexican farm workers who for years have kept Vermont’s dairy economy afloat. Ecuadorean, Guatemalan, Venezuelan, Peruvian, Honduran, Brazilian, and other immigrants work in roofing, construction and other industries, many or most of them lacking the documentation that could protect them from the ongoing immigration crackdown.
It is easy for the one America not to notice the other. But among those who have noticed are the volunteers who work to provide health care, food, transportation, education, legal representation and other support for migrants, many of whom live in isolation out on the farm.
For the consular visit, the Open Door Clinic of Middlebury had put up tables along one side of the sanctuary to provide vaccinations and health care information. The advocacy group Migrant Justice had set up its own table. The language of the day was Spanish, and numerous volunteers with Spanish language skills were pitching in to help
One of those helping was Fernanda Canales, who came to the United States with her Chilean family when she was 14 years old and who recently retired after a 39-year career in education. For the last 16 years she was principal of the Salisbury Community School in Addison County.
And yet as deeply embedded in the community as she was, she said it was only after she retired and began work helping the region’s migrant population that she came to recognize and appreciate the broad and diverse Latino community that existed in Vermont. Even for her, an immigrant herself, the migrant community had largely been out of view.
Now Canales works as dental coordinator for the Open Door Clinic and as the multilingual liaison for the Addison Central School District. When she arrived in the United States, she knew no English. “I understand the journey,” she said, and she is glad for the chance to help with the journey of the thousands of Latinos trying to set down roots in Vermont.
It is not an easy journey, and it is getting harder. Vermont is not Chicago or Los Angeles, but Migrant Justice has compiled a list of 87 people detained this year by Customs and Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement as of a month ago. Since then more have been detained, including a group of 17 recently imprisoned at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in Franklin County. Detainees are often people grabbed up on their way to work. They are people without recourse, which is why Migrant Justice and the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project work to keep track of who they are and what becomes of them.
Stories continue to emerge from across the nation of violent tactics by masked agents who act with impunity, ignoring due process and seizing people at will from the streets or on the job. For comfortable America, free to come and go, to take in the football game, or enjoy a vacation in Cancun, it is becoming an act of willful blindness to ignore or excuse the barbaric conditions at hastily constructed detention camps and the lawless manner in which people are seized and taken away from their families.
It is important for the one America to see the other — see the people, driven by their own enterprising spirit to seek opportunity north of the border and to find jobs that will help them support their families here and back home, jobs upon which the U.S. economy depends.
It is important for all of America to recognize the degree to which the nation’s rogue leadership has pitted one America against the other and is tearing the nation apart.
It need not be that way.
