I keep running into foreigners at the local convenience store

We have a lot of convenience stores here in Swissvale. They’re useful places if you need a quart of milk in a hurry or you’re out of toilet paper and there’s two feet of snow on the ground.

I used to be a regular at the store near the Busway, then I got a Connect Card pass. Now, I don’t have to stop and buy something cheap so I’ll have change for the bus.

I don’t visit the store on Braddock as much as I used to because it got an ATM I have to pay to use. I am enough of a tightwad that I will go all the way to Edgewood Towne Center to save $2.50.

My only real problem with the local convenience stores is that my neighbors go to them to buy soda and chips and then toss the bags and cans in my flower beds. That is not the fault of the owners of the stores or their employees.

One of the local stores is owned by members of an Indian family. They have the same surname as my friends Sherry and Shridhar. Sherry is from Swissvale. Shridhar is from Mumbai. For more than 40 years, Sherry and Shridhar were the only people in town with an Indian surname. Now, they’re one of three families with the same last name. This has caused no confusion whatever.

Kim, who works at the store with the ATM, is a local lady, a fellow cat lover and a fellow gardener. We talk sometimes. She has a replica of the Lion of Lucerne in her garden. She didn’t know what it was until I gave her a Wikipedia article about the memorial in Lucerne of Swiss soldiers killed during the French Revolution. Now, she probably knows more than she wanted to. But she hasn’t complained.

I discovered that a clerk in one of the nearby stores comes from somewhere in Africa where French is spoken. His English wasn’t that great. But I don’t get to use my high school French all that often. It also is not that great, because it has been a while since I was in high school. He was very nice about it.

A lot of the local convenience store clerks are immigrants. I haven’t checked their green cards. That isn’t my job. I expect the store managers do.

I’ve had to prove I was a U.S. citizen when I applied for jobs, and I was born that way. I presume that, if you have an accent, potential employers are even more insistent that you provide the right documents. Especially if you’re going to deal with the public. Especially if that public includes police officers who stop in for coffee pretty regularly.

Anyway, I have never considered convenience store clerks a threat to my well-being. I think of them as I think of waiters, waitresses, Walmart employees and plumbers, people to whom I must be extra kind because they spend all day on their feet dealing with difficult customers.

So, I’m not all that sure why federal immigration agents have been spending our tax money going after 7-Eleven clerks to see if they are in this country illegally. I don’t suppose they’ve found many criminals, just good people trying to make a living.

My friend Sherry gets calls now and then telling her that her husband will be arrested because there’s a problem with his immigration status. Sherry’s husband has been a naturalized U.S. citizen for more than 30 years. He’s working for the Navy, helping to build ships. Sherry has complained to the district attorney’s office about the calls, but there isn’t much anyone seems to be able to do about them.

Xenophobia, fear of outsiders, is as American as fireworks on the Fourth of July. Benjamin Franklin worried that Germans were taking over Pennsylvania.

But the fact is that everybody in this country came from someplace else. And our ancestors weren’t always welcome. There was a time when “No Irish Need Apply” was commonly written in employment ads. A time when hotels displayed signs that said “No Dogs or Jews.” A time when Chinese were “the yellow peril.”

Those times have past, I’m glad to say. I look forward to the day when these times pass, and we look back and think how foolish we were to be afraid of a few new Americans.