Many unfairly tagged as ‘ bad immigrants’

I read a good deal in The Dispatch about immigrants, claiming many negatives to the U.S. resulting from their arrival here. I have an acquaintance in the Grandview area who is an immigrant from Southeast Asia who lost his retail job in the past year due to his employer, a small company, going out of business. He soon got another job at a major national corporation, and also started his own home business.

He is not some zippy kid — he is only a couple of years younger than my 74 years. He also is very proud of his son, who is an Ohio State University-educated engineer. An acquaintance of the father is from the same country, and started up a retail business and has kept it going successfully for many years. She is near to the same age.

I encounter political and personal positions that are anti-immigrant, locally and nationally. I hear that the new immigrants are “too different, less trustworthy, lawbreakers, welfare cheats.” These immigrant folks in Grandview represent my personal experience, and wider statistics show immigrants generally are making the same successful lives as most American workers.

While certain immigrants, maybe especially refugees, need some economic help on arrival, they typically are short-term users of the assistance system. Also, they have higher employment rates than native-born people. However, they might need assistance, such as free school lunches, because they are often working at lowpaying jobs due to language shortcomings and other factors that have always been connected to immigration.

Some Americans have applied the “bad immigrant” label to many immigrants in the past century without justification. It would be a credit to our understanding of reality and our humanity to not repeat this with today’s immigrants. Columbus