Immigrants don’t need handout, but do need a welcoming hand

The last time I saw Sil Ganzó, she was beaming as she gave a tour of her afterschool care facility for newly arrived immigrant and refugee children.

Based on her enthusiasm, you’d have thought the tiny, two-room storefront for the elementaryschool students had the grandeur of Google’s headquarters. But, as I recall, it had few windows, and she was fighting to get local dog owners to pick up after their pets on the loose gravel outside the building — the barren spot where the trash cans were kept but also where the kids liked to make up games and run out their wiggles.

That was back in 2015, when I visited the OurBridge program in Charlotte, North Carolina, which Ganzó runs as executive director. I learned on my visit about the astounding diversity and expanding population of U.S.-born Hispanics, immigrants and refugees in the American South.

Charlotte continues to expand and serve as a gateway for new Americans. This has meant major changes for OurBridge and for Ganzó’s newcomers.

“We’ve grown! In the last couple of years, we tripled the number of kids to about 200 and expanded to middle schoolaged kids. Our home is now a beautiful building with hundreds of acres of green space, a lake and a kitchen,” Ganzó gushed to me on the phone recently. “We partnered with an elder care organization and are renting it for one dollar a year! We can take the kids to cook, on hikes; they have soccer fields and have planted a garden.”

It sounds like an oasis for children who are often scarred by the effects of war, deprivation and unspeakable trauma — whether it be from crossing our southern border or arriving here from Syria, Burma, Bhutan or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Truly, it’s a sanctuary. And I don’t mean the new facility — I’m sure it is beautiful, but when I visited, I witnessed gold-standard student-centered engagement. Kids working with each other to build block towers, teachers modeling self-advocacy and problem-solving, older students helping younger ones with homework, groups practicing English and filling in the blanks with their shared language of hand gestures and smiles.

My visit to OurBridge sprung to mind when I heard Ken Cuccinelli, the White House acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, make a mockery of the Statue of Liberty’s famous Emma Lazaruspenned inscription. He suggested: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”

What he didn’t say was that almost all poor, undereducated immigrants can pull themselves up by their bootstraps — they just need a loving, helping hand.

“We make our families feel cared for, not just by teaching their kids English, but by advocating for them in the community,” said Ganzó, herself an immigrant from Buenos Aires, Argentina. “Last year when we had ICE agents knocking on doors, I had a parent calling me from the closet, scared because they were outside her house. We went to our elected officials to ask that the city not cooperate. Unfortunately, the mayor didn’t sign on to do that, like many other major cities, but it gives our families peace of mind that someone is fighting for them.”

Ganzó said that both parents and students come to understand and eventually love the U.S., not because they’re offered English as a second language classes or after-school care, but because they feel connected to their new home when their own homelands are honored.

“We know we don’t want our families to ‘assimilate’ — that word is misused because it means that one culture supersedes the other. What we want to achieve is acculturation, where you learn and become part of a culture without losing your identity or where you come from,” Ganzó said. “We take the kids to their markets where they see their flags. We’ll go to the Nepali store, the Asian market, the Latino food market, the African store — then we ask them to help us buy the food for their recipes, and it makes the kids so proud that they know something that we don’t know.”

People who seek to keep others out of this country don’t realize that people who make the treacherous and heartbreaking journey to this country do so because they want to get on their own two feet. They don’t want a handout, but their success here does rely on being met with a welcoming hand.

Esther Cepeda is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. Her email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com.

Someday, in the not-so-distant future, sealevel rise could claim Mar-aLago. Perhaps President Trump — by then no doubt disgraced, shunned and all but forgotten — would still be around to see his beloved Florida resort wiped out by a “Chinese hoax.”

Of all the wrongheaded policies Trump and his Republican Party insist on pursuing, their stubborn denial of climate change is the most baffling — and the most obviously self-destructive. Everything is personal with Trump. Can’t anybody get it through his head that his own coastal properties are urgently threatened? And that he is going out of his way to hasten their demise?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday that July 2019 was the hottest month on planet Earth since record-keeping began in the years after the Civil War. Wherever you live, think back to all the punishing heat waves you’ve experienced. Globally, July was worse.

The month saw unprecedented triple-digit temperatures in parts of Europe where summers are usually mild at best. On July 25, thermometers in Cambridge, England, soared to 101.7 degrees — an all-time record for the United Kingdom. That same day, Paris saw a high of 108.7, which broke the previous all-time record by a full four degrees. Meanwhile, much of the United States baked in an unrelenting heat wave, with day after day in the 90s. And earlier in the month, Alaska saw its highest temperatures since record-keeping began, with residents of Anchorage enduring a Floridian 90-degree afternoon.

July also saw the area covered by polar sea ice shrink to record lows in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, according to NOAA. In the Arctic, there was almost 20 percent less ice than normal, or what used to be normal.

“Yes, but it snowed the other day in Australia,” denialists will say. Well, of course it did. It’s winter down there. Global warming doesn’t mean the seasons no longer march through their yearly progression. It just means that, on average, the planet is warmer than it used to be. It means that heat waves are becoming worse and more frequent, it means that weather patterns are changing, and it means that anomalous phenomena are being seen in the unlikeliest places. Thunderstorms generally occur in temperate and tropical zones. A few days ago, one was detected within 300 miles of the North Pole.

There is no longer a debate among climate scientists about the cause of global warming. Since the Industrial Revolution began roughly 250 years ago, the large-scale burning of fossil fuels has increased the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than 40 percent. Increase any variable by 40 percent — your monthly salary, say — and you are bound to feel an impact.

If you watched any of the television specials last month commemorating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, you saw grainy interviews with the early astronauts, who said they were struck at how thin and fragile the atmosphere looks from space. Humankind is perfectly capable of befouling it — and we’re well on the way.

The warming process is proceeding more rapidly in some places than others. The Arctic, for example, is heating up so quickly that shipping lanes are being charted across the Arctic Ocean, where summer now sees open water in vast areas once covered with ice. Within the United States, according to an analysis by The Washington Post, the Northeast corridor between Philadelphia and Boston has seen much more warming than inland parts of Alabama and Mississippi, which have seen very little.

Sea-level rise is real, undisputed and relentless. It is also gradual, measured annually in millimeters — for now. But warming has destabilized ice shelves in Antarctica and Greenland, and some scientists worry they could give way rapidly and catastrophically. Even if this does not occur, steadily rising seas plus bigger, wetter storms — another result of climate change — pose a deadly threat to coastal communities. Like Palm Beach.

When you find yourself in a hole, you need to stop digging — in this context, switch to clean energy sources and stop emitting carbon. But first you have to admit you’re in a hole, and that’s what Trump and his enablers refuse to do. Trump incredibly wants to increase the burning of coal, the dirtiest fuel in terms of carbon emissions.

Much of the damage this administration is doing can, and I believe will, be repaired after Trump is gone. But we will never get back the precious time he is squandering on climate change. If he retires to Mar-a-Lago, he’d better be able to swim.

Eugene Robinson is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. His email address is eugenerobinson@washpost. com.