On March 26, a massive ship filled with containers struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor, resulting in a tragic collapse that killed six men and injured two others as they were thrown into the frigid waters of the Patapsco River. With all six men being Latino migrants who were working on the bridge, the tenuous existence of immigrant workers has once again been cast into the spotlight.
The collapse of the bridge brings greater emphasis on the life-threatening challenges and vulnerabilities that migrant workers face each day – often from the very moment they arrive on U.S. soil in hopes of achieving the elusive “American Dream.”
An estimated 130,000 immigrants are employed in the construction industry in the Baltimore/Washington regions – 39% of the workforce – according to data from CASA, a Latino and immigration advocacy and assistance organization based in Maryland.
Economic hardship comes with the territory for these workers, many of whom live from check to check as seasonal or temporary employees. In addition, given the recent surge in nativism and xenophobia, immigrants are under threat of immigration enforcement while those without proper documentation are in constant fear of being deported.
But the treatment that people from Latin Americans currently face should come as no surprise. After all, since the days when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, America has exhibited a propensity for discriminating against “the other.”
It’s ironic when you consider that those Europeans, who came to this nation in search of religious freedom, almost immediately began to strip away the rights and freedom of the region’s various tribes of the Wampanoag people – indigenous natives who had lived there for some 10,000 years before the Europeans arrived.
And while the 12.5 million Africans shipped to the New World between 1525 and 1866 were not immigrants, but victims in the inhumane slave trade, they, too, were subjected to economic hardship. Based on data from the NIH, between 1619 and 1865, enslaved Africans in the U.S. contributed 410 billion hours of labor – without any compensation.
During World War II, at least 125,284 people of Japanese descent were forcibly relocated or incarcerated despite the fact that two-thirds of the inmates were U.S. citizens.
Since 1980, Mexicans have represented the largest group of immigrants living in the U.S. with the Mexico-U.S. route serving as the largest migration corridor in the world. By 2021, an estimated 10.7 million Mexican immigrants were living in the U.S. But that number’s still 1 million fewer than it was a decade earlier. Still, that hasn’t stopped politicians like Ted Cruz or Donald Trump from advocating for walls, detention camps and easier methods to deport illegals desperately seeking to escape violence and hunger while hoping to secure religious and political liberty and economic opportunity.
On the base of the Statue of Liberty, the words of the poet Emma Lazarus have long served as America’s invitation to beleaguered immigrants: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.”
But that was more than a century ago. And the invitation was not extended to “all” immigrants – just those who could easily pass as descendants of the Founding Fathers.