The Countryman: The faces of immigrants

They are nearly 12 percent of America’s population, if you count only the legals. They are 15 percent if you also count the illegals.

Their presence has become an election campaign issue. No wonder. In some states, we native white guys see fewer folks every day who look like us. Legal immigration has hovered around a million a year since 2005, topping 1.25 million in 2006 and falling below a million in 2013. Illegal immigrant population, according to procon.org, has declined slightly from its peak in 2007.

Change is never easy, and when the change agent is 37 million legal plus 11 million illegal immigrants, it is easy to spot. Even in some places in Maine.

Just the other day, the Bangor Daily News ran an article about Hispanics settling into home in Washington County. A couple of times, I bought cranberries for my business from a Mexican woman who had become a cranberry grower in Milbridge.

In 68 years in the working economy, I met quite a few immigrants. They came for various reasons and have lived various stories in their new home.

Two worked on our farm. Several I knew when I lived at the edge of Harlem and ran a superette: a couple who taught at the Hebrew Theological Seminary on 122nd Street, each with a death camp number tattooed on a forearm; American citizens born in Puerto Rico; a woman born on “the other side,” by which she meant Scotland; a man who brought his young family from the other side, by which he meant Ireland. Other places, too: at Vanderbilt, a Canadian graduate seminarian; in Kansas City, a Kenyan who was murdered, apparently in a street robbery. And many others.

I, too, was an immigrant for nearly five years in Canada, where I worked for The Montreal Gazette. Ten of the Gaz’s 80 news staff were Yanks. One was a draft dodger. No, not I.

Here are the faces of two immigrants I have known, one in Maine and one in New York. One I talked to the other day. The other I haven’t seen in 53 years.

The Maine face is worn by a young man who came nearly five years ago from the Democratic Republic of Congo. His mother and surviving family are here too.

He speaks five languages, is putting himself through CMMC in Auburn and loves soccer. But he gave up soccer to transfer from Lewiston High School to the Wayfinder School in New Gloucester, where he could get more educational attention. That’s right. He left the soccer team that won the gold ball and was ranked 17th nationally to get the education that was better for him.

His name in French means something like “boy child” or “kid.” He came to work slaughters at our farm a couple of summers ago. His job was to remove from Turkey carcasses the neck, the oil gland at the base of the tail and the crop from the neck cavity.

The young immigrant was dependable from day one. If we were killing 100 birds, we knew he would neck at least his share of 33.

He came to us through another occasional worker, who lived in Lewiston and had hired him to work in the Lots to Gardens program run by the nutrition center at St. Mary’s Hospital. She recommended him to us, and she was correct.

At first, he had no driver’s license, so the folks at the nutrition center got him here the night before. He slept in a camper we had used for our crew when we had a food concession at the Fryeburg Fair. The nutrition center arranged a ride for him the morning after each slaughter to get him back to work in the gardens.

On kill day, when I arrived at the plant at 6:30 a.m., the young immigrant was ready to go. How many 18-year-olds do you know like that? If I didn’t have tasks for him right away, he found productive work. Emptying trash cans, gathering knives for the necking bench, cleaning dishes and working surfaces.

A self-starter.

He seemed to enjoy the work. He spoke French with another necker, who had been born in Quebec but has lived here for decades. From time to time, each mentioned that the other spoke a “different” French but that they easily understood each other. Each also said he understood my French, but they were probably just buttering up the boss.

The slaughter drill was more other chores than slaughter. An hour setting up the plant and driving Turkeys to the holding pen, kill for a couple of hours, clean the plant top to bottom for more than an hour, then process the ice-chilled carcasses.

Someone always wriggled out of some cleanup. Not always men, though usually. But the young immigrant and a couple of others always picked up the slack. If he was the last to finish cleaning, I knew it was because he kept working until the job was done.

Somehow, growing up in the countryside and then in the city in a war-torn country, he developed the sort of work ethic we celebrate but don’t see often enough.

Managers at St. Mary’s saw his ability and work ethic and made him a crew chief in Lots to Gardens. He liked that job, told me he could speak African languages with some of the kids he was supervising and French and English with others. He wanted to improve his English for both school and daily life. He has.

Last fall, he enrolled at CMMC. His mechanical bent entices him toward engineering. He has passed a threshold of American adulthood. He has a license and a car.

The bond between us was strong if not long. We both lost our fathers in violent deaths when we were quite young. All he said when I asked about his father was, in French, “Il ete tue. Dans la guerre.” (He was killed. In the war.) We each grew up in a houseful of sisters.

We talked about Africa, as some of my graduate studies were on Tanzania and Uganda. Marilyn and I took him to a movie that was set in Lesotho. Nineteen-hundred miles from Kinshasa, but still Africa. He watched raptly. I never asked about his religion, if any. (Employers may not ask such questions.) Best guess is Protestant, like me.

The second face of an immigrant belongs to Michael from Ireland, whom I hired to work in the superette. He had brought his young family from County Wexford. He grew up in a houseful of siblings. He was a good worker, showed up on time, did his chores, looked after customers. But what I remember most was his goal.

“Take the civil service test,” his mother on the other side had told him. “Get a government job, then you’ll be set for life.” He passed the New York City civil service exam. He worked out his two-weeks notice at the store, and I never saw him again. Guess he was set for life.

The campaign debate swirls through thoughts of these two immigrants. The younger is embarking on his American dream. Michael must have long since retired from the New York City government, having lived out his American dream. Both chose to make our country their country. They are two very different faces of immigration in America.

Bob Neal lives in New Sharon. The immigrants from whom he descends arrived in 1630 from England and in the 18th century from Scotland or Ireland, depending on which family account you read. His younger son is an immigrant, born in 1976 in Montreal.