IMMIGRANTS' LOVE IS UNREQUITED by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, 21 May 2023. [Click image to view Karla's essay in the New York Times.]
If you know nothing else about our immigrants, you should know this: They have survived everything God put in front of them, and then some, in the name of freedom and safety, for themselves and their children. I will never understand why they, why we, were and are so hated. [...] I was a child in Ecuador in the 1990s, a time when Latin America was reeling from the effects of decades of coups, dictatorships, and political repression. My parents passed on to me and my brother their full-blooded hatred of authoritarianism and those who abet it----weak-willed people who value their own careers over their country's constitution, the disengaged and indifferent populace. [...] Immigrants love America in a way that America needs to be loved if it is going to survive. [...] ...we've been treating immigrants very, very badly.
