“If I had known, I wouldn’t have let him go to work. I would have stopped him,” Carlos Suazo Sandoval said, recalling the last time he saw his brother Maynor. , told CBS reporter Camilo Montoya Galvez.
“My brother is the driving force in this family,” Norma Suazo added.
After decades of living and working in the area, immigrants became part of Baltimore.
Workers like Mayor Suazo Sandoval are also the driving force behind America’s economy. Immigrant labor has long been an important driver of various industries. For example, without immigrants, the construction industry would grind to a halt. Immigrants work there at great personal risk.
Nevertheless, immigration is increasingly recognized as a concern among American voters.
Last week, as Baltimore grieved, Gallup released a comprehensive report on issues affecting Americans this election year. The poll included an open-ended question asking respondents to identify the “most important issue facing this country today.” 28% cited immigration as a priority over inflation and poverty.
Violent xenophobic rhetoric has featured prominently in American politics for nearly a decade. In 2015, early in his presidential campaign, Donald Trump criminalized Mexicans, who make up the majority of immigrants and their descendants in the United States. Since then, he hasn’t given up. In the run-up to the 2024 election, President Trump said immigrants were “tainting the blood of our nation.”
Why did President Trump’s ugly demagogy gain support from American voters? One reason is that immigrants are struggling in secret.
“Our industry would not exist without immigrant workers,” Wisconsin dairy farmer John Rosenau told me in an interview during the Trump administration. “Eighty percent of Wisconsin’s milk is harvested by immigrants. If we took immigrants away, more than half of the farms would go out of business.”
The thousands of farmworkers who support Rosenow’s farms and the vast fields of California do it quietly and all too often overlooked. How many drivers who pass road repair workers really recognize them? It’s easy to take them for granted.
The media also has a certain responsibility. In the United States, coverage of the border crisis has overshadowed coverage of the important daily contributions of immigrants. These editorial choices have consequences. If stories like those of the Baltimore road repair worker and his family had been told earlier, American public opinion might have been a little different. If immigrants were given the recognition and dignity they deserve within America’s national discourse, the demagogue’s job would become even more difficult.
Those of us who have had the privilege of telling these stories understand their depth and complexity, their humanity and moral significance. There is no better antidote to hate and misinformation.
But that effort must start now. Waiting for a catastrophe to shine a spotlight on the stories of people like the six grieving families in Baltimore will not change the public perception of their struggles and aspirations. That would be an American tragedy.
