Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.
There are 11 articles by Michael J. LaRosa :
“The outsiders ... who think this “surge” is a wonderful idea for the city have little insight into how the deployment of a few hundred people in a city as sprawling and diverse as Memphis can effectively combat crime.”
Alfredo Caminata saw the United States as a safe place free from the authoritarianism and persecution he suffered in his home country. Until he was stopped by ICE agents.
“Educating children helps society to flourish. Denying education is a recipe for stagnation, more crime and increased misery for all.”
More than 40 years ago, Doan and Mylinh Dinh fled Vietnam and established a new family here in Memphis — a city that gave them not just a chance for survival but the opportunity to thrive.
“Because of the sanitation workers’ strike and the tragic killing of Martin Luther King Jr. 55 years ago, Memphis has become a welcoming place for refugees and people fleeing unimaginable horrors back home.”
Leaving undocumented people out of the census mirrors a more subtle indifference to the Latinx community here in Memphis. Recent reporting shows Hispanics are contracting 28% of all COVID-19 cases in Shelby County, while comprising only 10% of residents.
Many of the heroes who are attending to the sick and dying in our hospitals are immigrants: 25% of physicians in the United States are foreign-born, and 1.5 million immigrants are employed as doctors, nurses and pharmacists.
Cutting poverty and increasing the financial security of all Americans ought to be a political objective, if not obsession.
In Tennessee, more than 70,000 citizen children live with an undocumented family member. If a large-scale immigration raid occurred in our neighborhoods, it would have ramifications among the nearly 14,000 Latino/Latina children attending Shelby County Schools.
In Memphis, new immigrants make up just over 5 percent of the metro population, but account for 9 percent of the area's business owners.
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