Opinion: A Venezuelan immigrant’s experience with ICE in Memphis
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.
Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.
There are 10 articles by Michael J. LaRosa :
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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