I am an immigrant
I am an immigrant.
Travelled across an ocean between continents before I was two. In the arms of a teenage mother — and detached from the family and culture we knew — immigrants, we arrived in Canada in 1982.
I don’t have an accent. I don’t wear a head dress. I certainly don’t have much of a shade of skin (friends often refer to it as a "pasty white glow"). I have red hair, which is certainly unique, and I used to sport some serious freckles across my face. But, not the status of my citizenship, the colour of my skin, nor the kilt I was married in, have ever made me fear for my life, or experience rejection in a desperate hour.
My parents and I faced a very different arrival on the shores of a new world than Alan Kirdy, or Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez or his little daughter Valeria, wrapped to his body, drowned.
You can tell me all the reasons we need border security, and immigration laws, and refugee vetting, and whatever else we need to feel safe and in charge — but children drowning in the Rio Grande, children detained without proper health care or hygiene, children caged on the Mexican border with no plan?
I’ve been asked for a Christian response to these crisis' we keep seeing in the news. A Christian response to the chaos into which the world seems to be following into descent.
But I cannot come up with one. I can’t seem to proclaim the Good News. I can’t seem to get there yet.
The Christian response to our world cannot begin without tears. Tears for the children raised in fear and chaos. Tears for political tolerance that allows it to happen. Tears for those who no longer feel empathy. Tears for those who have no place to rest.
I am grateful to be Canadian; to have been afforded opportunity and prosperity and 3rd and 4th and 5th chances at life in a country in which I was not born.
But I have white skin.
I am an immigrant. I don’t get treated the same way.
