Watershed Moment For America and Latino Immigration: Opinion

You see young children in cages being separated from their parents and it's not a pretty picture. It's is the reality of a situation that cuts like a knife through the heart of what America is not supposed to be and yet might become.

My grandfather came to America from Italy as an orphan teen. He somehow legally passed through Ellis Island and lived the American Dream. He could not speak English then, and quite frankly never mastered the language. I know for a fact he had a rough time assimilating as did so many other Italian immigrants.There were few open arms. However there was no help, there was no safety net of government programs to give him healthcare, childcare, unemployment, food stamps and rent control. Scholarships to the finer schools and an "Ivy League" college were out of the question.

Today is not like then, the situation today is more of a conundrum. The country is polarized on this very important issue that President Donald Trump used to go from three percent of the possible Republican primary voters to President of the United States. His first major rise in the polls came by basically calling for a wall to control the flow of illegal immigration. President Trump was making Americans pick a side. Now in the end, will this country augment massive immigration or do all in its power to retard it?

On the East End of Long Island, traditional historic school districts in the Hamptons have been changed perhaps forever by the recent Latino wave of immigration. Some schools have now reached 80 percent Latino registration, causing many families to pay huge private school fees to try to give their children a traditional non bilingual school experience. It may be a losing battle; it may be a fight against a rising tide of change.

You hear that on the East End the children of the locals can't afford to live here on their own. They have a set standard of living that perhaps the more determined immigrants are willing to endure to skirt around to live here. Rules, laws, and traditions, are being broken, trampled. Multiple families living collectively illegally in one rented home.

In the name of attempting to be decent, honorable and respectable humans, politicians battle their conscience versus the purse strings to get through this political reality. Just like the folks who watch children in cages on the border they feel there must be a better way to deal with the problem intelligently and humanely. There may be a better way to deal with the visuals but perhaps not a better way to deal with the problem. The great Niccolo Machiavelli stated 500 years ago, "Power is not given, it is ceased." Politicians are using this wedge issue to "cease power."

The problem is a math problem. Will the rising tide of immigration, both legal and illegal, raise the level of the quality of life in the country and on the East End or will it lower it, immediately and over time?

Can the country afford to have a moral compass or does there come a time to build a fortress and let no one in? Seeing children in cages complicates the math but doesn't solve the problem of opening all the cages at once. It is up to every single citizen to choose the future by casting their votes in all upcoming elections both national and local. Be part of the decisions of how to deal with change, in the schools, in the towns, on the borders and internationally. Hopefully in the end intelligent elected leaders will make the smart, tough decisions to control the direction of change in this tide to lift all boats and not lower them.

T.J. Clemente is a Patch columnist.

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