The way Trump tells it, Mexican immigrants are stealing American jobs. But what sort of jobs? And from whom? I’m here to tell you we should all drop to our knees in gratitude for migrant labor, without which the wheels of American commerce would abruptly grind to a halt.
To explain, let’s go back a few years, when the first person named Menzies migrated from Scotland to Utah. Great Grandfather worked in the coal mines; Grandfather worked as an auto mechanic; Dad taught school, and I became a teenaged grease monkey. So why did the arc of progress suddenly bend downward? I blame my mother, who came of age during the Great Depression and who was evidently so enamored of hardship that she encouraged me to take a summer job at Stan’s Sinclair Station and Tire Shop. Which, in her eyes, was time better spent that just sitting around the house with my nose in a book.
Nonetheless, I read. In particular, I was working my way through Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” a copy of which I kept hidden lest anyone discover that I was secretly trying to improve my mind. I was trying to improve my mind because a certain college coed with whom I’d become enamored had suggested that if ONLY I could somehow become more cultured, she might deem me a worthy suitor. Luckily for me, I never succeeded, and today I pity the poor bastard who did—because, let’s be honest—what in the world is more tragic than finding oneself married to a snob?
“I don’t believe I shall ever have anything in common with a grease monkey.” Those were her last words to me—the very words that finally set me free. However, at the time I didn’t see it that way. My little heart was broken, and I spent the remainder of the summer washing bugs off windshields with my tears.
Nowadays I still wash windows and change oil and do light maintenance around the house. But for bigger jobs—reroofing, for instance—I rely on workers with Hispanic surnames. I do so because they work hard and are very good at what they do. Do they speak perfect English? Who cares? I don’t speak perfect Spanish, but still I try, because what harm can come of learning a second language? I mean, “Madame Bovary” is no doubt a better read in the original French, and I’m sure it resonates more with a Frenchman than it did to a lovesick teenaged grease monkey slaving in a gas station alongside lonely Highway Six, albeit a grease monkey with literary aspirations.
