They come from many different countries and for different reasons, but immigrants to Minnesota share one thing: a vision of the American dream.
Amina Arte
Armando Blas Garcia
Laura Cerda
Marv Davidov
Milagros Jimenez
Zoe Massaquoi
Lu Samaniego
Hesbon Simba
Peter Yarngo
Amina Arte: ?If I can change one person?s mind?
ROCHESTER ? As an employment counselor who works with immigrant communities, Amina Arte bridges cultures. Born in Ethiopia, her family moved to Somalia when she was young, then emigrated to the United States.
For the past four years, she has used her fluency in English and Somali to help immigrants find jobs and adjust to a new life and a new culture.
 |
| Amina Arte |
?Communication is the key I see to bring people together,? she said. Conflict is inevitable when new groups arrive in a community, but ?education and also time will make improvement,? she said.
Arte is the mother of four and has many family members living in the Rochester area. She is proud to be a U.S. citizen, but adds, ?I will always be an immigrant. That identity will never go away.?
Arte learned about the Freedom Ride from organizers at HERE Local 21, which is coordinating riders from the Rochester area. She sees participation in the ride as a natural outgrowth of her community activism.
?I?m looking forward to changing perceptions,? she said. ?I don?t think I can change the whole world, but it would be a success if I can change one person?s mind.?
Armando Blas Garcia: ?Documents or not, we?re still people?
Armando Blas Garcia came to California from Mexico in 1986. ?I graduated from high school, and gone to one year of university, but we didn?t have any money and I had to drop out. There really wasn?t any work in Puebla aside from tending the fields, and without money you can?t fertilize the fields or work the land properly,? he said.
?When I came, I thought, ?we?re just going to El Norte for two or three years, make some money, go home.? I think that?s what most people [from Mexico] think. But when we got here, we saw what a great future we could have. There is a lot of work, our kids could have a better future. ?We were just born in the wrong place,? we thought.?
While in California, Garcia and his wife, Maria Luisa German, chose to have their two eldest daughters in Mexico. At the time, Garcia notes, crossing the border was easy. ?We worked on farms in California, picking vegetables. We didn?t have any health insurance, and Maria?s mother was in Mexico. This decision has meant serious consequences they didn?t foresee; the four of them are now fighting deportation. (Garcia and German have a son, George A Blas German, who is 11. Because he was born in the United States, he is automatically a U.S. citizen.)
Daughter Maria delos Angeles Blas German, 16, will accompany her father on the ride, and Areli Blas German, 15, will stay back and take her sister?s class notes for her.
?Since I got here, I?ve been trying to regularize our status. Before 9/11 the case seemed to be going well. They said they?d decide in June or July, now it?s almost September and every day I check my mail, but I have heard nothing?I?ve spent $6,000 or $7,000 on lawyer?s fees so far,? the Shakopee resident said.
Garcia and his daughter are going on the Freedom Ride because, Garcia says, ?We have to stand up and speak up. ? To people who say this has nothing to do with them, I sai, ?Who does your yard work? Who makes your fast food? Who cleans the bank where you keep your money? Who cleans your hotel rooms? The food on your table every night?how do you think it got there? Who picks it? Who packs it???
?I can?t wait to lobby,? he says of the stops along the Freedom Ride. ?And in New York, some 400,000 people are expected. We are going to show that we can do it. We have some power, if we are united, we can do it.?
?I always tell my kids, We are all human beings, we are all the same. With or without documents, we?re still people. We are still made of bones and blood.?
Laura Cerda: ?We have many different faces?
ROCHESTER ? For Laura Cerda, the Freedom Ride will be her first opportunity to see Washington, D.C., a symbol of democracy, and the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of hope for generations of immigrants.
?I?m excited and a little scared,? the Rochester resident acknowledged. ?I?ve never done anything like this before.?
 |
| Laura Cerda |
Cerda is just starting to learn about the long-term goals of the ride, such as legalization and ?a road to citizenship? for immigrant workers. But she knows why she is riding.
At St. Mary?s Hospital, where she serves food to Mayo Clinic patients, Cerda is part of a diverse workforce of people from Vietnam, Mexico, Cambodia, Bosnia and dozens of other places.
?We have many different faces,? she said. ?I go on the ride to represent them.?
Cerda also rides for her family, she said, which endured hardship and separation while undergoing the process to emigrate from Mexico to the United States. She empathizes with workers who have come to the country without documentation to earn a living and support their families.
?I was one of them before and I know what it feels like to be always afraid,? she said.
Marv Davidov: Riding again, four decades later
Marv Davidov says he?s ?probably the best known white radical in the state.? Part of his fame comes from being one of the Minnesotan Freedom Riders in 1961.
The 1961 Freedom Rides sought to integrate buses and bus stations throughout the South.
?In the 50s, I hung with a bohemian crowd in Minneapolis. We drank down the street [on East Hennepin],? Davidov recalled. ?I lived with a black man, and discovered first hand what racism is.?
The Minnesotan Freedom Riders left Nashville in June 1961, after the first wave of riders had been arrested, and some had been beaten, on their way to New Orleans.
After stopping in Nashville for a quick orientation, the group continued to to Jackson, Miss. There, they entered the bus station. ?Since we were an all-white group, we went into the door marked ?Negros Only? and sat at the lunch counter. The waitress didn?t even approach us, because it had happened so many times before. Captain Ray of the Jackson Police Department came up to us and said, ?I order you to move on? and we didn?t move. So he arrested us for ?breach of the peace.? Their ?peace? was poor jobs for black people, poor nutrition, and segregation. We were proud to breach that peace,? Davidov said.
After being tried and convicted, the group was sent to Parchman with other Freedom Riders from other states. ?We were 350 people in maximum security prison, white and black, women and men. I cried, but not because we were being punished, but because of the nobility of everyone. I knew there was no other place on Earth I should be than there with people I didn?t know. It was a moment of blessed human solidarity. Everyone felt it,? Davidov recalled.
Davidov, who returned to Mississippi last year for a forty year reunion, noted that much has changed since 1961. While there, they met the Black mayor of Jackson, a Black Mississippi Supreme Court justice, and Black city councilors. ?The 1961 Freedom Ride took a hell of a lot of courage, but it was immensely successful.?
Davidov looks forward to retelling the stories to the ?captive audience? of the two busloads of riders, as well as learning from the other riders. ?The ride is well-organized locally and nationally. I?m proud to be invited. It?s going to be a hell of a lot of fun!?
Milagros Jimenez: Running out of time
Milagros Jimenez, an ISAIAH organizer, was standing outside a church in South Minneapolis one night in March when several men approached her, and asked for her by name. When she said, ?yes, that?s me,? they handcuffed her and, she says, drove her around the Twin Cities for hours, asking her questions.
?I tried to relax, and asked for my lawyer, and remained silent,? Jimenez remembers. ?I peeked out the window to see where we were. Around midnight, I recognized that we were in Chaska. They took me a to a jail there. I asked an officer, ?why am I here?? and she said, ?I don?t know.? But at six the next morning, they took me to the INS.?
Someone had told the immigration authorities (now known as the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services) that Jimenez, a Peruvian immigrant, was here illegally. News of her case spread around the country. While in jail, Jimenez recalls fellow prisoners banging on her cell?s windows to say, ?You are Milagros. You are a celebrity! You are on TV. And I thought, ?ah, they?re doing something on the outside.? It was incredible.?
Jimenez was in jail for about a month. Since then, she had to sell her home, because of the legal expenses and because, with her status in limbo, she is unable to work.
?We need change in the American immigration system,? Jimenez said, ?It?s not just me appealing, fighting the immigration system. This happens to other people.?
Jimenez looks forward most to the camaraderie of the other riders, saying, ?It?s hard to understand things you don?t know. If we tell our stories, we can build a relationship? We are all coming together.?
Zoe Massaquoi, Peter Yarngo: Starting over
MINNEAPOLIS ? Fleeing Liberia, which has been at war almost nonstop since 1989, has not ended the struggles of Zoe Massaquoi and Peter Yarngo.
They say they are shocked at how difficult it is for immigrants to get a good job in America ? even those with advanced degrees and professional training, even those who speak English and are here legally.
Doctors, lawyers, nurses, pharmacists and accountants find that their training is virtually useless unless they go back to school and start from scratch, Massaquoi said. Like many other immigrants, they find themselves restricted mostly to manual labor and service industry jobs.
 |
| Zoe Massaquoi |
Massaquoi, 42, worked in two governments in Liberia, including as a deputy minister of finance and as president of a housing bank. Then, she says, ?I had some problems with the government, and when they came after my life, I decided to leave.?
Massaquoi fled to the United States in 1999, settled in Minnesota, and filed for political asylum ? a process that took more than three years. The U.S. government approved her request this past June.
Yarngo, 38, worked for a petroleum company in Liberia before the ongoing civil war essentially shut the company down. He worked for four years with Medicine Without Frontiers, a French relief organization, distributing medicine to rural clinics from the nation?s capital of Monrovia. ?Then things went bad, and I had to leave,? he said.
Yarngo then spent two years as a refugee in neighboring Cote d?Ivoire.
?Being a refugee is not an easy thing. It?s very pathetic to find yourself a refugee,? he said. ?It?s something no one should pray to be. It?s terrible. I was one of the fortunate ones to find myself in America.?
He arrived in 2002; his refugee classification allows him to apply for permanent resident status after one year.
?I thought it would be easier for me because I came here legally,? Yarngo said. ?But they want you to have work history in America, so how can you find a job? Why will you refuse a man if he don?t have work experience in America? He needs to live.?
The stress of earning a living is complicated by the needs of other family members. Yarngo is trying to support six of his relatives? children who are in America, and sends money back to support his own two children, ages 11 and 15, who remain with family members in Africa.
Massaquoi has five children ? the oldest 22, the youngest 7 ? who remain in Ghana, plus brothers and sisters still in Monrovia.
?Every month, I send $400 for their feeding and upkeep. When school is about to open, you have to send extra money.
?For the people in Monrovia, every month I have to at least find $200 to $300 for distribution ? give this person $50, give this person $40.?
 |
| Peter Yarngo |
Phone cards ? to keep in touch with family members by long-distance ? are a necessity. And immigrants still have their own bills to pay, Massaquoi and Yarngo point out.
?So that makes it very, very hard here,? Yarngo said.
The most expedient way to get a job, Massaquoi and Yarngo discovered, is to rely on temporary employment agencies. But companies that utilize the agencies routinely pay immigrants less, they say, even though they do the same job.
Yarngo worked at an assembly job where he made $9 an hour while co-workers received $10.50. Massaquoi said one of her first jobs ? in a collection agency ? paid her $8.25 an hour; that included a 25-cent bonus because she was a college graduate. American co-workers, including some that hadn?t even graduated from high school, were paid $11.50.
To make ends meet, Massaquoi at one point worked seven days a week, including extra hours at her main job, then double-shifts at a second job on weekends.
But she has quickly quit jobs where she felt she was being excessively exploited. ?As much as I need a job in America to sustain myself, I will not do any job that I will become a slave to,? she said.
?The problem we face as immigrants is not only faced by me,? Massaquoi said. ?It?s faced by every one of us, regardless of which country you?re coming from. If you?re an immigrant and you open your mouth and speak, you have this ?foreign? accent, you?ve got a problem.?
She said she hoped meeting with Congressional officials during the Freedom Ride will cause them to look at immigrants differently. ?I hope they recognize that the immigrants, too, are human beings and they have lives and they want to live the way the Americans live.?
?Look, America calls herself the champion of democracy,? Yarngo says. ?That?s how many of us look at America to be. But when you come, you look at it differently. There?s a lot of discrimination. No matter what our color looks like, we all got breath in us. We got the same blood. We are all going through the same things.?
Lu Samaniego: Hoping to spark awareness
ROCHESTER ? Lu Samaniego would be an unusual man in any culture. When he talks about the struggles of immigrants, he sprinkles his comments with quotes from U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson and draws from the constitutional tenets outlined in ?The Federalist Papers.?
In the next breath, he exclaims how happy he is to finally have come to the United States after waiting 20 years in his native Philippines for the process to go through ? and how proud he is to have a job as a dishwasher at St. Mary?s Hospital, part of the Mayo Clinic system.
 |
| Lu Samaniego |
In the Philippines, Samaniego was part of the ?peaceful revolution? that overthrew the government of Ferdinand Marcos and demanded more democracy.
Here in the United States, Samaniego is involved in his union, HERE Local 21, and is a community activist. He is concerned about the problems facing immigrants, which he sums up with the term, ?DOPE.?
??D? means they are deprived,? he explained. ??O? is for oppressed. ?P? is persecution and ?E? stands for exploitation.? If the lives of immigrants are to improve, the problem of ?DOPE? must be addressed, he said.
?That is why I join this march,? he said. ?I hope this will spark a kind of awareness on the part of immigrants and American society . . . to act.?
?I consider the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride to be a celebration of the American dream.?
Hesbon Simba: Waiting to see his children
MINNEAPOLIS ? Family reunification is always on the mind of Hesbon Simba, who emigrated from Kenya in 1997.
Simba?s three children ? now ages 7, 11 and 13 ? received permission to enter the United States in 2000. But Simba is still waiting for them to receive the visas that actually will allow them to join their father.
?I was told I have to wait for not less than 5 years,? Simba says, a wait that other immigrants tell him is not unusual.
Simba was a high school teacher and assistant principal in Kenya, but left because of interference and pressures from elected politicians. ?I was not the type [who believed in] playing the politics of the day, so I was always a target in my position,? he says.
Simba, 40, now is taking graduate classes in nonprofit management at Metro State University, and working with the Twin Cities Religion and Labor Network in an internship through the Organizing Apprenticeship Project.
The application process and the screening process to reunite families don?t bother Simba, especially since the terrorist attacks of 2001. But the delay after approval seems cruel to him.
?The citizens who have been born here and don?t have to go through that process, I think there?s much that they don?t know,? he says.
?Why do you have to screen and then subject someone to a long period of waiting?? What sense does it make to learn that you have been approved now, and then you have to wait for 10 years for a baby you left behind who was 2 years old??
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| Hesbon Simba |
The separation, the need to send money back to support family members, and the need to earn a living here all add stress to immigrants? lives, he says. He sees other long-term effects, too.
?If America wants to have a good society in the future, they should facilitate the children of the immigrants who are abroad, that they can come here as soon as possible, so that the parents can take their responsibility of shaping their children.
?Otherwise, I?m a scared person, when your child is brought up by someone else. You always copy the wrong things.
?They will come here as a teenager and won?t even listen to you,? he says. ?So what are we doing to the whole world??
Profiles and photos by Barb Kucera, Workday Minnesota; Michael Kuchta, Union Advocate; and Dania Rajendra, Minneapolis Labor Review.
Share
They come from many different countries and for different reasons, but immigrants to Minnesota share one thing: a vision of the American dream.
Amina Arte
Armando Blas Garcia
Laura Cerda
Marv Davidov
Milagros Jimenez
Zoe Massaquoi
Lu Samaniego
Hesbon Simba
Peter Yarngo
Amina Arte: ?If I can change one person?s mind?
ROCHESTER ? As an employment counselor who works with immigrant communities, Amina Arte bridges cultures. Born in Ethiopia, her family moved to Somalia when she was young, then emigrated to the United States.
For the past four years, she has used her fluency in English and Somali to help immigrants find jobs and adjust to a new life and a new culture.
|
|
Amina Arte
|
?Communication is the key I see to bring people together,? she said. Conflict is inevitable when new groups arrive in a community, but ?education and also time will make improvement,? she said.
Arte is the mother of four and has many family members living in the Rochester area. She is proud to be a U.S. citizen, but adds, ?I will always be an immigrant. That identity will never go away.?
Arte learned about the Freedom Ride from organizers at HERE Local 21, which is coordinating riders from the Rochester area. She sees participation in the ride as a natural outgrowth of her community activism.
?I?m looking forward to changing perceptions,? she said. ?I don?t think I can change the whole world, but it would be a success if I can change one person?s mind.?
Armando Blas Garcia: ?Documents or not, we?re still people?
Armando Blas Garcia came to California from Mexico in 1986. ?I graduated from high school, and gone to one year of university, but we didn?t have any money and I had to drop out. There really wasn?t any work in Puebla aside from tending the fields, and without money you can?t fertilize the fields or work the land properly,? he said.
?When I came, I thought, ?we?re just going to El Norte for two or three years, make some money, go home.? I think that?s what most people [from Mexico] think. But when we got here, we saw what a great future we could have. There is a lot of work, our kids could have a better future. ?We were just born in the wrong place,? we thought.?
While in California, Garcia and his wife, Maria Luisa German, chose to have their two eldest daughters in Mexico. At the time, Garcia notes, crossing the border was easy. ?We worked on farms in California, picking vegetables. We didn?t have any health insurance, and Maria?s mother was in Mexico. This decision has meant serious consequences they didn?t foresee; the four of them are now fighting deportation. (Garcia and German have a son, George A Blas German, who is 11. Because he was born in the United States, he is automatically a U.S. citizen.)
Daughter Maria delos Angeles Blas German, 16, will accompany her father on the ride, and Areli Blas German, 15, will stay back and take her sister?s class notes for her.
?Since I got here, I?ve been trying to regularize our status. Before 9/11 the case seemed to be going well. They said they?d decide in June or July, now it?s almost September and every day I check my mail, but I have heard nothing?I?ve spent $6,000 or $7,000 on lawyer?s fees so far,? the Shakopee resident said.
Garcia and his daughter are going on the Freedom Ride because, Garcia says, ?We have to stand up and speak up. ? To people who say this has nothing to do with them, I sai, ?Who does your yard work? Who makes your fast food? Who cleans the bank where you keep your money? Who cleans your hotel rooms? The food on your table every night?how do you think it got there? Who picks it? Who packs it???
?I can?t wait to lobby,? he says of the stops along the Freedom Ride. ?And in New York, some 400,000 people are expected. We are going to show that we can do it. We have some power, if we are united, we can do it.?
?I always tell my kids, We are all human beings, we are all the same. With or without documents, we?re still people. We are still made of bones and blood.?
Laura Cerda: ?We have many different faces?
ROCHESTER ? For Laura Cerda, the Freedom Ride will be her first opportunity to see Washington, D.C., a symbol of democracy, and the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of hope for generations of immigrants.
?I?m excited and a little scared,? the Rochester resident acknowledged. ?I?ve never done anything like this before.?
|
|
Laura Cerda
|
Cerda is just starting to learn about the long-term goals of the ride, such as legalization and ?a road to citizenship? for immigrant workers. But she knows why she is riding.
At St. Mary?s Hospital, where she serves food to Mayo Clinic patients, Cerda is part of a diverse workforce of people from Vietnam, Mexico, Cambodia, Bosnia and dozens of other places.
?We have many different faces,? she said. ?I go on the ride to represent them.?
Cerda also rides for her family, she said, which endured hardship and separation while undergoing the process to emigrate from Mexico to the United States. She empathizes with workers who have come to the country without documentation to earn a living and support their families.
?I was one of them before and I know what it feels like to be always afraid,? she said.
Marv Davidov: Riding again, four decades later
Marv Davidov says he?s ?probably the best known white radical in the state.? Part of his fame comes from being one of the Minnesotan Freedom Riders in 1961.
The 1961 Freedom Rides sought to integrate buses and bus stations throughout the South.
?In the 50s, I hung with a bohemian crowd in Minneapolis. We drank down the street [on East Hennepin],? Davidov recalled. ?I lived with a black man, and discovered first hand what racism is.?
The Minnesotan Freedom Riders left Nashville in June 1961, after the first wave of riders had been arrested, and some had been beaten, on their way to New Orleans.
After stopping in Nashville for a quick orientation, the group continued to to Jackson, Miss. There, they entered the bus station. ?Since we were an all-white group, we went into the door marked ?Negros Only? and sat at the lunch counter. The waitress didn?t even approach us, because it had happened so many times before. Captain Ray of the Jackson Police Department came up to us and said, ?I order you to move on? and we didn?t move. So he arrested us for ?breach of the peace.? Their ?peace? was poor jobs for black people, poor nutrition, and segregation. We were proud to breach that peace,? Davidov said.
After being tried and convicted, the group was sent to Parchman with other Freedom Riders from other states. ?We were 350 people in maximum security prison, white and black, women and men. I cried, but not because we were being punished, but because of the nobility of everyone. I knew there was no other place on Earth I should be than there with people I didn?t know. It was a moment of blessed human solidarity. Everyone felt it,? Davidov recalled.
Davidov, who returned to Mississippi last year for a forty year reunion, noted that much has changed since 1961. While there, they met the Black mayor of Jackson, a Black Mississippi Supreme Court justice, and Black city councilors. ?The 1961 Freedom Ride took a hell of a lot of courage, but it was immensely successful.?
Davidov looks forward to retelling the stories to the ?captive audience? of the two busloads of riders, as well as learning from the other riders. ?The ride is well-organized locally and nationally. I?m proud to be invited. It?s going to be a hell of a lot of fun!?
Milagros Jimenez: Running out of time
Milagros Jimenez, an ISAIAH organizer, was standing outside a church in South Minneapolis one night in March when several men approached her, and asked for her by name. When she said, ?yes, that?s me,? they handcuffed her and, she says, drove her around the Twin Cities for hours, asking her questions.
?I tried to relax, and asked for my lawyer, and remained silent,? Jimenez remembers. ?I peeked out the window to see where we were. Around midnight, I recognized that we were in Chaska. They took me a to a jail there. I asked an officer, ?why am I here?? and she said, ?I don?t know.? But at six the next morning, they took me to the INS.?
Someone had told the immigration authorities (now known as the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services) that Jimenez, a Peruvian immigrant, was here illegally. News of her case spread around the country. While in jail, Jimenez recalls fellow prisoners banging on her cell?s windows to say, ?You are Milagros. You are a celebrity! You are on TV. And I thought, ?ah, they?re doing something on the outside.? It was incredible.?
Jimenez was in jail for about a month. Since then, she had to sell her home, because of the legal expenses and because, with her status in limbo, she is unable to work.
?We need change in the American immigration system,? Jimenez said, ?It?s not just me appealing, fighting the immigration system. This happens to other people.?
Jimenez looks forward most to the camaraderie of the other riders, saying, ?It?s hard to understand things you don?t know. If we tell our stories, we can build a relationship? We are all coming together.?
Zoe Massaquoi, Peter Yarngo: Starting over
MINNEAPOLIS ? Fleeing Liberia, which has been at war almost nonstop since 1989, has not ended the struggles of Zoe Massaquoi and Peter Yarngo.
They say they are shocked at how difficult it is for immigrants to get a good job in America ? even those with advanced degrees and professional training, even those who speak English and are here legally.
Doctors, lawyers, nurses, pharmacists and accountants find that their training is virtually useless unless they go back to school and start from scratch, Massaquoi said. Like many other immigrants, they find themselves restricted mostly to manual labor and service industry jobs.
|
|
Zoe Massaquoi
|
Massaquoi, 42, worked in two governments in Liberia, including as a deputy minister of finance and as president of a housing bank. Then, she says, ?I had some problems with the government, and when they came after my life, I decided to leave.?
Massaquoi fled to the United States in 1999, settled in Minnesota, and filed for political asylum ? a process that took more than three years. The U.S. government approved her request this past June.
Yarngo, 38, worked for a petroleum company in Liberia before the ongoing civil war essentially shut the company down. He worked for four years with Medicine Without Frontiers, a French relief organization, distributing medicine to rural clinics from the nation?s capital of Monrovia. ?Then things went bad, and I had to leave,? he said.
Yarngo then spent two years as a refugee in neighboring Cote d?Ivoire.
?Being a refugee is not an easy thing. It?s very pathetic to find yourself a refugee,? he said. ?It?s something no one should pray to be. It?s terrible. I was one of the fortunate ones to find myself in America.?
He arrived in 2002; his refugee classification allows him to apply for permanent resident status after one year.
?I thought it would be easier for me because I came here legally,? Yarngo said. ?But they want you to have work history in America, so how can you find a job? Why will you refuse a man if he don?t have work experience in America? He needs to live.?
The stress of earning a living is complicated by the needs of other family members. Yarngo is trying to support six of his relatives? children who are in America, and sends money back to support his own two children, ages 11 and 15, who remain with family members in Africa.
Massaquoi has five children ? the oldest 22, the youngest 7 ? who remain in Ghana, plus brothers and sisters still in Monrovia.
?Every month, I send $400 for their feeding and upkeep. When school is about to open, you have to send extra money.
?For the people in Monrovia, every month I have to at least find $200 to $300 for distribution ? give this person $50, give this person $40.?
|
|
Peter Yarngo
|
Phone cards ? to keep in touch with family members by long-distance ? are a necessity. And immigrants still have their own bills to pay, Massaquoi and Yarngo point out.
?So that makes it very, very hard here,? Yarngo said.
The most expedient way to get a job, Massaquoi and Yarngo discovered, is to rely on temporary employment agencies. But companies that utilize the agencies routinely pay immigrants less, they say, even though they do the same job.
Yarngo worked at an assembly job where he made $9 an hour while co-workers received $10.50. Massaquoi said one of her first jobs ? in a collection agency ? paid her $8.25 an hour; that included a 25-cent bonus because she was a college graduate. American co-workers, including some that hadn?t even graduated from high school, were paid $11.50.
To make ends meet, Massaquoi at one point worked seven days a week, including extra hours at her main job, then double-shifts at a second job on weekends.
But she has quickly quit jobs where she felt she was being excessively exploited. ?As much as I need a job in America to sustain myself, I will not do any job that I will become a slave to,? she said.
?The problem we face as immigrants is not only faced by me,? Massaquoi said. ?It?s faced by every one of us, regardless of which country you?re coming from. If you?re an immigrant and you open your mouth and speak, you have this ?foreign? accent, you?ve got a problem.?
She said she hoped meeting with Congressional officials during the Freedom Ride will cause them to look at immigrants differently. ?I hope they recognize that the immigrants, too, are human beings and they have lives and they want to live the way the Americans live.?
?Look, America calls herself the champion of democracy,? Yarngo says. ?That?s how many of us look at America to be. But when you come, you look at it differently. There?s a lot of discrimination. No matter what our color looks like, we all got breath in us. We got the same blood. We are all going through the same things.?
Lu Samaniego: Hoping to spark awareness
ROCHESTER ? Lu Samaniego would be an unusual man in any culture. When he talks about the struggles of immigrants, he sprinkles his comments with quotes from U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson and draws from the constitutional tenets outlined in ?The Federalist Papers.?
In the next breath, he exclaims how happy he is to finally have come to the United States after waiting 20 years in his native Philippines for the process to go through ? and how proud he is to have a job as a dishwasher at St. Mary?s Hospital, part of the Mayo Clinic system.
|
|
Lu Samaniego
|
In the Philippines, Samaniego was part of the ?peaceful revolution? that overthrew the government of Ferdinand Marcos and demanded more democracy.
Here in the United States, Samaniego is involved in his union, HERE Local 21, and is a community activist. He is concerned about the problems facing immigrants, which he sums up with the term, ?DOPE.?
??D? means they are deprived,? he explained. ??O? is for oppressed. ?P? is persecution and ?E? stands for exploitation.? If the lives of immigrants are to improve, the problem of ?DOPE? must be addressed, he said.
?That is why I join this march,? he said. ?I hope this will spark a kind of awareness on the part of immigrants and American society . . . to act.?
?I consider the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride to be a celebration of the American dream.?
Hesbon Simba: Waiting to see his children
MINNEAPOLIS ? Family reunification is always on the mind of Hesbon Simba, who emigrated from Kenya in 1997.
Simba?s three children ? now ages 7, 11 and 13 ? received permission to enter the United States in 2000. But Simba is still waiting for them to receive the visas that actually will allow them to join their father.
?I was told I have to wait for not less than 5 years,? Simba says, a wait that other immigrants tell him is not unusual.
Simba was a high school teacher and assistant principal in Kenya, but left because of interference and pressures from elected politicians. ?I was not the type [who believed in] playing the politics of the day, so I was always a target in my position,? he says.
Simba, 40, now is taking graduate classes in nonprofit management at Metro State University, and working with the Twin Cities Religion and Labor Network in an internship through the Organizing Apprenticeship Project.
The application process and the screening process to reunite families don?t bother Simba, especially since the terrorist attacks of 2001. But the delay after approval seems cruel to him.
?The citizens who have been born here and don?t have to go through that process, I think there?s much that they don?t know,? he says.
?Why do you have to screen and then subject someone to a long period of waiting?? What sense does it make to learn that you have been approved now, and then you have to wait for 10 years for a baby you left behind who was 2 years old??
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Hesbon Simba
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The separation, the need to send money back to support family members, and the need to earn a living here all add stress to immigrants? lives, he says. He sees other long-term effects, too.
?If America wants to have a good society in the future, they should facilitate the children of the immigrants who are abroad, that they can come here as soon as possible, so that the parents can take their responsibility of shaping their children.
?Otherwise, I?m a scared person, when your child is brought up by someone else. You always copy the wrong things.
?They will come here as a teenager and won?t even listen to you,? he says. ?So what are we doing to the whole world??
Profiles and photos by Barb Kucera, Workday Minnesota; Michael Kuchta, Union Advocate; and Dania Rajendra, Minneapolis Labor Review.