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I was in the air while other people were grounded. A few days after President Trump closed America’s airports to travelers from seven Muslim countries, my wife and I were on a plane to Guatemala, headed for the second home of a Milwaukee friend who’d generously invited us down for a midwinter break. Despite nervous jokes from fellow passengers about whether we’d be allowed back into the country, the flight was uneventful.

Guatemala, we soon learned, is two-thirds Wisconsin’s size but has nearly three times our population — almost 16 million people. Tucked against the southern border of Mexico, it’s a nation of great natural beauty, deep Mayan roots, and a textile tradition that incorporates all the colors of the rainbow and then some.

We pursued with pleasure what the guidebooks recommended, climbing a volcano, touring a coffee plantation, soaking in a hot spring and visiting the shrine of San Simon, an alternative saint whom the Maya petition with gifts of alcohol, tobacco and cash. We also got off the beaten path and talked to people eager to discuss what was going on beneath the surface. Their most striking insight, and one with poignant relevance in Trump’s America, is that Guatemala’s principal exports are sugar, bananas, coffee … and Guatemalans. More than a million of them have settled in the United States, with or without benefit of papers, and the money they send home — over $7 billion last year — is the country’s single greatest source of revenue, far outpacing both agricultural exports and tourism. The vast majority of “remittances” are made by young men. I hadn’t noticed until someone pointed it out, but women seem to visibly outnumber men in both the countryside and the cities.

Most of the Guatemalan transplants have settled in California and the Northeast, but they’re our neighbors in Milwaukee as well. When our house needed a new roof a couple of years ago, we hired a long-established local company whose crew, it turned out, consisted of a Polish-born foreman and three Guatemalan laborers. I couldn’t carry on more than a basic conversation with any of them, but I wondered why the Guatemalans, in particular, would choose cold Wisconsin over sunny Central America.

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I wonder no more. More than half of all Guatemalans live in poverty, many in dire poverty, and Third World conditions are apparent nearly everywhere you look. After a few hours on an airplane, you’re dropped into a country where people are hauling bundles of firewood on their backs, women are doing their laundry on rocks by the lakeshore, and sheet-metal shacks house hundreds of thousands.

Why they come

There are additional reasons for Guatemalans to seek their fortunes elsewhere: the legacy of a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996, a government plagued by corruption (the previous president and vice president are behind bars), the random violence of drug cartels, the lingering effects of various natural disasters, and a threadbare infrastructure. Clean water sources are in short supply, good roads even scarcer.

Far from their image in some circles as parasitic gold-diggers, Guatemala’s migrants, and their counterparts from elsewhere in the region, are people driven to desperation, fleeing hopeless situations in their homelands for opportunity in the north. For this they are willing to pay exorbitant fees to “coyote” escorts, run the gantlet of hostile Mexican authorities, cross deserts and rivers on foot, enter a country whose language and customs are utterly foreign, take the hardest jobs at the lowest pay, and live in constant (and mounting) fear of deportation. Back home, in the meantime, their children are growing up without fathers, gang life beckons, and village social networks fray beyond repair. A gravy train? No, what’s going on is a derailment of continental proportions.

This may all sound terribly remote from the lived experience of most Americans, but how distant is it, really? The discomfort, even guilt, that tourists typically feel in the Third World, enjoying the sunshine but deploring the squalor, should be tempered by the fact that many of our own ancestors endured significant hardships before establishing our family footholds in the New World.

In the early 1900s, when steamship fares sank to record lows, legions of impoverished Greek and Italian males with no prospects at home commuted to America with the seasons and sent their money back across the sea. A few decades earlier, one-way tickets were the rule, but the desperation was just as real. My Norwegian great-grandfather was an itinerant carpenter who had to leave his family for extended periods in search of work. My Polish great-grandparents were on the verge of losing their oldest son to the Prussian military draft. In both countries, overpopulation strained the capacity of the land, foreign powers dominated local affairs, and economic turmoil was constant.

America was the obvious solution to all my ancestors’ problems. If they had been separated from the United States by a river instead of an ocean, do I think they would have waded across, regardless of the prevailing legalities? In a heartbeat. It might have been the St. Lawrence River and not the Rio Grande, but the “wetback” label wouldn’t have deterred any of them from seeking a better life.

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The pattern is general. Immigrants of many backgrounds encountered stout resistance from earlier waves of America Firsters, but they ultimately endured and prevailed. I, along with millions of others, am their legacy. I have my life because they uprooted theirs in one grand gesture of desperation and hope.

Of 'rights' and timing

So what’s the difference between my ancestors and the Guatemalans and uncounted others trying to cross America’s borders today? Timing, pure and simple. My people had no more natural “right” to be here than the latter-day transplants who walk in their footsteps. They found homes in this country because someone, however grudgingly, let them in. The America that Donald Trump so vehemently insists on putting first rests on a foundation built by generation after generation of newcomers, including his own ancestors. We are their heirs, and our good fortune in finding ourselves firmly rooted here and not knocking on the door in 2017 should be the occasion for humble gratitude, not chest-thumping chauvinism.

Travel is always broadening, and travel to the Third World can be a corrective kick in the head for those of us inclined to take our world for granted. In those first hours back inside the American bubble, before the novelty of home wears off, we realize that smooth roads, drinkable water, ridiculously well-stocked grocery shelves and homes big enough to turn around in are not a birthright, and that Americans, in fact, enjoy material comforts matched by few places on Earth.

Sharing what we have seems excessively generous only if you ignore what the rest of the world doesn’t have, and that obviously applies far beyond Latin America. Does that mean that we should open our borders to all comers? Of course not; the result would be chaos. But we would do well to show the world more compassion and less ugliness, particularly those of us with European roots. As the immigration debate continues, we should regulate with reason and restrict with restraint, but we also should remember that we, too, began as newcomers.

John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian, writes for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where this piece was first published.

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