Welcoming Immigrants

For John, BLUF:  The photo cut:  Lowell City Councilor Paul Ratha Yem chose items for his family’s Sunday dinner in the New Pailin Market, home to a thriving Cambodian community. The state recently announced that it is moving about 70 migrant and homeless families into the Lowell Inn and Conference Center..  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Lowell is getting dozens of migrant families. Their struggles resonate with Cambodian community.

From Boston Globe, by Correspondent Daniel Kool, 26 April 2024, 5:50 a.m..

Here is the lede plus four:

Vanna Howard watched as Khmer Rouge militants captured her father in the late 1970s during the group’s reign of terror in Cambodia.  She watched as three of her younger siblings and her grandparents were lost to sickness and starvation in a genocide that killed more than 1.7 million people.

Now Howard, a state representative, and other Cambodians in Lowell are watching with empathetic eyes as dozens of new migrant families trickle into Lowell — the latest stop on a harrowing journey that took some through multiple countries in search of opportunity.  She said she sees reflections of her experience in the newest wave of migrants arriving in Massachusetts.

When Howard fled Cambodia, making her way to a refugee camp in Thailand, she walked for “weeks and weeks, similar to the folks who have been coming to our border” in the United States.

“We need to treat this matter with empathy, with compassion,” Howard said, her voice cracking with emotion. “Nobody wants to leave their home country.  The decision to leave their home country — it has to be so bad that you are willing to risk your life to flee."

The state announced last week that it would move nearly 70 migrant and homeless families from Bedford to the UMass Lowell Inn and Conference Center.  Many of those being relocated are Haitian migrants who fled a country consumed by gang violence.

The lead photo shows Lowell City Councillor Paul Ratha Yem, who was on City Life Show this last Friday.  Lowell is a City of immigrants.  I came here 30 years ago. I say to Councilor Yem that while he was born in Cambodia, like me he came here from the Southland (Southern California), where he lived in San Bernidino, and did work in Long Beach, where I did High School.

I am opposed to President Biden's Open borders policy.  For one thing, I don't understand his underlying objective.  He has not been able to articulate the value.  Further, he cannot explain what historians and social scientists know about the ability of this nation to absorb new immigrants and make them successful and proud Americans.

That said, those who are here are here and we, as Lowellians and as Citizens of our Commonwealth need to make these people feel welcome and we need to provide them shelter and food and work.  Even if they eventually return to the nation from which they came, while they are here, they are fellow human beings and we need to help them to do and live their best.  Lowell is a good place for that to happen, and for immigrants to learn, from us, the importancve of human rights and respect for those rights.

Regards  —  Cliff