Previous Letters

Dear Tico Times:

I got an email from a friend and co-worker in the United States on Jan. 20. To say that he was distraught would be an understatement.

Diego is a 27-year-old from Guatemala who works in the restaurant where I have tended bar, waited tables and performed manager-on-duty tasks for the past eight years. He started as a dishwasher and is now the head chef’s right-hand man. His work ethic puts many U.S.-born kitchen workers to shame.

 Diego holds a valid green card and was, until recently, looking forward to becoming a U.S. citizen down the road. But that all changed a few weeks ago, when his wife, a young Mexican woman, gave birth to a baby boy at the local hospital. A hospital worker somehow discovered that Diego’s wife’s visa had expired. That person called immigration authorities.

 In Massachusetts, I am ashamed to say, we now have an 800 number people can call if they suspect someone is in the country without proper documentation. 

 Diego’s wife was detained by immigration. She currently is being held in a detention center somewhere, but Diego doesn’t know where and can get no answers to his questions.

 So, Diego and his newborn U.S.-citizen son are now without a wife and mother, and according to an attorney, given the ugly anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiments raging in the U.S. this presidential campaign season, it is highly likely Diego’s wife will be deported back to Mexico.

 I know that in an ideal world, everyone should have immigration paperwork in order. But we do not live in an ideal world, and the way so many people in the U.S. have angrily and hatefully framed the immigration issue is, in my eyes, something of which all decent U.S. citizens should be ashamed.

 I find it all so ironic, because so many U.S. expats here think nothing of residing and working in Costa Rica without immigration documents being in order. I cannot imagine the Costa Rican government treating them the way the U.S. government is treating my friend Diego and his family.

I shared this story with a Tico friend here and he just shook his head in disgust.

“It is little wonder,” he said, “that growing numbers of Costa Ricans are beginning to, if not outright resent, then question, the growing presence of Americans here who are working illegally, especially in the tourism industry on both coasts, when those jobs should be going to Ticos, while Latinos are being treated so shabbily in your country.”

That comment got me thinking about another conversation I had one night last year with Tico friends in Curridabat over a few beers.

 I mentioned I had not been over to the Pacific coast in several years. One friend asked in Spanish, “Mike, why do you want to go there? The Pacific coast isn’t Costa Rica anymore. It’s the new California.”

At first I thought he was joking, but then I realized there was an edge to his voice and that he was, in fact, troubled by what he later described as the “colonization” of his country.

 Given what is happening to my friend Diego and his family in the U.S., I can’t help but wonder if Latin American countries with significant populations of U.S. expats might not, at some point in the future, begin treating us as shabbily and with the kind of contempt and suspicion that Latinos in the U.S. are experiencing today.

I really couldn’t blame them if they do; after all, what is good for the goose, as the old saying goes, is good for the gander.