American has documented the need for immigrants to support labor needs, now as much as ever!

Immigrants and refugees improve America!  

Here's how they do it in Michigan!

Echo opinion published by John Hiner in MichiganLive

Every story is ultimately a people story, no matter how complex the topic may be. And immigration and migrant labor in the United States is as dense, controversial and multifaceted as topics come.

But the topic comes alive when you meet the worker who mowed the lawn at a Mackinac Island hotel with tears in his eyes, two days after his mother had died in Jamaica.

Or the Syrian refugee who owns an assessing business in southeast Michigan, but still carries a toilet brush to school speaking engagements to illustrate what she had to do to get established in America.

Crossing the international bridge between Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, May 1937.  America has documented the need for immigrants to support labor needs. 

Or the Mexican young adults whose pursuit of the American dream means staying here to build a life years after their parents were deported.

“We need the real personal stories, because that’s what drives it home for everyone – to see yourself in someone else and to walk in their shoes,” said Lindsay Moore, an MLive reporter who joined colleague Malachi Barrett over the past two weeks in publishing a project that dives deep into the sprawling story of migrant labor.

“There’s a lot of research, there’s a lot of data, and there are a lot of experts willing to talk about this,” Moore said. “But a lot of it was finding people and just being there, being present.”

For Moore, that meant two trips this summer to Mackinac Island, whose businesses rely heavily on a lottery for a limited number of work visas for foreign workers to take service jobs that Americans aren’t willing to do.

For Barrett, that meant interviews with farmers, who have a critical need for migrant labor, as well as trips to southeast Michigan, which has a rich immigrant history and still relies on it to fill sectors ranging from retail to high-tech jobs.

On all those trips, our reporters sought out real people with real stories that illustrate what is at stake – for our country, and for the workers themselves.

“They’re willing to give whatever they’ve got, because they know how good the opportunity is,” Moore said.

The politics of immigration are fraught with contention, and that has touched every part of American culture and community for years: Political, social, economic, business and industry. Everything about it seems tangled in debate and bureaucracy.

But Barrett and Moore’s project cuts through that to show clearly that there is a shortage of labor in general, there are lots of jobs that Americans don’t want to take, and that domestic employers are desperate for changes to the system in order to open the flow of foreign workers.

“Immigrants are more likely to be business owners, they’re more likely to go to college,” Barrett said. “Michigan has long history of bringing in people from outside its borders to fill the gaps in the labor force. Everything from cherries to electric vehicles and everything in between is built on the backs of immigrant labor.”

And in case you think the topic is too complicated or doesn’t affect your day-to-day life, consider the restaurants that close early – or entirely – in your towns because they cannot find workers. Or note the price of produce going up at the grocery store. Or at a macro scale, that Michigan is losing political clout.

“Michigan lost a seat in Congress because our population gains haven’t kept up with the rest of the country,” Barrett said. “Without the stream of immigrants that we have had, Michigan would have actually declined in population.”

That explains why MLive would write these stories: It’s our job to bring context and meaning to important topics and societal shifts. But on this immigrant worker package, Barrett and Moore showed that how we tell the stories is just as important.

“I think we’ve shown through data and through personal stories that this is the future of what our labor force is going to look like,” Moore said. “You can ignore immigration policy because you think it doesn’t affect you, but you can’t escape this.

An immigration history - 80 years after World War II

Published in MichiganLive.com by Julie Mack

On WWII 80th anniversary, the story of one Jewish family caught in winds of war. "After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Jews were forced to sell their property at ridiculously low prices. Some Jews fled the country. Others were deported to concentration camps."

The photograph was in our living room for years: A family portrait of my husband’s grandmother and her family.

It was taken around 1907 in Austria. It shows a prosperous Jewish couple, Simon and Klara Sommer, surrounded by their 11 children, most of them adults. The second-youngest in the photo is Laura Sommer, my husband’s grandmother. She was about 20 at the time.

Laura Sommer went onto to marry Erich Beu, a German and a Christian. Their oldest son, my husband’s father, was born in Vienna. In the early 1920s, the family emigrated to Buffalo, N.Y.

Erich and Laura Beu lived the rest of their lives in Buffalo, where Erich joined a German-American club and Laura eventually joined the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo. The couple had another son. A professional musician, Erich was a founding member of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and its first concertmaster.

Laura’s Jewish heritage was rarely referenced, say my husband and his two sisters. Growing up, they heard a few vague references to relatives killed in the Holocaust, but no details.

But I wondered.

Recently, with the help of ancestry.com and a Holocaust victim database, I dug into the family mystery: What happened to Laura Sommer’s family during World War II?

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the war’s start. And as I discovered, the Sommers were among the millions caught up in the Jewish genocide.

By 1939, Simon and Klara had passed away and Laura was one of 10 surviving Sommer siblings, agees 63 to 45.

Two were in Buffalo: Laura and her brother Emil. But for those still in Austria, things got rough.

After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Jews were forced to sell their property at ridiculously low prices. Some Jews fled the country. Others were deported to concentration camps.

By the end of 1938, the Sommers’ hometown of Amstettan, about 80 miles west of Vienna, was declared to be “Judenrien” or free of Jews, according to historical accounts.

One of the Sommer siblings, Sofie, went to Finland with her two sons in 1938. A brother, Richard, fled to Palestine.

Then there was Hugo, his wife Trudy, and their daughter Edith. My husband remembers meeting Hugo as a child. What he didn’t know was the family’s frantic scramble to leave Austria.

Edith came first in July 1938, alone as a 9-year-old on a ship sailing from France to New York City, ending up in Buffalo. Hugo and Trudy followed in November 1939 on separate ships -- Hugo leaving from Belgium and Trudy from Italy, a sign of the chaos descending on Europe. The family regrouped in Buffalo, moving in with Emil and his wife.

The other five Sommer siblings weren’t so lucky.

Ludwig was killed by Nazis in Vienna in April 1939. Arthur and Sigmund died in camps in Poland.

Friederike, the oldest sister, had married a Hungarian and was living in Romania. The couple survived the war but had a son killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944. Maxmillian, the second oldest brother, also survived; his name shows up in records as a war refugee resettled in Linz, Austria.

As her siblings were caught up in the horror of World War II, Erich and Laura were living in Buffalo within walking distance of Emil and Hugo. Karl, my husband’s father, was 18 at the start of the war in 1939.

Surely, the Beu family heard first-hand from Hugo and Trudy about the atrocities being committed by the Nazis, and the threat facing those still in Austria. Surely, the drip-drip-drip of bad news from family members during the war years must have packed an emotional wallop.

We don’t how Laura and Erich and their sons processed what was happening. Were they horrified by Hitler? Or was it more complicated than that? Did Erich feel loyalty towards his German homeland? Did Laura distance herself from her Jewish roots amid the era’s anti-Semitism?

Can we read anything into the fact that Erich continued to belong to a German-American club? That my husband and his sisters never knew they had a Great Uncle Emil in Buffalo? Emil and Laura obviously were very close at one point. Emil and his wife brought the Beus to America. Emil named his daughter Laura; Laura give her son the middle name of Emil. Yet until I asked, my husband and his sisters had never heard of Emil Sommer. They also hadn’t heard of their Great Aunt Sofie, even though she moved to the United States after the war and spent her last years in Buffalo.

The fact is, my husband says, his grandmother and father never talked about the past. There was no talk about World War II. There was no explanation of how Laura lost three brothers and a nephew to the Nazis. Maybe that’s to be expected. The Beus were a reserved family, not given to introspection. And many, many people impacted by the war found it too painful to discuss.

But my husband now wonders: Did the family’s connection to the Holocaust affect his father? A brilliant physicist, Karl Beu suffered throughout his adult life from major depression. He died of suicide in 1968. Karl’s brother also was hospitalized with depression.

Laura Sommer lived until 1988, past her 100th birthday. Her grandchildren recall her as a stern woman with a heavy German accent. “She wasn’t very pleasant,” recalls my husband. How did the war and the Holocaust change her?

Eighty wars ago on September 1, Hitler started a war that changed the course of history. It’s only now family members are exploring their personal connection to the Holocaust, and mulling how it might have shaped their lives, too.

CNN- German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has asked for Poland's forgiveness 80 years after the start of World War II.
"I stand before you, those who have survived, before the descendants of the victims, the old and the young residents of Wielun, I am humbled and grateful," Steinmeier said during a ceremony in the Polish city of Wielun, the site of one of the first Nazi bombings in the country on September 1, 1939.

Flint Michigan water crises still unresolved

Water has the power to unlock education, create economic potential, and improve health. Access to safe water empowers women in Peru with time to work, kids in Ethiopia with time for school and families in India and around the world with bright days.

Friday March 22, was International Water Day.

Water is a simple creation consisting of two parts hydrogen molecules and one part oxygen = H2O.  Miraculously, those two elements create the essential life sustaining compound. 

Yet, humans pollute water, even though, without it, we would all die.  Water has the power to change lives by providing all living beings with access to hydration. Humans have the power to clean up the water we pollute. Unfortunately, in Flint Michigan, the water pollution caused by a municipal decision to save money, is still unresolved.

Pope Francis is a former chemistry teacher.  This is what he posted on Twitter @Pontifex  "Let us thank God for 'sister water', such a simple and precious element, and let us strive to make it accessible to all. #WorldWaterDay
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha published this opinion in the Flint newspaper MichiganLive

Mona Hanna-Attisha is a pediatrician, scientist and professor in Flint, Michigan. She is the founder and director of the Pediatric Public Health Initiative. She is the author of “What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance and Hope in an American City."

From Oscoda to Benton Harbor, residents of Michigan deserve clean water when they turn on their taps. They also deserve to know the leaders they elect will make sure their drinking water is clean and safe. A generation ago, Michigan’s leadership in environmental protection was a bipartisan tradition -- and exemplified by Republican Governor Bill Milliken’s stewardship. But the ideology of extreme austerity prevailed. Government became too small and pitifully inadequate, starved of resources and talent, factors that led directly to the Flint water crisis. In 2019, Michigan is now returning to its rightful place as a leader in environmental protection. And that doesn’t mean big government or small government. It means smart government --- moored in science and intent on public health.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer has proven that she has learned some valuable lessons from Flint. Her first executive directive was to require state civil servants to immediately report imminent threats to public health and safety, like contaminated drinking water, to their department directors.

It has been almost five years since the Flint water crisis began. In a gross corrosion of democracy, the State of Michigan switched the source of the city’s water from pretreated Great Lakes water to untreated water from the Flint River. This led to the most emblematic environmental disaster of our times, one that continues. And one that could easily happen again -- in Flint or elsewhere in Michigan, be it lead levels in the water or PFAS contamination.

On Feb. 4, Governor Whitmer signed another executive order that will address some key factors that led to the Flint Water Crisis -- and prevent another such tragedy from occurring. The order will reorganize the Department of Environmental Quality and dissolve industry-led environmental rule review panels.

The executive order Whitmer signed also calls for the creation of the Office of the Clean Water Public Advocate and the Office of the Environmental Justice Public Advocate. These offices fill a gap in state oversight. While Flint was under emergency management, residents were disenfranchised and democracy usurped. When the citizens of the majority African-American city rose up against the filthy drinking water, their concerns were ignored by an apathetic state government. Each investigation into the crisis, including former Governor Rick Snyder’s own task force and the one done by the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, pointed to race as a leading factor in the perfect storm of neglect that caused failure on all fronts -- to act, to protect, to fix, to be responsible and accountable -- even after officials clearly saw the scope of the problem.

The new offices proposed by Whitmer will help build a more responsive state government. They should ensure Michiganders have a place to go when there are problems with their drinking water. Safe drinking water is not optional. It is a human right -- a public health and medical necessity that we cannot survive without. Lead exposure has no safe level and can potentially impact the entire life trajectory of an exposed child. That is the tragedy of the Flint Water Crisis, and the reason why so many of us are working day in and day out to mitigate the impact of the population-wide exposure.

So I’m grateful to Gov. Whitmer for beginning to address these issues in her first steps in office. Yes there is much more work to do. The public health culture of these agencies will take many years to revive. But these are necessary first steps that will address problems that have been neglected for too long. The newly fashioned Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy must be responsive to Michigan’s water problems. Dumping the bureaucratic industry review panels that second guess decisions made by regulators and scientists is an important move that gets us a lot closer to a smart government all Michiganders strive for.

Public trust in leadership is pitifully low. Right now, residents of Flint and citizens across the state have given up on the idea that state government will fix their drinking water. We can’t expect that to change with a few executive orders. And why should we? Some members of the state legislature -- either unable to absorb the lessons of Flint, or overeager to please their industry friends and donors -- have already launched a push to roll-back Whitmer’s new executive orders. 

Sadly, the State House voted to override the executive order two days after it was announced. The profiteering polluters of Michigan are especially excited about making sure their industry review panels are kept in place, public health be damned. (Irresponsible!)

The Synder administration often recycled the line that government should be “run like a business.” This failed ideology must be trashed. The only recycling left is the millions of plastic water bottles the residents of Flint, and now in cities all over our state, have been forced to drink from.

We must be smarter. This is the moment for an impassioned call for common-sense bipartisanship. Who doesn’t want their kids to drink clean water? Who doesn’t believe that it is government’s job to protect public safety? It is incumbent on citizens - from all political sides to voice support for the critical steps Whitmer has taken to protect Michigan’s environment, and in turn, to protect our most precious Michigan resource, our children.