Immigration

I didn’t want to hire a maid when we lived in Morocco even though everyone else did. I thought my actions would show my Moroccan friends and neighbors how Americans can sometimes be hardworking and resourceful and that, as a Christian, it was wrong to demean Moroccans by exploiting their cheap labor (the going rate for a maid in 2007 was $10 – $12/day). I thought my friends and neighbors would be so impressed at how selfless, kind and generous I was.

I was so wrong.

Morocco offered no welfare programs, food assistance, or low-cost housing back then (it’s changed a bit in recent years). Without government assistance, per se, the country operated under the unspoken, nation-wide understanding that the “haves” must help the “have-nots.” One of the five pillars of Islam is to give alms to the poor, so culturally, this practice of assisting the poor came quite naturally for Moroccans (over 99% Muslim). One of the primary ways the “haves” helped the poor was to employ as many house staff as possible. It was very common for average families (equivalent to middle-class here in America) to have at a minimum, a maid, a chauffeur, a gardener, and a house guardian. After a dear friend explained these cultural dynamics to me, she said, “I know what you’re trying to do by not hiring a maid, Cindy. You don’t want to take advantage of the cheap labor. I’m sure you’re trying to display how selfless you are. But in reality, your friends and neighbors here will view you as selfish for not offering employment to as many of your impoverished neighbors as possible. Moroccans already view Americans as too wealthy and self-serving. You’d just be cementing those views and showing them that Christians are no different.”

I was mortified. My actions conveyed the exact opposite of my intentions. Embarrassed, we hired a maid the next day.

Our first maid lasted only a few months. Amal was a gregarious twenty-something with master-chef cooking abilities and an indefatigable work ethic. She’d sing while she cooked, danced while she cleaned, and giggled contagiously while helping our kids learn Arabic. She adored our family, and we adored her. But then we suspected she was stealing from us. Eventually, she took a wad of cash we had stashed in the back of our dresser drawer—money we didn’t need, but had hidden there “just in case…”  

Because Amal and I had only ever communicated in spotty French—a second language to both of us—I enlisted my tri-lingual Canadian neighbor to serve as Arabic translator (Amal’s first language) for our little conversation about the sin of stealing. Amal immediately melted into tears but refused to admit guilt. In a shame/honor culture (unlike our right/wrong western culture), it is more important to save face than to be honest. I told her she could keep her job if she’d just admit she had done it. She refused to confess but continued crying uncontrollably. I felt so sorry for her because I could see she was in misery. She loved our family and didn’t want to lose her job. (Americans often paid their maids more than Moroccans did).

However, before leaving, Amal gathered herself and she and my neighbor/translator had a long conversation at the door in Arabic. I understood none of it. My neighbor later explained that Amal was still not admitting guilt, but had posited that IF she had, in fact, taken the money, it would have been because, in a sense, the money belonged with her and her community, anyway, due to the fact they had great need, and we had great abundance. She said we were “too blind” to see the poverty around us and should have been convicted of our excess. She said it was sinful for us to keep so much wealth for ourselves, but she recognized we were good people who just didn’t know the right thing to do. She said people like us (every American is considered wealthy in Morocco) should be doing more for those in need and we should have at the very least, hired more house staff. She said families in her neighborhood were struggling to feed their children while we kept money tucked away for no reason.

Amal ended by saying, “If the wealthy won’t do what Allah has asked of them, the poor need to show them how to do it.”

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Our home and lifestyle in the little fishing/surfing village where we lived, Dar Bouazza, felt very middle-class to me. However, in a country without a middle-class, per se, we were lumped-in with the tiny sliver of society considered “wealthy” by most Moroccan standards. Dar Bouazza was surrounded by shanty towns in every direction. These neighborhoods were often a huddled mass of shoddily built cinderblock homes with corrugated metal roofs. Most “homes” lacked proper kitchens, running water, or bedrooms. Many shared a community toilet, and the families slept on froshes, the same cushions that served as their couches during the day. Sickness ran rampant. Unemployment commonplace.

This means that every day, when Amal entered our four-bedroom, three-bathroom home with running water, a stove, a refrigerator full of food (so much so, that sometimes things go bad and are tossed), two cars, computers, books and toys, and an overflowing coat and shoe rack, she struggled with the injustice of it all. She’d wash our clothes (more than truly “necessary” for a family of six) in our very own washing machine and as she hung them out on the line (we weren’t that well off… we didn’t own a dryer!) each morning, she’d watch us drive off with our kids— carrying their big lunches and big backpacks—taking them to their private school up the street to the left and think to herself, “They’re nice people, but how can they justify living like this while just up the street to the right lives my family who can’t even afford to have dinner tonight. Why won’t they help the poor more?”

(L) – Our house – the narrow white town house in the middle, adjacent to an empty lot full of garbage, mice and cockroaches who paid us regular visits. (R) Photo from Amal’s neighborhood – a five minute walk from our house.

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I’ve never forgotten Amal’s challenging words from the day I fired her. As the years have gone on and I’ve let them simmer and settle into my Christian worldview, I think she may have been right. I now often wonder if our sin of withholding our wealth (socking away money we weren’t “using,” purely for security’s sake) while surrounded by abject poverty there in Morocco was, perhaps, the bigger sin than her stealing from us.

The thing is, Amal’s actions broke a UNIVERSAL law no one questions regardless of what religion you ascribe to (thou shalt not steal). But the hoarding of money is perfectly “legal” worldwide. If we had reported her, she would have gone to jail, not us. It’s the thing that we, the “haves,” love to get all worked up about, isn’t it?  We love to point our fingers at the thieves (the desperate “have nots”) and essentially say, “Her! Go get her! She stole from me what is rightfully mine!”

Yet, no one ever questions if perhaps we were thieves, too.

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Despite what lies our current leaders are peddling, most migrants are NOT criminals (see references below) and are either asylum seekers, or people seeking work for a brighter future for their families (desiring employment enabling them to send remittances back to their home country). This is a difficult reality for us Americans to understand because we’ve never experienced that degree of desperation. But the rights of asylum seekers are protected by international law. The human right to seek refuge when fleeing danger and persecution is recognized world-wide.

Study upon study on immigration proves immigrants (both the documented and the undocumented) are far less likely to commit crimes than nationals. In fact, in cities where violent crime has been on the decline, a larger number of immigrants directly correlates to a lower crime rate! The last thing an undocumented person would want to do is draw attention to themselves. And yet, as they’ve risked everything to come to America in seeking safety and/or a chance at a better life, we, the richest nation in the world, are essentially telling them “No! Get out!” largely because “It’s the LAW, damnit!”

It’s almost as if we, America, have these “wads of cash stashed in the backs of our dresser drawers” (i.e. surplus of employment, land, space, opportunity, resources) but we get all upset when immigrants come and take any of it. Yes, of course, many have come without proper documentation (which is NOT a crime, by the way, only a civil offense)—which means they have, indeed, broken a law. So they are the ones who get in trouble and are detained and deported and we get to point our bony little condescending fingers at them and yell, “Them! Go get them! They are taking what is rightlfully mine!”

But if it’s true, that our American “dresser drawer” has “cash” stashed in the back for “just in case…”, perhaps we need to ask ourselves this:

Could it be that we are thieves, too?

Which begs the question, who’s the bigger sinner?

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Glossary of terms (These are words I realized I was using incorrectly until my kids educated me):

• Migrant: person moving from one country to another
• Refugee: a person who has been forced to leave their country to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster and have COMPLETED a thorough screening process (which can often take years to process while they wait in refugee camps), and have been CLEARED to resettle in the US. They are 100% legal.
• Asylum seekers: people looking to apply for asylum because of documentable dangerous conditions in their home country. Asylum seekers sometimes reside within the US borders while waiting for their case to be heard by an asylum officer of the U.S. government, and they sometimes wait outside the US border. If granted asylum, they are 100% legal residents.
• Illegals – a derogatory term that dehumanizes immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The moment someone submits an asylum claim, they enter into the “system” and are “documented” with legal rights. Coming to America without proper documentation is NOT A CRIME, but an administrative infraction punishable by deportation, not incarceration.
• Undocumented Immigrant: someone who has traveled to another country without proper documentation

References:

• https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/03/immigrants-are-significantly-less-likely-to-commit-crimes-than-the-us-born/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CA%20surprising%20finding%20was%20the,educated%20men%20in%20recent%20decades.%E2%80%9D
• https://theconversation.com/proof-that-immigrants-fuel-the-us-economy-is-found-in-the-billions-they-send-back-home-227542#:~:text=Several%20studies%20indicate%20that%20remittances,wages%20of%20over%20$466%20billion.
• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/18/briefing/the-myth-of-migrant-crime.html
• https://www.migrationpolicy.org/content/immigrants-and-crime