I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.Alan Seeger (1888–1916)
Alan Seeger was born in New York and educated at Harvard. He was an American poet who joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914 and was killed on July 4, 1916, in northern France.
He was 28. This prescient poem (of which only an excerpt is given here) is his most famous. Published posthumously, it was a favorite of President John F. Kennedy.
Seeger was writing about death in the trenches and at the barricades of World War I, but to me this poem makes a contemporary connection to the disputed barricades along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Two years ago, 53 men and women — averaging 24 years old — died as the shade of spring gave way to the blue skies and brutal sun of a South Texas summer. They died from heat and asphyxiation, locked in a tractor-trailer left there by a smuggler, also known as a coyote, who fled and was found hiding nearby. It was too late to save the immigrants. They had been in the trailer for hours without air conditioning or water.
This was the deadliest smuggling incident in U.S. history.
The immigrants had each paid up to $13,000 to reach the United States, trusting the smugglers that they would soon join family members in the U.S., trusting that the American dream would work for them as it had for so many others. They wanted their families in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras to find economic freedom and freedom from oppression.
Two years ago, at the first memorial service for the immigrants, San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller gave us this metaphor: “Immigration is a natural phenomenon that arises from the supply and demand for labor and security. It is like a stream of water. If it is not given a channel, it finds it naturally but not in the right way.”
The metaphor is apt. It can be extended. The stream leads to the ocean — an ocean of opportunity in the form of jobs that immigrants can take once they arrive. These jobs are offered readily by businesses and households; immigrants are welcomed in this economy.
From 2020 to 2022, immigrants held jobs that helped our economic recovery from the pandemic. Today, they pay into Social Security, although most are unlikely to ever benefit from it. They revitalize previously declining small-town economies and societies all across the Midwest and South.
Tragedies like the one in 2022 will recur because of the obscene mismatch between job opportunities for immigrants and the fatal barriers erected to stop them. Open borders, however, are not the answer. The answer is sensible work quotas and paths to residency for de facto residents living and working here who still lack the right documents.
Meanwhile, on a lonesome rural road in far south San Antonio, twilight finds 53 flags gently flapping in the wind behind 53 crosses with the names of 53 immigrants whose families are back in rural Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. You can visit the sad and hallowed site at 9600 Quintana Road.
There you will find, behind all the crosses, a crucifixion, an American flag and a small sign. It reads: “American Dream 53 … Descansen en Paz.”
Richard Jones is a professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science and Geography at The University of Texas at San Antonio.
A version of this op-ed appeared in the San Antonio Express-News.
