Open Land and Skies = Opportunity?

After arriving in Tucson late on January 14th and making our way to our hosts' house, we awoke to the glorious open sky of Arizona. Lisa and Mark live in the Catalina Mountain foothills and have lovely views of the mountains. And the sky, what a sky. Wide and open. Such openness. Coming from the green mountains of North Carolina, the wide open sky above flat  or craggy mountainedterrain seemed so freeing somehow. Lighter, or more buoyant than the heavier, more closed in greenness of the Blue Ridge.  Like many things are possible here. Why not? You can see for miles. What looks close is really far away. European settlers of the US must have had similar reactions as they made their migration across the great expanses of plains and Southwest. They were, like the migrants today, looking toward the expanse as opportunity, as a destination for a future better life. Like today’s migrants coming to the US's southern border, they or their ancestors were also leaving their homelands because of religious persecution, economic despair or oppression, and maybe violence. Their story we revere/champion; it is the American narrative, one to be proud of, one that shapes how we think about heroism. Those European settler migrants formed the fabric of our cultural beliefs: Go forth and make something of yourself, settle the new land, conquer all odds, risk your life and the lives of your family. How is their story so different from that of today’s migrants?  The migrants who travel thousands of miles with their families today, escaping violence or torture or death—much worse push factors than many who migrated to and across the land that made up the United States. They are only seeking a better life in a land they think will be better. Of course that may not be the case, and it wasn’t the case for the many migrants who crossed the Atlantic and then the Pacific to come to this land. 

At a closer look of course this wide-open opportunity reveals its dangers. The scrubby barrenness and craggy hills makes crossing on foot very difficult and dangerous. Today it was in the mid 60s, but in the summer it gets very hot. And it is dry. Very little water here. And yet, our government, instead of helping the desperate people make passage across this terrain, spends millions, billions of dollars to track them down and capture them. The migrants are risking their lives for some ideal—the “American Dream,”—exactly what we claim we all strive for and what our ancestors strived for.