I lived in the neighborhood my husband grew up in. It had gone from a family blue collar neighborhood to primarily latino. A lot of the adults did work hard. But their kids were left home and gangs moved into our neighborhood, actually ironically a subset of MS 13. One of my neighbor's daughter told me how they were trying to get her to "claim" a gang a school. She was in 3rd grade (and I gave her a ride to AWANAS on Wednesdays and helped her study her verses). My BIL's truck had two bullet holes in the side from a drive by during one night (he lived next door to us). I moved my bed away from the window after that and the kids weren't allowed to sleep in our room (theirs was on the back of the house). The sweet old lady across the street had her driveway tagged...we never were sure if it was a tag of protection or if it marked her house as target because her grandson lived there periodically (he was a gang member). My kids could never ride their bikes around the block because we were worried what could happen to them when they were out of our sight and they could only ride their bikes when one us was outside in the front yard. All my grocery flyers went from coming in English, to biligual, and eventually they were primarily in Spanish. I served as the team mom for my son's Little League team and had to talk to young children on the phone who translated messages about practices and team information to the adults. And I had no one to talk to on the bleachers when watching the game. I do know several of the mothers were saying unflattering things about me "behind my back" because I did understand enough spanish to get the gist of what they were saying. Yes, my son's coach was Latino and a great man. One of our neighbors was very nice but even he was upset that his wife (an illegal from Hondoras) hadn't bother to learn English even though she had lived there 7 years ... and he was fluent along with her young daughter being fluent. And our neighborhood was full of houses illegally remodeled to house 10-15 adult men instead of families...or illegal additions to house second or third families living in a single family dwelling. I didn't look back when we finally did move out of that neighborhood even though it was initially a good place to live. Life was not better for the Latino families once the gangs moved in. They weren't living the "American dream". They were caught in a cycle where they could never become legal and they could never afford to move their kids out of the gang ridden neighborhoods here that they left their own counties to escape.
On the flip side, my immigrant friends who came in legally were able to move into "good neighborhoods", get good jobs, and provide futures for their kids. Some come from less that ideal backgrounds but live good lives here as LEGAL citizens and take great pride in the day they got US citizenship. One family even celebrates their Citizenship day annually because they value being here.
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