" I Pity the Poor Immigrant"

I am an immigrant. I may not have crossed national borders to get to Nashville, but the cultural, social, and personal borders I crossed to get to this city 30 years ago were just as profound. The Kurds came here to escape Saddam Hussein. The Hispanics came to work in in what may be one of the last boom towns in this country.

"Why did you come here?"' I asked a young Spaniard, whose family left Spain for Mississippi, and who , in his turn, left Mississippi for Tennessee. This young man had just passed his nursing state boards.

"The opportunity," he said, "The opportunity".

I came for opportunity as well. I came to escape the New England smog- that snobbery that pegs people by prep school and college and by what boat dumped their ancestors onto some rocky Massachusetts beach. I came as much for experience as I did for money. For the experience in an alien place where one knows no one, and where courage can build up a new life, brick by brick.

I walk into the Bellevue Kroger on Saturday night, and I hear six different languages. I work with Jamaicans, with Filipinos, with Haitians, with Kurds, with Nigerians, and Somalis. With refugees from Detroit and the Rust Belt. With young people fleeing their oppressive little Tennessee towns and their narrow parents and the Church of Christ. I have quoted it before. I will do it again.

"City air makes you free".

Bob Dylan sings that the immigrant he pities "wishes he had stayed at home."
Not I. Of course there is nostalgia and loss. The family we may never see again. I miss hearing the veery sing from the New England woods. I miss the Connecticut River, and every road I ever wandered searching for black raspberries in Vermont. Who does not miss their youth? But we grow up. And instead of wondering about the great world we go to live in it.

Some have called this city the New Ellis Island. An Immigrant Portal. A destination City. This is true. This is why I live here.