Immigrant Women

My mother, born in 1892, emigrated to the US in 1914. She worked as a seamstress in a small rural community a few miles away from her Swedish childhood home where there was no employment. She had a brother and a sister in Minnesota so she trudged on to the Land o' Lakes after a rather unpleasant and dangerous voyage thanks to Nazi subs plying our waters.

She learned English and became a Registered Nurse and after a long courtship with my father, they married in 1925 and by 1931 she was a victim of cancer. I barely knew her and few memories are cherished today as I was only three years old when she passed away.

When I read today's newspaper, I identified with a couple columns. One of them, wrote The new face of immigrants: women about his 91 year old mother in a hospital cared for by nurses from Kenya and South Africa. The social workers who processed her discharge were Grace from Cameroon and Patricia from Trinidad.

Her church peaked thanks to immigrants but as it waned, it was kept alive for years by bequests from single immigrant women who earned a pittance but were penny-wise and caring.

Immigrant women, many single, tend to be overlooked for their contributions. True, many did do menial tasks others had declined while many rose above the poverty level and made significant contributions to our culture in various ways. How well I remember visiting Singapore when we ran into a huge crowd of women taking shelter midday beneath an overpass in their urban setting. I was told these were women from the Philippines socializing on their half-day off.

The same columnists mentioned above also wrote about the fact that in the next 25 years, the over-65 population will exceed 70 million meaning immigrant caregivers will be needed more than ever. Some will be recruited and hopefully not exploited while others will flee discomforts persisting in their homeland. We are indeed a nation of immigrants.

Back to Selma Hill, my immigrant mother. She arrived on a shoestring and could have sponged off her brother and sister for years. She could have tried to slip into the country unnoticed but didn't. She could have indulged in unskilled work the rest of her life but no, she learned our language, became a nurse, was naturalized, married a non-immigrant and gave birth to two children.

I'm proud of this immigrant I hardly knew and would be highly honored if she would have been equally proud of her descendants including a grandson who married his sweetheart from the Philippines, and a great grand niece from China.

Genuine immigrants. How priceless.