Georgia Floods

I hate floods. No disaster is good, so let's just say that I particularly hate floods. Sometimes floods are insidious. The water rushes into a home and then recedes. The family comes back, dries everything out, throws out whatever they can afford to replace, re-paints the walls if they can, and tries to forget the trauma. This is particularly tempting if you are poor, if you are uninsured, and most particularly if you are undocumented. If you are an undocumented immigrant then there is a good chance that you will have to live with whatever your landlord decides. He (or she) knows that you won't complain. The government that protects most of us from people who act inhumanely does not protect you. You are a stranger in a strange land.

So, too often, if you are an undocumented immigrant, you get things as dry as you can and hope for the best. It doesn't work, though. In about a week or so a black stain starts to show through the paint, or in the crack between the wall and the floor. You clean up whatever you see but it does no good. Your children are sick and you don't feel so good. Black mold is hidden behind the drywall, in the insulation, under the floor, in the ceiling. You watch your family get sicker and sicker.

One of the first things I try to do in a flood is to go to the shelters and find out who our clients are. I talk to the people and learn about their experiences. One of the things that struck me immediately about the Georgia floods was that the Hispanic population was not in the shelters. We knew that they had been badly affected by the floods, perhaps worse than any other group, but they were nowhere to be found. What I found over the next several days, after dozens of phonecalls, after talking to many flood victims, was a population as afraid as any that I have ever met. They weren't afraid of me or the Red Cross. They were afraid of the governments of the United States and the State of Georgia who they believed to be hunting them. They had no belief that the Red Cross would be able to protect them in our shelters. This fear was so great that it overshadowed the horrific experience of living in inhospitable conditions as their families gradually sickened.

One morning, as I talked to a Georgia politician, I expressed my frustration. I told him that I had been at least somewhat successful at helping the undocumented population in Florida, California and Texas in other disasters. I asked him why I had failed completely in Georgia.

He looked at me for a long moment. "That's the thing you need to understand. Those states want to work with their immigrants. Georgia doesn't want to be like Florida, California and Texas. Georgia doesn't want to work with the immigrants, they want them to go away."

That made no sense. The population is huge. "They aren't going away!"

"I know", he said softly.

Thomas Jefferson once said, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever." Immigration is a complex issue and I don't pretend to be an expert. But, in a disaster, it is easy to see the institutionalized inhumanity that we have wrought. Agencies of own government are too often on the wrong side of justice and morality. I have seen it in the mountain camps in southern California, in the deep woods in Florida, in the Colonias settlements in south Texas, and now along the flood plains in northern Georgia. It varies by degrees but it is always there. We are on the wrong side of morality not because our leaders are immoral but because, sometimes, their morality is a commodity to be sold for votes, dollars, or barrels of oil. This needs to stop. Justice will not sleep forever.

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