Back to the Wild West

A wind chill of 4 below zero tries to slip through the space between her hat and her face. Her cheeks, uncovered, have turned red and her eyes water, trying to protect themselves from the sustained onslaught of that glacial wind. She walks slowly, even though she would like to run, but the windstorm blows in the opposite direction and slows her down with every step. Marina came to Nebraska when she was a baby, ignorant of the fact that the one-month journey would turn into a stay nearly two decades long.

Her parents brought her with a tourist visa and stayed in Omaha trying to build a better life, away from the violence and poverty that covered the north of Mexico like a cloak of death.

Today, Marina is 19 years old and has landed a job in a restaurant’s kitchen. She washes dishes nonstop, cleans the floor and the long tables where the cooks prepare the food in an endless cycle from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. She saved some money to buy a car so she could drive to work, almost three miles away from home. But she still has not bought it because Nebraska is not allowed to give driver’s licenses to young undocumented immigrants who arrived here when they were kids.

These young people call themselves “Dreamers.” Their name comes from the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors). The legislative proposal gives relief to these young people so they can have access to education, and allows them to remain in the U.S. provisionally. But Nebraska still forbids them to drive, despite the fact that its cities are planned over great expanses of land with an extremely poor bus system that ends service around 6 p.m. despite the inhuman temperatures that reach the region from November through March.

Not allowing these young people to drive means forcing them to walk long distances in the midst of winters ranging from 19 degrees to 4 below zero Fahrenheit. Sen. Bill Kintner, Republican through and through, defends his veto, for he thinks that, “The progressives have attempted to take our state and make it like California, make it like New York, make it like all the progressive, leftist states: soft on illegal immigration, driver’s license for illegals,” he said to Fox News.

His stance reveals a longing for those days of the Wild West, where outsiders used to pay with their lives, the ignominy of visiting these lands. Their longing for that past of saloons, cowboys and sheriffs encourages them to force hundreds of young people to walk for miles in full winter. To their misfortune, the majority of Congress lives in the 21st century.

Analyst Matthew Pearson says that calling Bill Kintner “a ‘racist’ would be to limit the spectrum of his unacceptable beliefs and behaviors. His ideology is a rainbow where all the possible hues of human vileness appear.”*

Kintner and other Republicans from Nebraska believe these kids are criminals; hence their decision to veto their driving privileges, as the case once was when only the land foremen could ride a horse. They might even long for the banning of interracial marriages, the banning of Spanish teaching and access to education for the black grandchildren of slaves. The Wild West still lives in the minds of men like Kintner, and it feeds on dormant movements like the tea party. Only time, compassion and sanity will tell if Marina will be able to drive to work in a modest car those nearly three miles this winter, or if she will be forced, once more, to travel that icy path in a city that refuses to embrace the sinful progressivism of California or New York.

*Editor’s note: This quote, although accurately translated, could not be independently verified.