They assembled at a bright corner of South Colorado Boulevard and Iliff Avenue. And at South Colorado and Warren. And South Colorado and Evans. Lured by the reflection of red light across windshields. Squirt-squirt, scrub-rub-rub, flip; sweep — sweep. Now you see the journey ahead between pale gray streaks racing towards the finish line of your inert wipers. Deploy them to finish the job. You’ve missed your cue to mouth “No, gracias” before the hopeful approach to the driver’s-side window. It’s too late. You haven’t held spare change since the summer of 2007. Roadside insistence. Release the brakes smoothly. Exit stage right.
Jack Butler wrote last spring about his run-in with the gruff squeegee men of Washington, D.C. — the eternal office — where every paved square foot is somebody’s place of business. Like any other line of work there, the public-nuisance industry can be cutthroat, especially during those subtropical morning hours when the average vehicular speed is about 20 nanometers per fiscal year. But this here, by the Rockies, is the low highlands, and every other afternoon is mid October. The stop-and-swab service is out of place; its providers are balmy, green.
Nearly 40,000 migrants arrived in Denver over the past year — proportionally more than in any other American city, per Miriam Jordan of the New York Times. (I added a unit to that total last March if the accounting is precise.) “Where life can be lived, so can a good life,” Aurelius meditates, but he could’ve done better. No: There’s no place quite like these laissez-faire States, you and I know. So do the boys at the corner of S. Colorado and Iliff (and Warren and Evans) or else they wouldn’t be there. I don’t hold it against them. But, contrary to the mawkish exhibitions of feigned tenderness — recently toned down — on the left and by this White House, let’s be honest. The last mass resettlement of political exiles in the United States was two years ago. What we see today is run-of-the-mill migration, not “huddled masses” on the run (which in Emma Lazarus’s overused 1883 poem referred to Russian Jews who were escaping tsarist pogroms).
When most of those perambulating the Southwest border are lone men especially (even though post-Trump regulatory conditions motivate family migration), talk of “humanitarian parole” and the “asylum regime” is irrelevant. So long as we accept these as the terms of the immigration-policy debate, we really have no immigration policy to debate about. A start: Do away with the puffy parlance of humanitarianism. Detain everybody who turns up uninvited this side of the Rio Grande. Territorial sovereignty demands it. As does the state’s principal obligation: the citizens’ security. But also take a look at the rest of the old jerry-built thing. A collection of antique curios — temporary-worker programs from the Eighties and Nineties for industries once favored; familial provisions from the Sixties and Eighties — still crowds the back of the cabinet like Grandma’s china. The immigration system of a nation with a history such as this one should deal in opportunity, not showy gestures of supercilious compassion.
Just past Evans Avenue, lightning cracked overhead. Three inches by dusk. I drove on, dry as irony, with a fat mouthful of guilt (the lather lads must have been about my age) towards some forgettable business meeting. The squeegee squad stayed on the shop floor. The blacktop conveyor belt kept bringing more work. One can’t too strictly fault another — whose presence is legitimate, for now, by executive Joe-jitsu — for trying to sponge up a living. If they’re willing to spend their days this way, I thought, to what other ventures could such persistent zeal be fruitfully applied?