Speakout: Caring Americans ask only for a commitment

David O'Shea Dawkins

Sunday, July 2, 2006

In 1914 Ellen O'Shea sat over her morning cup of tea in her northeast Denver home. Her thoughts drifted back to her one-room cottage in Tullerboy, County Limerick, Ireland. It had been 64 years since she fled the starvation that decimated the land of her birth. Her father, John Nash, had married Mary Hourigan in the good years, raising Ellen and her six sisters in the "shadow of St. Patrick's hand."

The good years allowed the Nash family to feel the warmth of a peat fire during the cold times, the security of land that produced food to fill their stomachs, humor to ease their troubles and faith to overcome their losses. It was faith that sustained them during the hungry years. After the potato crops failed repeatedly from 1845 to 1850 the starvation policies of the British government sent the Nashes on an immigrant's journey to America.

Now, the ocean journey on "coffin ships" was threatening and their likes were not always welcomed when they arrived in the United States. They stopped speaking Irish (Gaelic), yet spoke with a brogue and look jobs no Americans would take. The men filed their petitions and became naturalized citizens. They worked on Mr. Tilden's farm in upstate New York until they could afford to move west. They were farmers, but it was the railroad they labored on and it was the railroad that brought Ellen to Denver in 1890. In the final summer of her life, having outlived her husband Michael and eight of her nine children, Ellen Nash O'Shea would be buried in America - as an American.

So it is with these thoughts that I ponder the Mexican immigrant who flees a corrupt and dysfunctional Mexican government that, like the British before them, encourages death and immigration as a policy to rid their country of their poorest citizens. And now the United States of America is burdened with the responsibilities of caring for millions of immigrants who are seeking a more compassionate and rewarding life in America.

America is too compassionate to send established families back to the slums of Mexico and to the politicians who, surrounded by natural resources, have filled their own panzas while allowing their citizens to eat garbage. But with our compassion we ask for a commitment to our country, to our culture. This does not mean foreign-born residents must hide their cultures behind the American flag. Americans have always celebrated the cultures of our immigrants and this has made us a better nation.

But the first step in becoming a loyal American is to become naturalized. The process whereby the requirements to become an American citizen are fulfilled: "read, write and speak English; a knowledge and understanding of U.S. history and government; good moral character; attachment to the principles of the U.S. Constitution; and favorable disposition toward the United States." It is the process that past immigrant groups completed to become citizens.

When you take the Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America declaring that you "absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state and sovereignty . . . \[and] will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America," you have stated that your are an American first and foremost. Your oath to America is your word that you will become a loyal citizen.

Over the years, my great- great-grandmother, Ellen Nash O'Shea, surely shed a tear or two over her morning tea as she thought of Ireland. But wiping the tears from her cheek, I have no doubt she proudly whispered, "Sure now, 'tis enough of that. Glory be, not a tear for sadness I'll be crying, but a prayer I'll be saying for my blessings."

Sure now, to live in the United States of America - 'tis a blessing and a privilege.

David O'Shea Dawkins is a resident of Denver.