Labor Day like no other
Allison Silberberg's Plain Talk
Labor Day like no other
Allison Silberberg
September 1, 2025
Two weeks ago on August 18th, ICE arrested 15 construction workers in a neighborhood of my city. The workers were fixing a roof on a hot, humid morning. They were on their jobs.
That morning was also the first day of public school in my city. It’s a day of great anticipation, much joy, and a bit of trepidation for some children about leaving their parents. A number of children went home that afternoon and their fathers were gone.
The arrests sent a shockwave. As much as I have been thinking about those construction workers, I have been thinking even more about their children and all our children. This is a trauma playing out across our country.
Those construction workers were working hard at a very difficult and dangerous job. Perhaps these men had arrived in the U.S. illegally at some time. But they found jobs and were working to establish a new life for themselves and their families, as generations of immigrants have done before. The jobs that many immigrants are performing are vital to our economy. Who will fill those jobs now? I don’t see large numbers of “legal” Americans rushing to take those jobs. In fact, I see more and more “Help Wanted” job advertisements in my city as immigrants are fearful of arrest by going to work.
On this Labor Day weekend, our nation is full of contradictions for me. Our country is forgetting who we are.
One local Latino woman confided that there is huge fear everywhere. She said that her Latino friends are not going out, shopping, or even going to a park. People are staying in. Children are nervous about leaving their parents. Parents are being told to have their plans in place in case they are deported. They need to know where their children will go. Imagine the trauma for those children and their parents.
Over 1,300 children are still lost from the first Trump term where so many children were separated from their parents at the border. There was little or no tracking of those children. It is unthinkable. We can and should do far better as a nation.
Like generations before them, our new immigrants are taking enormous risks to traverse huge physical obstacles to come to a country where they can feel safe and find gainful employment.
What I do know is that it takes great courage to come to a new land. My father’s side of the family came from Germany around 1870-90. My mother’s side fled the Cossacks and the pogroms in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia and they got to our shores with nothing more than a small suitcase around 1905. They were all Jewish and faced their own challenges once they arrived.
My great-grandfather was a peddler, selling fruit one day from a push cart and carrying a block of ice up five flights the next. The family struggled, managed, eventually thrived, and gave back to their adopted land.
My mother’s mother was a toddler when she arrived in our country. She totally thought of herself as a Bostonian because that is where she grew up. Because my grandmother was born in Eastern Europe, my mother was first-generation American.
Because of my family history, I have always felt that I can relate to the struggles of our current crop of New Americans, as I prefer to call our immigrants.
I often thought of my ancestors when I served as mayor of my city and met with New Americans and encouraged our youth to study hard and to remember the enormous sacrifices their families had made to come to America. I never forgot that I stood on the shoulders of many and never forgot their courage and how far our family had traveled and sacrificed so I could serve. I knew that when I spoke with New Americans that they looked at me and assumed that I didn’t understand their plight. But they didn’t know my family’s story. I do understand and empathize.
It is the American Dream: people come to our shores with nothing and make a new beginning for themselves and their children and the generations to come. They leave their homeland and language that they know in order to escape grave poverty, persecution, life-threatening conditions, and brutality. Their suffering transcends into their strength as they come here and start anew. Granting political asylum is a crucial part of our nation’s immigration story. In recent decades, we seem to have forgotten what political asylum means and how vital it is to allow for legal immigration.
I believe that we should be a city and nation of kindness and compassion. Those are not mere words to me. Those words become policies in action. Those words set the tone for who we are. We should have a moral compass that guides us and is our North Star.
Every day in America we see news of roundups across our country. Masked men throw people to the ground with no regard for the person writhing in pain. The ICE agents have been harsh, do not identify themselves, and do not even read the Miranda rights to those they are arresting. What has happened to due process?
I don’t see the kindness and compassion.
To some Americans, your status depends on when you arrived. To me, it’s pure luck when your family got to American shores. Some people today act like their families have been here forever. What is that about? Where does that sense of superiority and anger come from? Is it fear of the unknown and the stranger in our midst? Do they remember the Biblical story of Emmaus and the story of the stranger?
Even if your family arrived on the Mayflower, that is not forever. Your family came here from somewhere.
All of us, with the exception of the Native Americans, are here because their families came to the United States as immigrants. Every single one of us, including President Trump. No exceptions. (Native Americans came to the Americas from Siberia and crossed the Bering Strait at least 15,000 years ago. They were clearly here first.)
We are a melting pot; it is what makes our country so strong; it is what makes us tick. Lest we forget, our county is a nation of immigrants. Our huddled masses.
All this veiled superiority is disingenuous and false. It is a lie. For example, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has a similar family history as mine. Why is he so determined to rid our nation of immigrants? Trump’s family arrived before Miller’s but, like all of us, they came from somewhere else. Trump’s wives were all from a different land. How does Mrs. Trump feel when her husband spews hateful words toward all immigrants?
What we need in our country is less fear and more focus on creating a path to citizenship. Don’t we want to have immigration reform? We passed an immigration reform bill in 1986 under President Reagan, and we would have passed such a bill under President George W. Bush, but a small band of members of Congress known as the Tea Party, the precursor to the MAGA movement, crippled that bill. Then, in May of 2024, a bipartisan group of Senators worked tirelessly for months and came up with an immigration reform bill. It looked like they had the votes, but Trump, a presidential candidate at the time, called the Republican leadership on the Hill and told them to drop the bill because he wanted the issue to fester so he could run on it. They obliged.
Some say that if someone is here illegally, then they are guilty of a crime and that is enough to deport them. I disagree.
If someone has committed a crime in our country, then that person, no matter who they are, should be arrested and charged accordingly. There is a process to address crime. But for the most part, the vast majority of our immigrants have not committed any crime, other than fleeing life-threatening conditions in another country. They have become part of the backbone of our nation’s workforce. In fact, ICE arrested a firefighter who was fighting a blaze in a forest in Washington state. He arrived in our country at age 4, and ICE arrested him. Our country desperately needs firefighters and others who serve in high-risk occupations. Trump’s policy makes no sense.
We need a path forward as a country and a toning down of the harsh rhetoric, recognizing that immigrants are a core part of our nation’s strength and greatness. We need to maintain a secure Southern border, and we need an efficient and humane process to allow immigrants to enter our country legally. There needs to be a path to citizenship for those who are here and have been working hard without any criminal record. We need a way to welcome our New Americans and remember from whence we all came. A nation filled with trepidation is not strong. Fear is the opposite of greatness.
Happy Labor Day. It is a day to be grateful and to reflect on how our country was built on the backs of millions who have worked hard for a better life.
Allison Silberberg is a writer and public affairs/public policy consultant. She served as mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, 2016-2019. Her work includes working on staff on Capitol Hill for Senator Lloyd M. Bentsen (D-TX). She is the author of “Visionaries In Our Midst: Ordinary People who are Changing our World,” which hit #1 on Amazon’s List for Philanthropy & Charity. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, on PBS.org. To learn more, please visit: www.allisonsilberberg.com
Thank you very much for reading Allison Silberberg’s Plain Talk, which is free to read and free to subscribe. Please subscribe, like, and share.