By Patrick F. Cannon
I live in a town of modest homes on small lots. With few exceptions, the lawns are – as you might guess – modest and small. Most owners mow their own grass and otherwise maintain their property. It is quite different in nearby, more affluent, communities.
If you drive through their leafy streets anytime between April and November, you will likely see at least one landscaping service on every block busy mowing broad lawns, trimming the hedges, and planting and maintaining the showy flower beds. When I owned a home in one of these communities, I also decided to hire out the work and stay cool while others sweated. The landscaping service I used was owned by two men, one with a German name and one with an Italian. The company was large enough to have several crews. All were led by, and consisted of, Hispanics, mostly Mexicans.
Some of the smaller companies were owned by Hispanics, who had presumably worked for the larger companies and eventually decided to start their own. What could be more American than that?
Are all those workers here legally? I have no idea. I’m sure some are citizens, either born here or naturalized. Some have the green cards of permanent residents. Others may work here under legal programs for seasonal workers. And some certainly are here illegally.
Restaurants have similar workforces. It’s no secret that most of the kitchen staff, even in the toniest establishments, are Hispanic. Almost without exception, the person who busses your table will also be Hispanic. Increasingly, I notice that the servers will be too. And of course, the Chicago area – as with most large cities – has literally hundreds of Mexican restaurants, varying from push carts to full-service establishments. Can I say that Americans are addicted to Mexican food? They must be, because there are an estimated 80,000 Mexican restaurants in the US, about the same number as Chinese. Italian restaurants number about 60,000, and no one really knows how many are owned and operated by Greek Americans. Almost without exception, all depend on Hispanics to stay open.
As many of you know, I own small shares in Thoroughbred race horses (with indifferent luck, I must say). Like most agricultural industries, breeding and racing depends largely on Hispanics for the day-to-day care of the horses. Most of the jockeys are Hispanic. Speaking of agriculture, most fruits and many vegetables are hand-picked by – you guessed it – Hispanics, mostly Mexicans.
At the risk of piling on, most of the people who clean hotel rooms are also now largely Hispanic, as are the ladies who clean my house every two weeks. Various numbers are reported, but let’s say that approximately 11 million people are here illegally. Eight million are from Mexico and other Latin American countries; 1.7 million from Asia; 775,000 from Europe; 180,00 from the Middle East; and 375,000 from Africa. You can blame multiple administrations for letting it happen and thank the Trump administration for slowing it down.
(By the way, does anyone still believe that immigrants, legal or illegal, commit crime at greater rates than we native born Americans? President Trump and his toadies still rail about “rapists and murderers,” despite evidence to the contrary. His “base” loves it though.)
(While I’m in a parenthetical mood, why don’t we hear of mass deportations of illegal immigrants from Ireland, Poland and Canada? Are they too white to be noticed?)
Do we really want to send them all back where they came from? It seems Trump advisor Stephen Miller would. Trump, as usual, is waffling. Congress probably knows how to make sense of it all but refuses to do so. If Miller has his way and deports the whole lot, we’ll have to suffer the consequences. But maybe it won’t be so bad. For example, I live in a sixty-unit condominium building. If every unit owner is given the responsibility for cutting the grass and trimming the bushes in turn, and considering the growing season at 28 weeks, then my turn would only come up once every two years. And surely, we’ll all be willing to eat only good old American food – at home!
Copyright 2025, Patrick F. Cannon
cannonnadedotcom 
I mow my own grass but use a lawn maintenance service to keep it from going full salad bar.
Many of my neighbors do too. The work, however, is done by local residents, not immigrant labor.
Mayberry is surrounded by farms and small communities, so no shortage of people who do outdoor work and operate machinery. Around the area it’s rare to see a property that isn’t meticulously mown.
We joke that the main Hoosier pastimes are mulching, driving lawn tractors and pulling trailers.
I don’t see many immigrants working in local restaurants either. It’s mostly area folks. I smile when I think of an Hispanic serving up a plate of biscuits and gravy.
And now I realize why Italian food in most Chicago places never quite tasted like it was prepared by someone following nonna’s recipes.
It’s easy to understand why Chicagoans, where the main employers are government, health care, banks and street gangs, would consider manual labor “dirty work.” (They don’t teach it in graduate school, and if you happen to live in one of the less tony neighborhoods, you’re probably too busy carjacking or dodging gunfire to do much else!)
Without immigration, the United States wouldn’t be the exceptional country it is. Immigration almost defines America.
I sense our immigrants thought of themselves as “American” even before they left their native lands. When an Italian, for example, moves to England or Australia, he is considered an Italian who immigrated, not English or Australian.
But when an Italian moves to the US, he’s considered “American” and becomes an American.
My father, when he retired in Italy was considered an American, even though he was born in Italy and spoke Italian.
I know of one Italian woman who married an American and after five years of legal paperwork became a US citizen. After the ceremony they asked her how she felt.
She said, “I feel free.”
American immigration is different from, say, Muslims immigrating to Europe. American immigrants, including Muslims, assimilate. The ones to Europe mostly don’t.
And what is most remarkable, the efforts of American immigrants enabled ensuing generations of sons and daughters to climb the socio-economic ladder. This is seldom possible in class-structured countries where the son of a laborer will also be a laborer.
According to economist Thomas Sowell, blacks, too, were immigrants, from the rural south to the urban north. Their progress up the social ladder was certainly impeded by discrimination (Irish, Italian, Jewish and other immigrants also had to deal with it) and assimilation has been slow but steady.
As with other immigrant groups, sports and entertainment have provided avenues for blacks to advance. But a serious obstacle for them may have been Great Society welfare programs (thanks, LBJ). It split families and replaced fathers with government agencies, creating populations of single mothers and dependent children. Democrats did get the votes, however.
We may be seeing this with the recent waves of illegals.
Proponents on the left, like Gov. Nuisance in California, fail to distinguish between legal and lawless immigration. They are hardly the same and can have very different consequences.
Immigrants almost always have been law-biding and strongly motivated to be model citizens. If anything, they were more likely to be crime victims than perpetrators.
The Biden gang’s pernicious opening of the southern border has given immigrants a bad name.
And how many of them will become “American”?
Among the many illegals who no doubt crossed over for a better life were thousands of criminals, drug dealers and sex traffickers. “Biden” gave corrupt governments like Venezuela an easy way to be unburdened by what has been and its prison populations. Among the unvetted were many thousands of Chinese as well as possible terrorists from Mideast countries. Way to go, Joe!
Their purpose in flooding the country with millions of unknowns is baffling to me. Some say it was to boost the census of red states like California and Illinois losing population and electoral votes. Who knows?
But asking who will pick the crops sounds awfully elitist, and isn’t good optics for Democrats, given their history.
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A percentage of our immigrants have always been bad actors. The Irish gangs of NY and Boston come to mind (throw in the politicians too!). And the Sicilian “outfit.” In many ways, Biden was hopeless. For the moment, I think I’ll pass on counting the ways, but the open borders was one. Thank God for the hard workers. And for those Hoosiers who love their lawns!
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