Proud to be an American

Among immigrants to America, this is known as paying their dues. Nobody gets in on a pass. Everybody works the night shift, or does the grub work somewhere, or handles the stuff nobody else wants to do.

Such as going to war, the way Kendell Frederick did. He served in the U.S. Army. He called northwest Baltimore County home but never quite reached the full America. He arrived in Randallstown as a teenager from Trinidad, and departed this Earth, at 21, in a roadside bomb explosion in Iraq three years ago. He was on his way to clear up some confusion over fingerprints needed for his U.S. citizenship application.

But it took an act of Congress to finally make him a U.S. citizen after he was three years gone.

As we approach this Fourth of July holiday, it’s a moment to ask ourselves: What does it take to become an American?

Kendell Frederick was good enough to join the Army, and serve this country in a war nobody wants, but not good enough for immigration officials to OK his fingerprints. He had to leave his base in Tikrit and head for Baghdad to get re-fingerprinted. He never got there. His convoy was hit, and he died in the explosion.

And so, at Fort McHenry the other day, we had Sen. Barbara Mikulski and Rep. Elijah Cummings standing there with Kendell’s mother, a tearful Michelle Murphy, as she received a copy of brand-new legislation named for her son.

The law allows those serving in the military to use the fingerprints they gave when they enlisted to help process naturalization paperwork. In other words, it renders unnecessary the deadly trip taken by Kendell Frederick.

But this isn’t about fingerprints.

America celebrates its birthday by waving the flag and driving to the beach and offering up deals on a brand new car. But it’s four bucks a gallon to get to the beach, and the big dinosaurs get only 18 miles to the gallon, and this makes it cheaper just to slip over to the mall to check out any other Fourth of July specials being offered.

And the holiday passes, and we forget the message of those such as Kendell Frederick. And the stories of the pharmacist from Nigeria and the cashier from the Philippines, and all who pay their initiation dues to America.

We don’t make it easy for any of the newcomers. We revere that lady in the New York harbor, lighting her lamp for the tempest-tossed, but we continue to give mixed signals. Generations ago, there were housing codes, segregation laws, quotas, unspoken winks. There were famous signs: “No Irish Need Apply.” “No Jews, Blacks or Dogs.”

Today we speak in code. The politicians demand that all newcomers learn English right away, as though this is simple as opening a door. Or they decry “multiculturalism,” thus missing the entire point of America.

Ours is a nation where we know we have differences — but we also know we can celebrate them, and not just tolerate them or find them suspicious because they’re different from our own. We overlap — or what’s the point of America?

I had lunch one evening at a Latino restaurant, on Eastern Avenue near Broadway, a tiny place with a steamed-over front window and half a dozen tables. This is how the newly arrived begin a mercantile class: Rent a storefront, put up some tables and cook the food that smells like home.

A portable tape recorder plugged into a wall socket played Spanish-language music, but a radio carried the Orioles play-by-play. A cable TV network showed a soap opera with Spanish dialogue — but the actors all dressed like any homogenized American young people wanting to feel like a tribe.

The tribe is America. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it happens. The newcomers work the night shift, they do the grub work, they go off to war. Kendell Frederick becomes a citizen three years in his grave. But his legacy makes it half a step easier for those who follow him here.