Immigration
Very few of us started here. Our families came here from every corner of the globe. We came here on the promise that was a lie. While our immigration laws and policies have become increasingly more disturbing lately. While things seem absolutely horrible because of the Mango Mussolini and his band of sycophants this is not a unique moment in our history. Our treatment of immigrants has a very dark and violent past.
I'm sure other nations have their own history and issues but this behavior, this hate and animosity towards immigrants and immigration, runs counter to our founding principles and the image (let's be honest the lie) we have sold to the rest of the world.
We literally have a giant statue of a Middle Eastern women in the harbor of our largest city with a bronze plaque a fixed to its base that says
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
That is the poem titled 'The New Colossus' by Emma Lazarus written in 1883. I mentioned that date for a reason. Because the year before, in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act that severely limited Chinese immigration and fostered a great deal of suffering on Chinese immigrants.
When you look at it objectively we have created a massive propaganda machine that has created a worldwide lie that we are a nation that welcomes immigrants but nothing could be further from the truth.
Our government has fostered this lie to leverage the knowledge and labor of immigrants, only to kick them out of the country when we no longer needed them.
I mean all the way back to our very beginning, our Founding Fathers spoke of "freedom" and "liberty" but refused to extend those hard fought rights to hundreds of thousands of human beings held as slaves in that new nation so many gave their blood and treasure to create.
At its core was capitalism. From those "immigrants" that were brought to our shores against their will to those that walk across our borders to help feed and cloth us today, has been to use these people for our own benefit and cast them out when they were no longer useful in the eyes of capitalist leaders.
People look at the times we are in and say things like "we are better than this" but that isn't true is it? It should be true but it's not. We have never been good to immigrants.
Despite everything, despite the way we have treated immigrants in our country, they have been the lifeblood of our nation. From the involuntary immigrants (slaves) that fought in the Continental army in 1776 on the promise of being free in a new nation to the immigrants picking our fruits and vegetables in the fertile valleys of California in 2025. It is immigrants that have made us great.
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