President Obama set a record by deporting over 2.5 million illegal immigrants. His successor has boasted he will remove 11-million more. The justification for deportation has been defined by the new administration as applying to persons “who would appear to pose a threat to national security.” In short — with no material evidence whatsoever — authorities could seize and expel anyone they wished, including you or me. Besides, it is rampant gun violence, carried out by deranged, or radicalized American citizens — who commit nearly all our mass shootings. Foreigners are not involved and these incidents should not be conflated.
Predating the recent, contested ban of travelers from seven Muslim countries, the U.S. has had a long anti-immigrant history. In 1917, for example, a law required literacy tests. In the 1920s, Jews, Slavs and Italians were restricted. Those advocating radical political ideas became victims of discrimination, deportation or worse.
We’ve steadily drifted away from the spirit of the Emma Lazarus’ inscription on our Statue of Liberty, “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-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
Around the issues of immigration and deportation belying that promise have been both “political sorting” and racism. Current examples of sorting have been the easy admittance of white Europeans, professionals from anywhere, and (ended by Obama) of any Cubans who managed to put a foot on our shore. As for racism, in the 19th Century, Chinese were recruited for the death-defying building of railroads across the mountainous terrain of our West. White Europeans were being recruited as settlers. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred entry for any Chinese who came other than for slave-like labor. Survivors of the potato famine who came here from Ireland suffered decades of the same anti-Catholic abuse they experienced under British colonial rule.
Question: What did Europeans do to create a flood of Africans to their shores? The rape of Africa, begun with export of 12.5 million of its people into slavery and continued through imperial control and extraction of wealth, has been a circumstance from which much of that continent may never economically recover. Its most impoverished people now risk all to find livelihood in Europe. European countries might be said to have a debt to pay.
Question: What have we done to impoverish the people of Mexico and Central America? Repeated military interventions and long support of dictators and ruling families of Central America, as well as America’s war against narcotics, have created conditions in which many south of our border are willing to risk the perils of traveling north and crossing our deserts in search of a safer life. Our farm subsidies, paid largely to corporate agriculture, allow production of cheap corn, driving south-of-our-border farmers off the land. They head northward in search of livelihood. Of course, agriculture-business giants like Archer Daniels Midland spend millions to keep political office holders on their side so they can reap billions from these corn sales. And clearly, the barring of refugees from Mexico and Central America is racist.
Question: What have we done to create hostility from the Middle East? First there was the 1953 CIA-led overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran, which poisons relations with Iran to this day. After Israel’s victorious 1967 war against its Muslim neighbors, it was seen as a strong U.S. military ally — a foothold in the region of needed oil. Over $100-billion has been contributed by the U.S. to Israel, while they have made Palestinians virtual prisoners in land the Israelis and Palestinians were mandated by the U.N. to separately share. Power does not make right. Osama bin Laden cited Palestinian oppression, abetted by the U.S., for launching his 9/11 attack. In that Palestinian West Bank refuge, an area smaller than Delaware, Israel has built 140 settlements — some the size of cities. Since 1949, 800,000 Israeli settlers have come. This is a march for living space on someone else’s turf. Members of the Netanyahu government defend this invasion saying we need living space, the land is ours, and we will take it.
Then there was the failed Cheney-Bush invasion of Iraq. Mistakes led directly to the formation of ISIS.
Historically, emigration to this country has been driven by intolerable conditions in other countries, like Syria. The American narrative defines us as a welcoming and generous people. What has again gone wrong?
As we know, there is economic and rural distress in this country, but imagine how much worse it can be abroad. As this national debate goes forward, Americans need to look, particularly, at their hyperbolic labeling of those whose color, whose dress or language is different from their own. The latter have always been the immigrant’s baggage — soon after shed.
Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author, historian, and independent video and print journalist.