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The
Melting Pot Calling the Kettle Black (July/Aug
2006)
We’re all of us squatting on
stolen land. Recipients and beneficiaries of an economic tour
de force first made possible by the forced labor of imported Africans.
Today, we have sweatshops building our consumer goods, and immigrants
working for next-to-nothing manning our fields.
When slavery is illegal, cheap labor becomes the
name of the game.
This is gated
community USA, we’ll militarize and erect fences on our
borders, keep out all those nonwhite undesirables — that
is, unless they’ve come to clean our floors or pick our
strawberries. All this rampant xenophobia made possible through
the forced forgetting of our own history.
We’re all of us illegal immigrants, violators
of treaties, destroyers of culture.
Remember how Columbus had babies’ heads
bashed on rocks, how he ordered mass hangings of indigenous peoples?
Remember Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears or the massacre
at Wounded Knee? How about James Polk and the annexation of the
southwestern U.S. from Mexico? A collective history of displaced
peoples.
So it’s ironic this land of opportunity,
this melting pot, is now bubbling with fear of illegal aliens.
This tarnished
beacon of tolerance and freedom is making sure its monoculture
won’t be subverted. We’ve always been afraid of those
who arrive late in this illegally acquired America. There was
the Know Nothing Party’s fear of the Irish-Catholics, the
Chinese Exclusion act and the Asiatic Barred Zone. The forced
interment of the Japanese during WWII. Even some Jewish refugees
fleeing the Nazis were turned away, sent back to their deaths
in concentration camps — anti-Semitism run rampant among
captains of industry.
But if you are desperate and willing to work,
the U.S. Corporatocracy will find ways to use you up then throw
you away.
In 1942 it was called the Bracero Program. Temporary
Mexican manual laborers were used to replace American workers
fighting in WWII. And when we didn’t need them anymore,
in 1954 Operation Wetback began rounding them up for deportation.
Now, we’ll call it a “guest-worker”
program.
Immigration policies will continue to be ineffective
so long as we refuse to target the root of the problem: the predominantly
white business owners who would rather take advantage of poor
Latinos than pay American citizens a decent, living wage. These
modern day equivalents of plantation owners, these architects
of failed trade policies such as NAFTA and CAFTA, are intent on
maintaining inflated salaries reliant upon black-market labor.
It’s time the racist vigilantes patrolling our Southern
border take note — the real criminals reside on Wall Street.
-Jason M.
Glover, Editor
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