It’s not just about language

It’s the truth

For many many years now, I’ve been horrified by how both Republicans and Democrats talk about and treat immigrants. For a country that loves to throw around the inaccurate but popular phrase “we are a country of immigrants” we sure seem to hate immigrants. Politicians and the wealthy do an excellent job of vilifying folks who actually make this country function. Take just a few minutes and review a day in your life or a week—from grocery shopping to running errands to eating at a restaurant—and think about who is serving you, who’s picking the fruit, who’s doing the work behind the scenes. (Yep, you guessed it, lots of the folks who make your life function are people who came here from somewhere else). Many have come here seeking a better life and wind up working the jobs others don’t want to do. And many of these folks are exploited and abused in the process, but I hope you already know that.

If you want to understand immigration better and see why “building a wall” is patently absurd, check out this episode of Adam Ruins Everything.

As a descendant of immigrants, wait..let me clear that up. I am a descendant of an “illegal immigrant” on one side. My maternal great-grandfather—the boat builder from Vico Equense, Italy—jumped ship at Ellis Island. His name is NOT on that wall. My great-grandfather the ship builder turned ship jumper came here, I assume, to find a better life. To make more money in the country he was told had “streets paved with gold”. I wish he had stayed in Vico Equense, a picturesque town on the Sorrento peninsula. But alas, he had a dream and he didn’t care if the folx at New York Harbor were paying attention.

So many of the Italian-Americans I know (or share DNA with) are now rabid anti-immigration folks. How quickly we forget our own past? How quickly we distance ourselves from similar experiences? And here’s the thing. Back at the turn of the 20th century, my immigrant forebears chose to come to the USA. Yes, they had hardships, and they were insanely poor not least of which is because as southern Italians they were steeped in a culture of corruption. But they didn't HAVE to leave. They CHOSE to leave.

The “immigrants” we see being thrown in cages and separated from their children and working in strawberry fields and standing on food pantry lines today are arriving due to a lack of choice. In their home countries, conflicts and oppression and poverty and suffering brought on by American meddling in geopolitics for financial gain have made existence in many of these places damn near impossible. The women from Guatemala that I interact with in my community are not immigrants, they are refugees and asylum seekers. They are people fleeing places in the world that have become uninhabitable or too violent due to deliberate destabilization by Imperial/Colonial powers, namely the USA.

Recall that Guatemala had a democratically elected president yet in 1954, the US facilitated a coup d’etat and installed a military regime that they kept supporting until my time there (1992). The US used the convenient excuse (for so many of their shenanigans) of fighting communism, but we also know that the US wanted control over coffee and bananas (hello, United Fruit Company). So, the US Government did what it does best: destabilized the democracy. Years of war led to the genocide of the Guatemalan people - mostly the indigenous people - and violence and instability got knitted into Guatemala’s DNA. It will take years, decades, to remedy those horrors, not just in Guatemala, but everywhere colonialism and US interference has occurred.

People fleeing physical, structural, and cultural violence from Latin America, Palestine, Haiti, Afghanistan, and the like are not immigrants to be mistreated. They are asylum seekers in need of safety. Accepting them into the US is only the beginning of an effort of reparations for the harm the US has caused around the world.