Our nation’s true history is one of diversity
Mitchell
Zimmerman in Common Dreams
Most Americans aren’t swallowing your so-called jokes
depicting African-Americans as apes, your white supremacist lies about Haitians
“eating the pets,” your slanders of law-abiding farmworkers as the “worst of
the worst,” your creepy wails about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of
America, your demand we exclude refugees who come
from what you term “shit-hole countries.”
Fear and hatred are all you offer, and relief from an
imaginary conspiracy of Jews and elites which you claim are plotting to
“replace” white Americans with invaders from abroad.
The reality: Americans have always been a polyglot people of
multiple races and ethnicities. We did not become a multi-national,
multi-ethnic people because of a scheme to open our borders. Rather, our nation
and its leaders—through ambition to expand the United States—incorporated other
peoples into the American mix from our earliest days. Our true history is one
of diversity, even if equity and inclusion have been aspirational.
If whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for
Anglo-Saxon white people, President Thomas Jefferson should not have made the
Louisiana Purchase, bringing people of French, Spanish and African ancestry and
still more Native American tribal nations into the territory of the United
States.
If Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an
exclusive home for white people, pro-slavery forces should not have launched
the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 to seize almost half of what had been Mexico, and
incorporate its Mexican population into the enlarged United States.
And for that matter, if Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North
America to be an exclusive home for “pure-bred” white people, they should not
have encouraged the immigration of
millions of Europeans who, at the turn of the Twentieth Century, weren’t really
regarded as “white”: Irish, Italians, Poles and Slavs, eastern European Jews
and others—“the wretched refuse of [Europe’s] teeming shores”—to work the mills
and mines, the factories and farms of America.
Today desperate, hopeful and hardworking immigrants come
from the lands south of our border, from India, from China, from the Dominican Republic.
Many are fleeing horrific gang violence, persecution, or the impacts of climate change on
their native lands. Undocumented immigrants—the so-called “invaders”—commonly
do work native-born Americans won’t do.
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| My grandfather immigrated from Quebec to work in a Rhode Island Mill like this. Will Collette |
Those without documentation provide most of the farm labor force. Trump’s own Labor Department has acknowledged that “agricultural work requires a distinct set of skills and is among the most physically demanding and hazardous occupations in the U.S. labor market.” “Such jobs are still not viewed as viable alternatives for many [U.S.-born] workers.”
Similarly, the labor of undocumented immigrants is critical
to the meatpacking industry, food processing, construction, and elder care.
Immigrants are not “replacing” American citizens—they are filling needs and
struggling for a good life for themselves and their children. That’s what
immigrants have always done.
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| Trump's grandparents, his mother and two of his three wives were all immigrants |
Our nation and the world have real problems—climate change,
shrinking opportunity, inequality and poverty, violence and
unnecessary suffering. But it has become clear to more and more Americans that
your program of meanness, malice, and spleen are not the solution. It is time
for you to get out of the way.
Mitchell
Zimmerman an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the
anti-racism thriller "Mississippi Reckoning" (2019). His columns have run in Progressive Charlestown for years.
