I AM THE ALIEN

In Opposing Immigration:

You’re asking a lot of different questions and operating off of some poor information.  Let me rather than argue with you, try to create a little context for the general issue of immigration.

Firstly, you know from studying US history that unlike any other country in the world, the US is purely an immigrant nation.  No one but the original indigenous people who crossed the Baring Strait some 20,000 years ago is anything but an immigrant to this country.

We are all the same in that respect.

Secondly, this country was built by immigrants.  Its wealth was generated by wave after wave of immigration from all over the world.  The Irish, fleeing the potato famine (and the English), the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian Jews fleeing the pogroms, first the Czar’s then Stalin’s, the Italians fleeing poverty, the Vietnamese fleeing the collapse of the South, Koreans, Chinese….etc. etc.

Everyone who has ever come here has come here to escape somewhere else.  

Do you get that?  That’s our shared history.

Now more recently we have Central American, Venezuelan, Haitian, Ukrainian an even a fresh wave of Chinese migrants and refugees also escaping their circumstances to survive.

I hate this stupid jingoistic myth that because “we’re the greatest country on earth” that refugees choose to come here like we would choose a vacation destination.

It’s not just a myth, it’s a dangerous xenophobic lie.  Just like you and me, the vast majority of people on this planet would rather live where their parents grew up.  Where they grew up with the language and the culture.  Migrating half way across the world or even a thousand miles to a strange and foreign land where you are received with suspicion and derision is not an easy thing to do.

So why do they come here?
Why did our familial predecessors come here?
Because more often than not, they had no other choice than to survive.  

Yes, this is a generous nation, the wealthiest nation on the planet.  We can afford our generosity.  But it’s not selfless.  Americans know that our lifeblood is dependent on the steady influx of immigrants.  It has from at least the 1860’s.

Look up the facts and statistics:  immigrants generate wealth.  They take the jobs no one else will do.  They congregate in communities and care for and build those communities.  

Where do you think Little Italy comes from, or Old Town, or China Town or Japan Town (in LA and SF) or the Polish neighborhoods of Chicago, the Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan (where you can still get Kosher pickles out of a street barrel)?

These neighborhood weren’t engineered by Disney or Lucas Films.

They were built by immigrants attracting extended families and more immigrants to safe neighborhoods, small businesses and jobs.  There would be no Broadway or Hollywood in not for the Jewish rag merchants of turn of the century NYC who invested in Jewish Theaters, that became Vaudeville, that became Musicals on Broadway, that became silent films. Then hopped to West Coast to build cheap studios in an undeveloped part of LA?

But enough history, look at the present.  Federal crime statistics confirm that immigrants commit fewer crimes that US citizens, are more likely to pay their fair share of taxes than citizens and improve the safety and prosperity of the cheap rent neighborhoods they congregate in.

All this Bullshit about emptying prisons, rapists, drug traffickers and child traffickers is just that:  BULLSHIT.  Contrived by Donald Trump and his band of MAGA-Morons to instill paranoia, division and xenophobia for the sole purpose of gaining political power.

It worked for Hitler, for Mussolini, Stalin and it has worked short term for Trump.  Get everyone to blame the immigrants for their domestic problems. 

 “They’re taking our jobs”!  Clogging our schools, ruining our hospitals and polluting our neighborhoods with their funny foreign food smells, accents and UN American dress sense.

Don’t get sucked into the xenophobia; you’re being manipulated for a specific outcome: To increase the power of a dwindling elite who arrogantly claim righteous dominance just because their grandparents arrived here a hundred years ago instead of last month.

Again, the lifeblood of America IS immigration.

From a global perspective, people have always migrated when food got short, they felt threatened by violence or just to explore a further horizon.

It’s in our genetic nature to migrate.
It’s how we’ve survived.

Otherwise, we’d all still be dodging lions on the southern African plains.

Nation states have always imposed changing borders to regulate the flow of people moving around and to assure that such people could be relied on to pay the state for the privilege of residing there.

National borders are imposed and maintained by violence, usually after armed conflict with a rival nation state.  Take the US southern border which dates back to the end of The Mexican American War in the 1860s.  Do you realize where the border was before then?  Since the 17th century, some 4-500 hundred years!  Before then the border was the Mississippi River.  The US to the east and first Spain then  Mexico to the west. There were also vast swathes of tribal territories that were defined by people not fences.  For over 400 years.

The native language of the western US is Spanish, it’s been spoken and continues to be spoken by the majority of our inhabitants.  You can’t build a border that contains culture. Language, culture and indeed humanity itself always overwhelms and supersedes walls and borders. Remember the Berlin Wall? Sees like an archaic artifact of a distant history by now

Of all nationalities, Mexican nationals are still the biggest immigrant group that crosses the 140 year old southern border.  However; their ancestors lived across the border and regularly crossed the new border for years prior to the US even existing.  Additionally most Mexicans are mixed blood with tribal peoples who were here in this land long before white European brought their horses, guns and fence wire to this territory.

Do you see the bigger picture?

Mexican immigration is actually going down because of improvements in the Mexican economy and the crack down on the cartels.

However impoverished families are still fleeing crime violence in Central America and coming to our border because they have no choice but to survive.

Currently. Joe Biden has imposed a 2,500 person a day cap on border crossings regardless the reason.  That was largely in response to Donald Trump torpedoing the bi partisan immigration reform bill tat would have add 1,600 ICE personnel and sped up immigrant processing to a matter of weeks rather than a year.

Trump needed the border to continue being a problem that the right could promote purely to make Biden look bad.

Lastly, we need to distinguish between immigrants, both documented and undocumented and refugees.  

There is no such thing as an “illegal” human being.  

That a deliberately dehumanizing term to generate the sense of otherness and threat supposedly posed by foreigners you haven’t even met.

The correct descriptive term, as used by ICE and all immigration authorities is ‘’undocumented visitor’ or alien.

A documented alien may be on their way to citizenship.  When my grandfather first came to this country escaping the Cossacks and the pogroms, he jumped ship at Hudson Bay, swam to the New Jersey shore and got work in the shipyards building boats for WWI.

He had no documents or papers and he didn’t speak a word of English.  But like ALL immigrants then and now, he was willing to work to earn his living. Eventually he learned English, got his work papers and eventual citizenship, then went back to Poland/Russia married my grandmother and brought her, her family and his family out of Russia, across Europe, to the UK In Liverpool they boarded a ship for New York’s Ellis Island.  Many of my grandfather’s family did not have papers either and spent more thana week being processed on Ellis Island.  Some want to Canada without papers and settled there.

So not all aliens have documents, Not all aliens are legally here on paper but that does not make them less than human, does it?
What difference does it are these precious pieces of paper?
How does it make me more human, less alien to be carrying a stamped passport than not? Have we really got to the sad point where we’ve allowed government documentation to determine the degree of our humanity our worth?

”Ve must see your papers!” He said in a cartoon Nazi’s voice
”Vif-out papers you are worth nothing!”

At the end of WWII, the League of Nations established the Refugee Council later to became and still is, the UN Refugee Council.  It was established to avoid the anything approaching the Jewish Diaspora to ever happen again. Nearly as any Jews fleeing Europe on refugee ships drowned at sea as perished int he concentrations camps. The British navy even deliberately capsized such desperate boats to prevent Jews from entering Palestine. Yet another triumph of borders over people

The UN Refugee Council is comprised of delegates from every UN member, but most importantly every nation in the UN contributes to the International Refugee Fund.  This money is allocated by the council to every nation who accepts asylum seekers seeking refugee in their nation state.

THE US TAX PAYER DOES NOT PAY TO HOUSE OR FEED OR SCHOOL ASYLUM SEEKERS

The UN does.   Everyone contributes equally as allocated by the number of refugees each nation agrees to admit.  Who admits the highest number of refugees per capita?  

Iran.  Followed by Lebanon and then Ireland.
The US is about number 7.  The admission of asylum seekers and refugees is by international treaty as detailed in the Geneva Conventions. Look it up

As a signatory to that treaty and member of the UN Refugee Council we are obligated by law to permit ANYONE seeking political asylum to be admitted into or nation.

That is THE LAW.

It can take up to a year to process an asylum application and during that time, the costs and expenses of their hospice including health care translation services legal representation are all covered by the UN in the form of yearly reimbursements.  That said, some 80% of all asylum applications are rejected and the applicant is returned to their country of origin.

That’s over 900,000 “border crossers” who have been returned to their native country to date this year.

This doesn’t get publicized, the number isn’t subtracted from the numbers crossing the border and the right wing xenophobic don’t want you to know anything about this

Are their “illegal border crossers” intent on malfeasance, breaking every law they can, murdering, raping, dealing drugs.

OF COURSE there are but not to the extent touted by right wing racists and a whole lot fewer compared to the percentage of rapists, murderers and drug dealers amongst the documented GENERAL US POPULATION.

Don’t fall for the BULLSHIT and the hatred.

An anecdote is not a trend or the rule.

Look at the facts, look at history and ask yourself deep down:

What does it really mean to call myself an American?

Who am I and how did I get here?

I am the Alien Igor Goldkind.