San Francisco (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Notice to Donald Trump and his MAGA myrmidons: It’s too late by centuries to turn the United States of American “back” into the ethnically homogenous nation for white people which it never was. And that’s nothing to be disappointed about.
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 “sh**-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 the Anglo-Saxon whites who first colonized North America wanted it to be an exclusive homeland for white people, they should not have brought half a million enchained Africans to American shores. By the time the Constitution was adopted, the result was that one in five residents of the new nation were enslaved or free Black people.
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.
If Anglo-Saxon whites wanted North America to be an exclusive home for white people, we shouldn’t have employed tens of thousands of Chinese immigrant workers to build the Transcontinental Railroad, man the mines, and perform the other dangerous and dirty work that helped build the West.
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.
“Battle of Cerro Gordo. April 18th 1847.” Print shows American soldiers advancing on Mexican infantry and cavalry, and artillery during the Battle of Cerro Gordo, in Mexico. E.B. & E.C. Kellogg (Firm). [New York] ; Hartford, Conn. : E.B. & E.C. Kellogg 144 Fulton St. N.Y. & 136 Main St. Hartford, Conn., [1847] (Buffalo : D. Needham 223 Main St.) Public Domain. Via Library of Congress.
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.
It’s too late, Mr. Trump, for your sleazy appeals to racial hatred. Most Americans know that seeking to degrade others because of their race or ethnicity is deeply wrong – a violation of the values of fairness and decency we struggle to live up to, but seldom spurn entirely.
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.
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