Talking "immigration reform" on Columbus Day Eve!

Get the Point!

For all of the domestic public policy issues I have addressed in my newspaper columns and blogs over the past 30 years, one issue that finds me cutting against the popular political pundit grain is immigration and the typical talking point that more should be done to secure America's borders.

U.S. Border Patrol agents using lassoes and whips to detain poor Haitians seeking entry via the Rio Grande in 2021…

My basic position stems from knowing that there is an extreme level of hypocrisy in these United States, a nation that will commemorate the Christopher Columbus “holiday” this week 👀, in determining "who" can (or should) be allowed entry to a country that has always boasted of being the "land of immigrants."

That's why when I have seen recent headlines about Democrats pressing President Joe Biden to "control" the U.S.-Mexico border, or whenever I heard former President Donald Trump screaming "build that wall," a chant that excited his base and even some of his Democratic foes who share a common desire to "control" who gains entry—and who does not—such renders me incapable of aligning myself with the ghosts of racist policies past and present. 

Seriously, if you doubt my words about the racist nature of American immigration, if you have the time, google the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 and learn ALL about how past Congresses and presidents worked to limit immigration to the U.S. to paler whites from Northern Europe—while providing strict quotas for darker whites from Southern Europe—and straight up forbidding immigration from parts of Asia, Sub-Sahara Africa, Central/South America and the Caribbean.

Central American asylum seekers locked up along the Texas border earlier this year…

The impact of those laws not only ensured superior Caucasian numbers in the 20th Century, but the tenor in the legal tenets remain in the 21st Century as shown by former President Donald Trump's profane comment in 2018 about the U.S. having "…all these people from shithole countries like Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa come here when we should have more people from Norway."

Well, as a descendant of enslaved people brought over from the continent (not country, Mr. Trump) of Africa, I could never find myself going along with this mindset, one that may not be expressed in the same crude manner as Trump, but clearly has been shared in deeds by Republican and Democratic presidents alike for well over a century!

A casual observer may be surprised by how similar the above presidents immigration policies have been over the past 20 years. Stay tuned to Hobbservation Point for a future blog comparing and contrasting the same…

Equally hypocritical is the fact that while the U.S. has prided itself in its racist immigration policies since the 1880's, our nation has had no qualms with colonizing and displacing people in territories "won" or annexed during wars from the Spanish-American conflict in 1898, to post World War II positioning in the run up to the Cold War with the Soviet Union. 

Just this past week, I read about the lugubrious story of Chagos, a British controlled archipelago in the Indian Ocean that was inhabited by formerly enslaved Africans who were brought there by the French to work in the 18th Century. 

In the early 1960's, Great Britain leased part of Chagos to the U.S. for the purpose of building an American naval base. To develop what remains known as the Diego Garcia Naval Support Facility, the U.S. forcibly removed thousands of Black Chagossians from the very lands that they had inhabited for well over two centuries. To add insult, in 1971, Bruce Greatbatch, then commissioner of the British Indian Ocean Territory, enacted a law that banned all natives of Chagos from returning to their homeland. 

Now, a cursory look at the map above shows that the Diego Garcia Base in Chagos places the American military within striking distance of potential hot spots in Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia.

And yet, to the point of today's blog, I just learned that over the past week, that a delegation of Black Chagossians have been in Washington, D.C. petitioning President Joe Biden and both chambers of Congress to provide financial reparations for their displacement—and access to lands where their ancestors died and remain buried. Indeed, the irony that some American political leaders in both parties are indifferent to the plight of "lawful" Chagossian land owners and inhabitants—while at the same time drumming up support for ways to prevent Mexicans and other South Americans from returning to lands that their ancestors once owned and inhabited like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, is rich!

Lest we forget this map showing Spanish controlled Mexico circa 1750—two decades before the American Revolution against Great Britain…

To be clear, understanding the legacy of European colonialism and the notion that "territory" can be owned, fenced off, and the like, I realize that there will never come a day in these United States when systemic bigotry isn't an issue in policy considerations about “sovereign territory.” I am also no fool in that I realize that unfettered entry to the U.S. for everyone is untenable considering how our local, state, and federal governments work.

But I also strongly believe that it is important to remember the racist nature of colonialism and immigration policies in this country so that the Trumpian ideal that Norwegians and other Northern Europeans should be fast tracked for citizenship —while people of color remain stalled, corralled in camps, and summarily deported, is eliminated so that each potential immigrant is judged by the content of their asylum request—not the color of their skin!