Latin America – Page 2 – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

The Context to the Honduran Migrant March

By S. Brian Willson (October 23, 2018)

The massive forced flight of people from Honduras is not new; it is the legacy of US intervention in the country.

Since the 2009 US-backed and Hillary-supported coup in Honduras, the post-coup regime has perpetuated a system based on disregard for human rights, impunity, corruption, repression and the influence of organized crime groups in the government and in the economic power elite. Since the coup, we have seen the destruction of public education and health services through privatization. The imposition of mining, hydro-electric mega-projects and the concentration of land in agro-industry has plunged 66 percent of the Honduran population into poverty and extreme poverty. In the last 9 years, we have witnessed how the murder of Berta Cáceres and many other activists, indigenous leaders, lawyers, journalists, LGBTQ community members and students has triggered a humanitarian crisis. This crisis is reflected in the internal displacement and the unprecedented exodus of the Honduran people that has caught the public’s eye during recent days.

The fraudulent November 2017 elections, in which Juan Orlando Hernández – the incumbent president since questionable elections in 2013 – fraudulently refused to leave office despite losing the popular vote, and in violation of the Honduran constitution, sparked a national outrage confronted by an extremely violent government campaign with military and US-trained security forces to suppress the protests against the fraud, resulting in a number of people killed by government forces, more than a thousand arrested.

The Institutionalized Cruelty of Separation: My Story

By Byron José Sun (June 29, 2018)

in 1988, a few days before Thanksgiving and just a couple of weeks after the picture below was taken; my mother and I were sitting in a detention center in San Ysidro, CA. My mother was 19 and I was under two years old. The border patrol had arrested us after the sewage tunnels the Coyote lead us through dumped us in San Isidro. We were stripped searched and processed until we sat in a small cell where a stool was the only furniture. The detention center was not prepared for the thousands of Central Americans fleeing the poverty and violence of dictatorships and civil wars that were backed by the US.

As my mother sat on the stool with me in her arms, we were feed milk and cookies three times a day, and we were expected to sleep on the floor with just one blanket. What people don’t understand is that it’s not easy leaving everything behind to migrate to the US. My mother had escaped a Coyote that kept us prisoners for a month in different hotels around Mexico. She went hungry many nights. She struggled to keep me happy. She went through a lot to keep me safe. We were only arrested in San Ysidro because she started screaming in fear that I was going to be killed by how hard the other immigrants were trying to keep me from crying.

As my Facebook is flooded with all the news of children being separated from their parents I can’t stop thinking about how my mother would have felt if I was ripped away from her arms, from her warmth, from her protection, and from her love. There are no words that I can write here to describe how immigrant parents who are experiencing the ‘Institutionalized Cruelty’ of separation must be feeling. No human being should ever feel what those parents are feeling. No human being deserves to be treated as less than human just because they are searching for a better future. As a nation we need to act not with fear and hate in our hands—instead, we must act with kindness and love if we ever want to keep our full humanity.

We Need a Theology of Liberation in the United States

By Mikasi Goodwin (June 22, 2018)

I was born and raised in Oregon, on colonized land, in a state founded specifically on systemic racism. I grew up poor. I grew up in a rural, conservative environment. I was very conservative for a long time. I am white, a trans woman, a lesbian, and a poor person. I say this to establish who is speaking, and what context I am speaking from.

When I was 13 I went to Bible Camp. Over a week away from home, our denomination’s pastors worked tirelessly to convert us. We were in church 3 times a day. Everything we did had a religious component, even when we went swimming or on hikes. By the end of the week, I felt sure that I was a sinner, that I was going to hell, and that I wanted to be saved. For the next few years I was a zealous believer in what I thought was the gospel, and what I thought was a lifesaving religious tradition.
I read the Bible fervently. I read commentaries, I studied & fasted. What I found wasn’t what I was taught to find. Time & time again I was getting a different message than my church. I was getting a message of liberation, of solidarity & of love from the gospel. Even immersed in conservatism like water, I couldn’t come to the same conclusions. This contradiction quickly led to a break with my church, and with Christianity in general. I spent a long time wandering & searching.

I didn’t find my way back to faith in a church service. It wasn’t reading the Bible that illuminated my own deeply held spiritual beliefs. God didn’t speak to me in the language of the church, in the scriptures & traditions of Christianity, or the acts of Christians I knew from my old church family. God spoke to me in the voices of people suffering under oppression, in prophetic voices unafraid to speak even the hardest truths. God spoke to me in the long struggle for liberation led by oppressed people. What did I find when I listened? I found that many oppressed peoples throughout the last 100 years have used a very specific tool to analyze their situation. That tool is called Marxism.

So, what is Marxism? That isn’t an easy question to answer. Marxism is about discovering the root of social problems, it is a radical way of analyzing the world. Marx says that ideas are the primary force that shapes our world but also that these ideas don’t come out of nowhere. These ideas are a product of human beings, of human societies, of our ‘material conditions’.
Marxism is about historical materialism. It says societies are divided into contradictory classes, slaves vs. slaveowners, lords vs. serfs, employers vs. employees. These are specific societal relationships that boil down to oppressor & oppressed. In my view, the goal of Marxist analysis is to find a way to transcend this relationship of oppressed & oppressor and create a liberated world.
The idea of creating a liberated world is by no means new. A reading of the New Testament illuminates many similar ideas about transcending class in early Christianity. The Apostle Paul said, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” These words weren’t just a pretty spiritual allegory. The early church was known for distributing their wealth equally. In the book of Acts, it says, “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Even Jesus said, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me… …Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” The call of the gospel sounds awfully similar to Marx’s famous slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

Marxism & Christianity have often had an antagonistic relationship, but that antagonism is by no means universal. In Latin America in the 50’s & 60’s, an emergent group of Christian clergy members began to advocate for a fusion of Marxist analysis & Christian theology. The result? Liberation theology. Many of the concepts of liberation theology existed before its inception. Wherever the gospel was in the hands of the oppressed, especially in slave communities in the Americas, a type of theology of liberation sprang up. A theology that says to the oppressed, God is on your side. God is positioned as the liberator, the ultimate spiritual source of all struggles to free the slave & the captive. Liberation theology says to the Christian, you have a mission, a mission to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth, and that means nothing less than the unconditional liberation of all humankind. Jesus did not come to found a religion, but to spread the message of redemption, liberation and justice.

Liberation theology is a call to return to the historical mission of the Christian church & the gospel, abandoned by Christians as Christianity became co-opted and turned into a violent & oppressive institution. I am convinced this is the message modern Christianity needs. As young people leave the church in droves to wander the wilderness because they have been betrayed, abandoned & ignored by their faith communities, this theology calls them back in. This theology called me back in, a transgender lesbian who was completely abandoned by my faith community.

We need a theology of liberation. A theology of revolution, justice and love. We need a theology that demands of us that we feed the hungry, house the houseless and put our bodies on the line for justice. We need a theology that says to the oppressed, you are worthy, your voice is important. We need a theology that humanizes, that encourages solidarity, not just charity. A theology that says, “I will give up all I own to raise up the oppressed and empower them”. A theology that spurs us to act tirelessly to free people from the bondage of oppressive systems.

To be clear, this is not about electoral campaigns. This is not about legislation. You can’t elect liberation. You can’t legislate liberation. It takes a spiritual, cultural, and deeply personal shift among all of us. It takes a revolution. It takes an Exodus from the bondage of the United States to find redemption in building a new world, one without borders and nations. This is a long struggle, one that people in the Americas have been waging for over 500 years. It is by no means impossible.

Liberation theology is an expression of this long struggle. Faith in ancestors, faith in God, faith in deliverance from bondage & oppression has carried this long struggle into today. Many on the left have lost hope that they will see liberation in their lifetime, and many in faith communities have lost sight of the vision of liberation. What we can gain from each other is a vision for a better world, and the hope that will sustain us to build that better world in our lifetimes.

When the Israelites were struggling for their liberation from Egypt every attempt to crush them was made. Even when Pharoah’s kingdom lay in ruins, he chased them until the bitter end. We will face the same kind of entrenched resistance every step of the way, but I know that together, we can overcome any obstacle that stands between us & freedom.

Trump’s Four Immigration Pillars

By Ana Castillo (June 21, 2018)

THE 4 PILLARS HE DEMANDS BE MET; Let’s examine the hypocrisy, the fallacy of his proposed sincere desire to resolve, and the reality that makes it impossible for Congress to vaguely go along with HIS demands.

1. He HAS AND IS deporting Dreamers.

2. Demands $25 billion dollars for the WALL. It is no solution to keeping out unwanted immigration or drugs.

3. End to Lottery. (Read from remarks he has made: Let’s just let White and highly educated people here.) Never mind we have countless of U.S. college educated here now who are underemployed or unemployed.

This country was built on, and is currently functioning, to make life comfortable for some, and very comfortable for the few, because of basic skilled labor. Here is a recommended message to your base who lost coal mining jobs, or are waiting for the manufacturing jobs that the likes of your family have given to people in countries like Mexico and China, (where there are no unions or safety regulations or child labor laws to protect them):

“Go out and work the fields. Bus tables. Mow lawns, nanny children, stand on the corner for ten hours with a cart and sell corn on the cob or peddle a cart in parks. Change linen in hotels or work in steaming laundries.”

Tell your supporters jobs eagerly await when you bring back your own companies from countries where you pay an individual $2.00 a day and that will hire your loyal base here at minimum wage.

4. End ‘chain migration.’ His wife is an immigrant and her parents were recently brought here as a result. Start at home, Sir, with your policies.

The Separation of Immigrant Families is Institutionalized Cruelty

By Joseph Orosco (June 19, 2018)

As I listened to the recording of immigrant kids crying because they were being separated from their parents, I heard the Border Patrol agent joke that they sounded like an orchestra without a conductor. My reaction was to wonder how anyone could be so cruel to the fear of young children. What could make a person so cold to that kind of pain?

The incident reminded me of philosopher Phillip Hallie who wrote about the Nazi concentration camps. Hallie pointed out that amid the daily horror of the camps, there were guards who had not been broken down by the constant show of degradation and would display kindness. They would share a kind word, or sneak an extra roll of bread to a starving person. Such examples are often used to argue that despite cruel situations, there might be solitary individuals who recognize the humanity of others. The Border Patrol agent laughing at children in terror doesn’t seem to be one of those.

But Hallie warns that we shouldn’t narrow our focus to the morality of individuals or to episodic instances of cruelty or kindness when thinking of the concentration camps. In fact, a Nazi guard’s smile, or an extra ration from the camp kitchen, only works to remind the prisoners that there is a world in which people can be kind and people are treated with dignity, but they aren’t part of that world inside the camp. Quoting from the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass, Hallie notes: “The kindness of the slave master only gilded the chain. It detracted nothing from its weight or strength. The thought that men are for other and better uses than slavery throve best under the gentle treatment of a kind master.”

Hallie argues that the way to comprehend the immorality of slavery or of the Nazi camps is with the idea of “institutionalized cruelty”–they way that the individual infliction of pain and suffering becomes normal, justified, and everyday. The Nazi guards could kill, beat, starve, torture prisoners because they had lived for years with their leaders telling them that their country, and their own families, were threatened by enemies who were not quite human. Ordinary Germans tolerated the Nazi policies because they became convinced by rhetoric that they were somehow morally better than Jews, and therefore, deserved to control and dominate them.

Recent public opinion polls suggest that 28% of Americans approve of the President’s policy of separating immigrant children from parents; among Republicans the approval shoots up to almost 60%. These numbers indicate that more than 1 in 5 Americans think there is an immigration crisis that requires an extraordinary effort of cruelty to solve. How could they be convinced of that?

Trump started his presidential campaign in 2016 by railing against Mexican immigrants as dangerous criminals, assuring his followers that (only) some of them are good people. He continued this way of thinking this year, bemoaning that the only kinds of refugees we attracted came from “shithole” countries. Then he warned that our laws were letting in “animals”, having then to clarify that he meant specific MS-13 gang members and not undocumented immigrants in general. The ambiguity in Trump’s language might be attributed to lazy speech, but just this week he reiterated that immigrants want to “infest” our country. It’s clear that when it comes to immigrants, Trump relies on metaphors about animals, insects, disease, filth, and crime. It’s really not surprising that cruel policies follow such patterns of thinking.

Hallie pointed out that the remedy to institutionalized cruelty is not kindness but what he called “hospitality”—caring for the victim of cruelty in a way that removes them from the relationship of domination. Hallie’s heroes were the people who sheltered runaway Jewish families and kept them out of the grasp of the Nazis. What we need now is not just a reform to keep immigrant families together, but also a recommitment to assist refugees and asylum seekers and attention placed on the economic and political circumstances that are creating waves of migrants to our borders. And we need to stand up to the dehumanizing language from our leaders that hardens hearts and then, crushes bodies. Like Hallie’s heroes, we ought show kindness not only by alleviating the suffering inside the tent cities where immigrant families are being detained, but by making sure that such places don’t come to exist at all.

This Treatment of Immigrants is a Dark Stain on US History

By Arun Gupta ( June 18, 2018)

Immigrants are not your bludgeon to use against Democrats.
Immigrants are not an object for your history lessons.
Immigrants are not numbers in your game.

Your argument that “it happened before” is utterly inhumane and shows complete contempt for solidarity for millions of immigrants in peril.

What is happening now is unprecedented. Trump promised a war on immigrants from the moment he began his campaign three years ago. That is exactly what is going on now.

Here is what is unprecedented:
Concentration camps for children.
The rescinding of DACA for 800,000 Dreamers.
Removal of temporary protected status for 248,000 refugees.
Administrative closure has been revoked for 350,000 more immigrants.
Refugee admissions have dropped from 95,000 in 2016 to less than 11,000 in the first half of 2018.
Domestic violence is no longer grounds for asylum.
Asylum seekers in general are being illegally turned away at the U.S. border.
Green card holders — legal residents — are being advised by immigration lawyers not to apply for any government aid, even Medicaid for an injured child, or their application will be refused.
Even more breathtaking, the Trump White House is moving to strip naturalized U.S. citizens of their citizenship and deport them.

You know what happens when people are deported? They die. Many die right away. Go spend some time in Tijuana among the armies of homeless deportees being preyed on, going mad, and being killed there by cops and criminals alike. Others die slowly, like the man in Tijuana who told me within a year of being deported, his wife got cancer and died because she was so devastated. Nearly all will see their life expectancy cut short because of a lack of healthcare, of basic services, of food, or from violence.

So when you claim this is nothing new, this happened before, America has always been racist, this is Obama’s fault, you are deliberately downplaying the gravity of what is happening now. This is more than 2 million lives at stake, given how many people are forced to leave with deportees.

2 million people and growing. And your response is “it’s not unprecedented.” This is nearly 20 times the size of the Japanese internment. And you say “it’s not unprecedented.”

Look at the picture below.

This is the bridge into Tijuana where deportees come through day and night. Stand where I stood. No one will bother you. Stand there and tell deportees:

This is nothing new.
It’s Obama’s fault.
It’s the white-supremacist settler-colonial ruling class.
It’s not unprecedented.

You are really saying you don’t give a shit about immigrants. It’s more important to you to minimize what is happening than acknowledge this moment is a unique dark stain on American history. Because if you admitted this was uniquely terrible, you would have to shed your fossilized dogmas and revolutionary fantasies.

So you would rather lend aid and comfort to Trump, to Stephen Miller, to Joe Arpaio, to all the nativists and racists and Neo-Nazis who want to make America white again.

You are showing which side you are on. You are not on the side of 43 million American immigrants like me.

Have You Ever Had to?

By Octaviano Merecias-Cuevas (June 16, 2018)

Have you ever had to?

Abandon a lifetime at the eye-blink notice of a memory?
As villages collapse and dreams become black fumes?
As tanks roll-in while drones of anger machete their bloody ways into crops and farms?
No laws can stop imploding sadness; burying babies in Syria.
Dead AF floating towards the shores of your consciousness.
Migration then… is not a fucking choice;
As we become walking clandestine dreams on stolen lands.

Have you heard the symphony of exodus?
Decapitated destinies and mutilated dreams; vibrating!
Toxic poverty of institutionalized stress; raising!
Rows of footsteps carrying crucified Gods in palms of dreamers hands
Escaping carcinogen greed of capitalism; who’s legacy?
Remedying the asthmatic last speech of a 4-year-old
Witnessing tear-ed little hands from moms along the border.

Migrating in paths of your ancestor’s plans; a better life
escaping cages, emperors of corrupt plans and genocide;
AK’s disguised as bibles and doves into moral enforcers
As seven-headed false prophets fight porn-stars; silence
Vomiting hypocrisy underneath the stars of our flag; compliance.

Crossing a fence, jumping a border; the last choice or falling into:
the indignity of decomposing into the mouth of the desert
Suffocating into the extremities of the oceans; praying
Holding crushed infant hands in collapsing clinics.
Starving for a new beginning in shadows of invisibility
flowering into emerging hopes; photosynthesing dreams

Mother, aunties, grandmas, sisters…
holding on tightly the innocent hands
Like holding onto the last feelings that germinate our souls
Her sentence lingering on a piece of paper with her name;
Her hope collapsed into the absence of a piece of paper
When home burns as a waving flag legacy of colonial brutality;
The only house left for us to walk is the naked world;
As memories of dinosaurs-into-butterflies today remind us;
migrate, to survive, like waves, like wind, like time… Like Life.

Is there an accidental kind gesture within your soul?
Can today shine your merciful medicine of secrets?
Here’s the last piece of my hand; families belong together
like mind, soul and spirit belong into one wisdom!

Poesia Mixta

Why We Run: Thoughts for Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzales

By Octaviano Merecias-Cuevas (May 29, 2018)

To whom it may concern: Why we run!

We run to catch the bus at 4:30AM in America
Running our hands to the bones; here, look!

We run with contagious joy like Tarahumaras
We run like whistles emerging from the Zapotec clouds; calling.
We run to the hills to watch our temples burned; Guatemala
We run like poetry of peace in paragraphs of war; Tu’uun Savi.

We run to escape decapitation in borders created by you;
We run to catch la bestia; to tame this tender journey of life
We run with torch and fire of humanity; a reminder of our yesterday’s tomorrows.

We run; porque si no corremos ahora;
El mañana no llegará nunca; contigo.

We run to complete your restaurant orders;
To caress the patience of your landscape and industry
To complete your gold chains desde los andes; las minas
To catch the rain before our dry lips become silence; Bolivia; chained water is death.

Can you understand 500 years of running; escaping?
This indignity of invisibility in everyday songs of poverty?

We run three times as fast just to stay afloat with you;
But we cannot run faster than your bullets… this is America.

Only the shattered pieces of our spirit can… levitating in memories coming back to you; us.

Poesia Mixta
RIP: Claudia Patricia Gómez Gonzáles

When It Comes to Protecting Immigrant Workers, Strategic Organizing is the Answer

By Arun Gupta (February 4, 2018)

This is an insightful report on how to organize against Trump’s deportation regime. Here are some important lessons.

One: Immigration is as much about labor as about race. Trump won by racializing working-class conflict, stoking white nativism and resentment against all immigrant workers from farms to high tech. A few years ago I interviewed Ana Cañuenguez, an undocumented worker who cleans hotel rooms in Utah. She left El Salvador in 2003. Ana told me, “It was a very difficult decision to flee from my country and leave behind my family and all my people. But I had six children and one died because of severe malnutrition. I did not earn enough to feed them.”
https://www.telesurtv.net/…/The-Refugee-Crisis-in-the-Ameri…

U.S. policy has devastated El Salvador for more than 100 years, particularly during the Reagan era when it funded and armed a death-squad government that massacred tens of thousands of peasants and workers fighting for some measure of justice. That’s why hundreds of thousands Salvadorans have fled their country. I have interviewed refugees from more than half-a-dozen countries. Not one wanted to leave their home. What would you do if the U.S. destroyed your country and you watched helplessly as your child starved to death? These people are coming here to make better lives for themselves and their families. It’s the least the U.S. owes them.

The notion immigrants come here for welfare is a racist lie. For one, there is virtually no social welfare for anyone to get. It’s just crumbs at best. And there are all sorts of state and federal laws that bar undocumented immigrants from receiving assistance. More significant, the labor force participation rate for all Americans over 16 years old is 60.2%, but for undocumented immigrants? There are about 10.1 million undocumented immigrants over 16 and of those, 8 million are in the workforce. In other words, they have a labor force participation of 80%. That is staggeringly high. They want to work. They are doing jobs native-born Americans won’t do, and the fact they are being terrorized by the state, police, and racists is what would suppress wages, not their presence here.
http://www.pewhispanic.org/…/size-of-u-s-unauthorized-immi…/
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/…/unauthorized-imm…/state/US

Second: Organizing is not an either/or. This campaign against the bakery in Queens that fired undocumented workers used letter writing, flyering, protests, boycotts, *and* direct action. A tactic is just that: a tactic. Tactics should never be elevated to a strategy or a way of life.

Third: Organization matters. Brandworkers played a crucial role in helping the immigrant workers receive severance. Brandworkers has links to the Industrial Workers of the World, the storied anarchist union. Despite the fact New York is one of the last remaining strongholds of unions, it was a scrappy leftwing labor group that threw down with the workers. Not one of the big national unions with a billion-dollar war chest.

Fourth: The campaign was unable to stop the firings, but is now agitating for greater legal protection for undocumented workers.* The only way to fight state power right now in the U.S. is through exercising other forms of state power. That does not have to mean electoral politics, but it does mean organizing has to be focused on figuring out how to pressure state institutions, especially at the municipal level, to throw up roadblocks to federal policy., particularly barring local police cooperation with the federal immigraiton police. The reality is these campaigns will be much more effective in liberal enclaves, which is why it does matter who is in office. It’s easier to force neoliberal Democrats to the left on the immigration issue than it is to force white nationalist Republicans.

It is impossible to protect millions of immigrants solely through protest and direct action. It’s like the foreclosure crisis. There were millions of illegal foreclosures that happened in the last decade. All the various anti-foreclosure groups, including Occupy Our Home groups, prevented maybe a couple hundred families from being evicted. It was heroic work, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the problem.

Strategic organizing gets the goods.

*From the article, some ideas for how cities can give greater protection to immigrants.
“In addition to its work with the fired employees, Brandworkers is fighting to establish an immigrant-protection policy for businesses that would notify workers about audits and provide safeguards against warrantless raids. The blueprint for such legislation has already emerged in California, where the Immigrant Worker Protection Act just took effect. The new law prohibits employers from allowing ICE agents to enter non-public areas or obtain records without a warrant. It also requires warnings before and after audits take place. California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra has even warned that he will prosecute businesses that voluntarily hand employee information over to ICE.”

Trump’s Comments Recall A Racist Past in Immigration Policy

By Joseph Orosco (January 14, 2018)

The condemnation of Trump’s remarks on immigration has been swift and widespread. Most of the denunciations cast his ideas as seriously out of line with American ideals on immigration. The problem is that they aren’t really. From the very beginning of our nation, there has been a white nationalist core driving our immigration priorities. Even as we struggled to be a “nation of immigrants”, most of the people we allowed in were chosen on the basis of national origin from the “whitest” parts of Europe.

The first US naturalization law of 1790 required that anyone who wanted to become a citizen had to be a “free white person”. At its start, the Framers envisioned the US as a political society for members of a specific racial caste. This requirement stayed in place until the mid-twentieth century.

In 1924, the US passed the Johnson Reed Act, one of the most significant comprehensive immigration reform bills in our history. It limited the number of immigrants each year and those allowed were selected on the basis of their country of origin. Immigrants from North and Western Europe (such as Norway) had almost no restrictions on entering, while Southern and Eastern European immigrants were severely controlled. Immigration from Asia had been almost completely prohibited for several decades by this point.

The shocking issue with the act is its little known origin story. The law was the brainchild of a notorious white supremacist named Madison Grant. In 1916, Grant wrote a book, The Passing of the Great Race, which argued that the truly white people in the US, the Nordics, were at risk of going extinct because of the massive influx of Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Jews who Grant did not consider white (Be careful if you do an Internet search for this book–you will end up on several white supremacist websites). Grant’s book became a bestseller and reading groups were formed among members of Congress. Grant chaired the committee to advise Congress on immigration. The result was Johnson Reed. Grant went on to inspire the Racial Integrity Act for the state of Virginia that prohibited interracial marriage. It was widely copied throughout the US. So for almost forty years of the 20^th century, US immigration policy and marriage law was specifically designed to create a white majority population.

Congress didn’t remove this system until 1965, replacing it with one that shifted the demographic makeup of most immigrants. Since 1965, the large bulk of immigrants have been from Asia and Latin America. The new policies today favor creating a diverse pool of immigrants rather than one based on national origins, and they encourage immigrants, once here, to bring their family members from their former home countries in a process called “chain migration”.

Trump’s remarks, and the policy proposals on immigration that he has released in the past year, indicate that he wishes to return US immigration policy to the way it was under Grant. Clearly, his preference for individuals from Scandinavia versus Africa or Latin America would have pleased Grant immensely.

Trump’s advisors have also proposed to reduce the total number of immigrants that can enter each year and those allowed would be selected by a merit system. Those immigrants demonstrating English proficiency and the right job skills would have a preference. This obviously will favor immigrants from those countries with the educational systems that can give people experience with the American way of life. Such a system will drastically limit immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa by eliminating chain migration.

About a century ago, Americans struggled to find a language to describe what a multicultural, racially diverse, and democratic society would look like. One group of progressive thinkers, led by figures such as John Dewey, Alain Locke, and Jane Addams, urged us to imagine a nation where immigrants were not forced to assimilate to a single mold, but encouraged to keep their traditions and enlarge the possibilities of what it means to be an American. This is something I explore in my book Toppling the Melting Pot: Immigration and Multiculturalism in American Pragmatism. This theme is missing from public discussions on immigration today. But if we are looking to the past for hints today about what to do with our immigration policy that do not involve reinventing a white nationalist vision, then perhaps this is a conversation we need to remember.

We Are Carved Out of Salt of the Earth and Humanity

By Octaviano Merecias-Cuevas (January 12, 2018)

About the “s***hole” comment.

Dear my fellow immigrants and refugees friends/sisters/brothers. They don’t know the long, dangerous and tired road that we have paved and walked to come to this country. The ones with privilege do not have the scars in their skin to prove it, nor they will ever be able to feel the pages and chapters that we have carved with sweat, tears and blood to find a better place during our journey…. to choose living amidst the chaos. That’s why we are thankful answering the call of a greater energy; oscillating.

At times politicians will exploit our stories for their advancement, and at times, they will point the finger at us for… their advancement. The authenticity of our hands, hard work, perseverances, dreams, are the dignifying compasses that drive us everyday… something they cannot take away. The indignity of vulgarity are luxuries reserved for the ones disconnected from our past struggling with colonization and imperial intervention creating our home countries a bittersweet heaven… exiling us. I emigrated from a piece of heaven on earth and I arrived to another piece of heaven on earth; my respect for both moons of my same life is a testament that I will never be ashamed of both lands.

No matter where we came from; we are here and we are bringing mindfulness and much needed peace and inspiration during hard times of transition. With our stories, we carve memories on the walls along the signature of those before us; with our daily sacrifices, we move families and communities forward; with our hard earned dollars, we support the human connection that mirrors the dignity of the golden rule. I’m better because the gifts of knowledge that you bring today; I feel your soul.

Don’t forget that we are carved out of salt of the earth and humanity; out of sugar of steel and kindness; out of mirrors that look like the parents, grandparents and great grand parents of those who wish us ill.

Stay strong, stay loving, and stay human.

Excuse the typos; I wrote this as I was riding the bus on my way to a panel… or maybe my trilingual mind was trying to find the right pieces to craft a small reminder for you.

Sincerely;

An actual immigrant made out of flesh, bones and dreams.