I have been mulling over the "immigration" question that is political class seems to be so divided over. The frame of the debate is based on assumptions that I find it hard to accept, so I can't come up a reasonable utterance that would speak to either side. What comes out of my mouth is something like "a plague on both of your houses." But that is so shrill.
Some family history sets the stage. In 1815 give or take a couple of years, some Cherokee left Northern Georgia and migrated to Texas in what was then the Republic of Mexico. They got recognition from Mexico, They wanted to leave the United States. Being in Northern Georgia was dangerous for Cherokee. A few years later the whole Nation was forcefully relocated to Oklahoma. I relate to ancestors that went to Texas voluntarily, and Oklahoma involuntarily (as well as others who were still in Ireland when this all was happening.)
Later some Indian killing "pioneers" migrated into Texas, and joined up with other enterprising white folk who wanted to introduce slavery and started a rebellion against Mexico. The "revolutionaries" declared the Cherokee charter and land grant null and void and siezed the already planted fields and drove of the people away from farms which had a couple of decades of labor invested. Some of the Cherokee hid out in the piney woods of East Texas, and sort of blended in with other poor folk. They later bought land and became known as Texas Cherokee. But some decided they wanted to get away from the "Americans" when they moved to Texas, and they still did, so they moved to Mexico. Mexico gave those Cherokee another charter of recognition and another land grant. So there are Texas Cherokee in Texas, and Texas Cherokee in Mexico. Both are descended from people who were indigenous to the Piedmont and Mountains of the Carolinas and Georgia. I have distant cousins in Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico, and North Carolina. Marjorie has Cherokees on her father's side, and they are in North Carolina. If somehow we were to have a family reunion would the Mexican Cherokee be foreigners?
I have heard it said that "we are a nation of immigrants." And then it follows that "we are all immigrants." Sometimes the qualification is made, well except for the Indians. Well the evidence is abundant "the Indians" have ancestors that go back at least 10000 years and maybe 30000 years. That is a long time. Before the Tigris and Euphrates was civilized, before China was China. Europe was still Celtic fifteen hundred years ago. There can be no English if the Angles were still back in Germany. There was no France until Charles the Great had a son Frank.
But was America populated by immigrants? From a Native American point of view, the post Columbian Europeans must be characterized as invaders, conquerors, and definitely "illegals." Immigrants I am told by the Republican Congress are people who apply to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and wait their turn. Immigrants are people who obey the laws set up by their hosts. The Europeans whether they spoke Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch or English did not obey the laws and they killed their hosts. That isn't the behavior of immigrants, that is the behavior of conquerors. We are reminded that when the Pilgrims came to what they called "the howling wilderness" they brought their own mercenaries led by a certain soldier for hire Miles Standish. Bringing along gun thugs is not the behavior of immigrants. (Go to the South Shore of Boston and see if the name Miles Standish pops up. The Plymouth Colony planted itself down on a Native corn field, it needed tending, which the Natives like good hosts taught the Pilgrims how to tend that corn. But Howling Wilderness was not what they found, they found a cultivated land populated by what was then a group of natives who tried in vain to exercise a firm but friendly policy toward these well meaning Crusaders.)
We are all immigrants? The African American people in the United States can not included in the "we are all immigrants" claim. Not unless one is engaged in that genre of history writing that white folk used to love to read, history where the Negroes were "rescued" from savagery in Africa, Christianized and brought to America to be servants until they were ready to assume to burdens of freedom whereupon the white folk generously gave them freedom. No we can't play that game anymore. Most of us have know about the Slave Trade and the Middle Passage. African peasants were kidnapped by slave catchers, chained like cattle, packed into the hold of a ship and if they survived that ordeal, then sold without family or friends to a violent brute also known as a slave driver, or a Southern gentleman, or Founding Father depending on who you are reading. That is not immigration! We know about the resistance of those African people who were forged under slavery into a new people, and we know of that people's real contributions to securing their own freedom and assuring with voluntary service that this republic did not perish from the Earth. (Most white soldiers on both sides of that carnage called the Civil War were draftees, all African Americans were volunteers.) White America did not free the slaves, it took a blood letting to do that.
We won't go on about the poor Irish who forced into debt and then shipped off to the colonies to work off their debts. Some of those newly liberated Irish were young men, and they went into the Mountains to get away from the bloody English. There they found Cherokee women whose husbands had been killed. The Irish were adopted into the community of their bride, and thus the tradition of Cherokee with Irish names.
We won't spend time on the Chinese who were recruited onto labor gangs to build the transcontinental railroad, because American whites and Blacks found the wages to low. We don't have time to tell about all the people who came on labor contracts, or came as refugees or some other way of coming to America that doesn't meet the definition of immigrant.
And now we have the Mexicans and other Latin Americans, whose economies have been ruined by "globalization" or what we used to call Imperialism (we were so shrill), and now are forced to leave their families to work as undocumented workers in the United States at wages it would be illegal to pay a U.S. worker.
Some people did come as immigrants, my mother's mother came from Ireland with a piece of paper saying she could work as a maid in a big house in Boston. She was an immigrant. But we are hardly a nation of immigrants.
Most Mexicans are of indigenous descent. There is a saying in Mexico, we do not cross the border, the border crossed us. How do the Mexicans get to be defined as foreign to California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas? There were people in the areas seized from Mexico as a result of an war of aggression, people who had relatives in the Republic of Mexico. Their descendants live in two nations, divided by a border. Is one cousin is "an American," and the other a foreigner. Who made those laws? How is their divided family different from me and my long lost Cherokee cousins in Mexico? Borders move, families are separated by acts of violence and by migrations to seek safety and a chance to feed their families. People who are native to a land, become foreign to that land.
I find the frame of the "immigration" debate hard to accept! The children of conquerors get to treat the conquered as foreigners. The children of invaders assume the prerogative to define that other people are illegal. And then historians are tenured with the understanding that they will to turn our past into children's stories full of willing immigrants and happy Negroes. No, I do not accept the assumptions! How gentle and reasonable I can make myself sound.
I might have to say is what the Congressman and the President are talking about as an immigration policy is a lie based on centuries of lies based on an invasion and conquest. That would be so shrill.
