As “undocumented aliens” enter this country, remember that the U.S. Southwest once belonged to Mexico. Those routinely slandered immigrants have a more valid historical claim for being here than we do. Their ancestors had a rich culture from present-day Texas to California while our forebears were huddling in crude huts across the Atlantic.
Furthermore, when Europeans genocidally stole this continent from its indigenous inhabitants, what legal authority did they possess for doing so?
Being of Finnish descent, I know how discrimination against immigrants was formerly used by interests profiting from working-class division. “No dogs or Finns allowed” signs were seen on Minnesota’s Iron Range decades ago, and we were disparaged exactly as Mexicans, Hondurans, etc., are today.
Mining companies tried to prevent better worker pay and benefits by creating friction between nationality groups. But the Finns built strong alliances with other ethnicities, resulting in everyone getting ahead. That’s a necessary model for our present profits-before-people era.
Also required is abandonment of racially-based animosity, currently being pushed by right-wingers, just as similar scapegoating was used against Jews in Germany, to such terrible detriment.
Conservatives often invoke “family values” and “the right to life.” Doesn’t that apply to families with some members who are official U.S. citizens being able to live without fear that others who are not will be deported, in heart-wrenching resemblance to how Jewish families were separated by the Nazis?
And let’s stop labeling immigrants job stealers, disease carriers, terrorists or whatever other bugbears malicious conservatives shamefully concoct. They’re incredibly hard-working, culture-rich souls who give much more to us than they take.
Once, when our local economy soured and he lost his job, my father could only find employment beside Chicano migrant farmworkers. But, despite being a strong man, he couldn’t endure the intensity of labor that they handled as a matter of course.
The produce on our dinner tables is their gift to us, and that in itself far outweighs any social-service cost, vastly exceeded by huge taxpayer funded breaks that go to Big Business, that some immigrants receive.
There’s a Spanish word that we definitely need to always keep in mind—venceremos—meaning “we will win.” But we can’t triumph unless we stop squabbling within our own ranks and forge an unbeatable alliance across ethnicity and skin shade.
Longtime union activist Stewart Acuff beautifully put this whole issue into proper perspective: “Any man or woman who comes to America to feed the kids, work hard, sacrifice for a better life for their family is my brother and my sister.”
Only seamless solidarity can keep plundering corporate exploiters who are our mutual, actual enemy from laughing all the way to the bank, with wealth ripped off from working people of every description.
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.
RSS
Immigrants are our brothers and sisters
Posted on November 26, 2014 by Dennis Rahkonen
As “undocumented aliens” enter this country, remember that the U.S. Southwest once belonged to Mexico. Those routinely slandered immigrants have a more valid historical claim for being here than we do. Their ancestors had a rich culture from present-day Texas to California while our forebears were huddling in crude huts across the Atlantic.
Furthermore, when Europeans genocidally stole this continent from its indigenous inhabitants, what legal authority did they possess for doing so?
Being of Finnish descent, I know how discrimination against immigrants was formerly used by interests profiting from working-class division. “No dogs or Finns allowed” signs were seen on Minnesota’s Iron Range decades ago, and we were disparaged exactly as Mexicans, Hondurans, etc., are today.
Mining companies tried to prevent better worker pay and benefits by creating friction between nationality groups. But the Finns built strong alliances with other ethnicities, resulting in everyone getting ahead. That’s a necessary model for our present profits-before-people era.
Also required is abandonment of racially-based animosity, currently being pushed by right-wingers, just as similar scapegoating was used against Jews in Germany, to such terrible detriment.
Conservatives often invoke “family values” and “the right to life.” Doesn’t that apply to families with some members who are official U.S. citizens being able to live without fear that others who are not will be deported, in heart-wrenching resemblance to how Jewish families were separated by the Nazis?
And let’s stop labeling immigrants job stealers, disease carriers, terrorists or whatever other bugbears malicious conservatives shamefully concoct. They’re incredibly hard-working, culture-rich souls who give much more to us than they take.
Once, when our local economy soured and he lost his job, my father could only find employment beside Chicano migrant farmworkers. But, despite being a strong man, he couldn’t endure the intensity of labor that they handled as a matter of course.
The produce on our dinner tables is their gift to us, and that in itself far outweighs any social-service cost, vastly exceeded by huge taxpayer funded breaks that go to Big Business, that some immigrants receive.
There’s a Spanish word that we definitely need to always keep in mind—venceremos—meaning “we will win.” But we can’t triumph unless we stop squabbling within our own ranks and forge an unbeatable alliance across ethnicity and skin shade.
Longtime union activist Stewart Acuff beautifully put this whole issue into proper perspective: “Any man or woman who comes to America to feed the kids, work hard, sacrifice for a better life for their family is my brother and my sister.”
Only seamless solidarity can keep plundering corporate exploiters who are our mutual, actual enemy from laughing all the way to the bank, with wealth ripped off from working people of every description.
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.