Immigration, Identity Politics, and Empire

“Over the long term this [immigration] is going to get solved because at some point there’s going to be a President Rodriguez or there’s going to be a President Chen . . . The country is a nation of immigrants, and ultimately it will reflect who we are and its politics are going to reflect who we are.”

-------President Barack Obama

It's very heartening to learn that the divine elect of rich investors and Israel-forever fanatics that rule over the U.S. are committed to giving us reactionary identity politics tokens that will continue the dismal elitist trend for the indefinite future, a future that is likely to be "nasty, brutish and short," to quote Thomas Hobbes on the predictable effects of vast centralized power.

In other words, it's business as usual in Washington. That the American people might look forward to something other than stale arguments over the presumed virtues of big unaccountable government, small unaccountable government, or ethnically diverse unaccountable government is a concept too deeply subversive of American "democracy" to be safely contemplated.

Furthermore, that Barack Obama hasn't the faintest notion of "who we are" is also painfully obvious. We are not a "nation of immigrants" and never have been. The country was founded by white colonists who openly boasted of their extermination of the indigenous farming peoples that obstructed their designs for unlimited private wealth produced by chattel and wage slaves. The chattel slaves cannot reasonably be described as immigrants at all, while the wage slaves can be only with major qualifications. The legality of "immigration" against a backdrop of mass murder and displacement of dozens of indigenous nations whose rights to the land extend back for thousands of years, has rarely been a subject of interest among the people who benefited from the robbery, but we can say with assurance that the millions of "immigrants" who entered the USA in search of a better life did not voluntarily submit to the long established norms of the societies being violently eliminated. If those norms did not rise to the status of the dubious virtue of "legality," it can only be because indigenous nations had no need for lawyers, not because they had ever done anything to forfeit their right to determine who occupied the land.