Language has been a concern ever since humans created it and
began using words to replace grunting, howling or shrieking. It’s much easier
to be clear in communication when speaking, assuming the language is mutually
understood, rather than simply gesturing or making barely intelligible noises.
But when indicating difficulty in communicating with someone was once referred
to as an experience like “talking to a wall”, present political discourse about
immigrants and immigration among people who supposedly speak the same language has
become divisive screeching in a “tower of babble”. This is a weapon for
minority dominating powers who keep humans in a condition of confusion in order
to continue ruling out any notion of a state of democracy, another concept widely
confusing and misunderstood. But let’s just stick to the words immigrant and
immigration, which are as different as day and night or love and hate, and are
a great cause of social division among people who desperately need unity before
that division helps push an entire society into oblivion.
Confusion over those words has pushed many good people who
passionately support immigrants into dispassionately supporting policies that strengthen
the very immigration system they criticize. A majority of Americans still
support the political economics they have lived in and under all of their
lives, but they are as confused as social critics who in their desire to help
other humans often work at cross purposes by strengthening an anti-social,
anti-human, anti-environmental system that is helping destroy nature - and we
who are a vital part of it - more
quickly than ever before. Things have become so confused that many calling for
“revolution” work hard to create a sanctuary for the system they seek to
radically change. Or at least they do that based on another confusion of
language that convinces some that “revolution” is exclusively personality based,
involves identity-tribal-religious-ethnic groups, an alleged two party system in
which both parties are owned by the rich, and other contradictions that
manifest serious problems getting worse by the minute.
America is believed by many to be a nation of immigrants in
that it was founded by people from Europe and grew peopled by new generations
that came first from Europe, then Africa – in physical bondage and not just economic
chains - then Asia, and more recently, from the southern part of North America,
the name given to the continent settled by immigrants from Europe. The fabled
tale of our nation’s birth and our seeming worship of immigration usually leaves
out the near destruction of the humans who lived here before the invasion of
settlers and immigrants who found better lives – mostly after suffering a great
deal as most immigrants did and some still do – at the cost of ruining the
lives of those they replaced. And all immigration under any circumstances has
social costs that are absorbed by some far more than others.
Under the political economics of capitalism, which ruled
when our nation was founded though it wasn’t called by that name yet,
immigration profited many people greatly but meant a loss for sometimes far
more. That reality has continued from its beginning with the replacement of the
indigenous people by murder and ethnic cleansing to a more modern form which
simply reduces some to lower standards of living while increasing profits for
investors in capital’s market for cheap labor, the reason for the overwhelming
majority of people who came here in the sixteenth century and continue to do so
at the present moment.
Whenever there
was a need for bodies to work the land – the peasants sent from England and
later Germany at the nation’s beginnings – or work the mills and factories of
the later industrial revolution – when the rest of Europe and China offered
their unwanted or extraneous populations – the calls for new shipments went out
and soon they were delivered.
While it was supremely difficult for immigrants to enter the
country illegally in the past when oceans had to be crossed in becoming a
newer, cheaper work force, it became a bit easier for workers from south of the
American border who, often at great and even life threatening difficulty had to
merely step over an invisible line to leave one nation and enter another. Since
that line had been created more recently than mostly older European and Asian
borders, there were mixed cultures on both sides and a sometimes-easier
community to welcome new immigrants. Immediately arriving migrants from Mexico
and Central America could find old communities that spoke the same language and
were of related culture – with differences, of course, but none as wide as
those between English speakers and Germans or Italians or the Irish of previous
immigration waves – and this too made it possible to find quicker entrance and
a degree of comfort and familiarity. Where previous groups took some time to
settle in and find cultural comfort zones, the Latino influx of 20th
and early 21st century was able to adapt more quickly, and
with even more homeland pleasure for the profits they created as cheap labor.
And with the new class of illegal immigrants, they become even cheaper and thus
even more profitable for capital and its professional class servants.
Whether finding work in agriculture, factories, mills, or
smaller businesses like restaurants or in domestic work, the Latinos became
both a larger group of workers than ever imported in a short time, and a far
more profitable one taking jobs at the lower and entry levels of the economy.
Thus, the upper-middle and professional classes could also enjoy the
replacement of domestic servants with cheaper help for house cleaning,
childcare, landscaping and such, at lower cost than previously employed
Americans. And again contradicting well intentioned people anxious to end
racism and employment discrimination, those replaced Americans were mostly
black, as is true of hotel workers who have become almost entirely Latino where
once black Americans did the vacuuming, bed making and laundering for both
hotel chains and independent smaller motels. This replicated past experience
when the English immigrants were replaced by Germans and they were replaced by
the Irish and they by central and southern Europeans. Each new group entered
the nation poor, took the dirtiest jobs available, and with luck moved up the
economic ladder to become more average working class and later and more
recently a middle class citizens. This highlights more language confusion when
America is supposedly a non-class society, which just happens to have a lower,
middle and upper class. Oh well.
Or is it Orwell?
The point being that in almost entirely well intentioned
support for immigrants, good people continued bad policy when, by creating
alleged sanctuary for individuals suffering systemic problems, they actually
create sanctuary for capital’s policies that replace one group of workers with
another, thereby strengthening the system’s endless need for cheaper labor for
its profits by creating greater loss among the often misguided majority. When
those who profit directly from the import of cheap workers are joined by those
who bear little or no social cost for that intervention, the policy is
strengthened by a focus on humanism, which conveniently keeps capitalism out of
the frame. Then, people are reduced to being labeled “racist” if/when they
complain about immigration - as though immigrants were members of a different
race than human, in keeping with a racist culture’s population subdued into
believing such mythology – which completely excludes the personal and social
cost of bringing a newer work force in to replace an older work force going
out, and a tax paying public frequently receiving no profits at all while
absorbing much greater loss.
The more recent wave of immigration meant entry-level
employment for new workers, which were thus denied those Americans previously
dependent on such work. If that wave of immigrants were professional class and
English speaking, say from Canada, and Americans could get a lawyer, doctor or
therapist for fifteen bucks and hour, a teacher, social worker or accountant
for ten, many Americans might be thrilled and delighted but that would hardly
be the case for all those professional class people reduced to near or real
hardship if not destitution. Under such duress we might see "extremist" groups of lawyers or doctors with shaved heads and swastika tattoos parading the streets upon losing their homes, investments and facing such hardships. And rest assured that America’s bloated and near
bursting penal colony numbers many members of a new "criminal class" who became
such as entry level jobs vanished from their version of the American Dream, too
often a nightmare upon waking to face reality.
A far better and socially just answer to our massive
economic problem of worship of market forces instead of democracy would be to
bring in immigrants from foreign countries the way we bring in relatives and
neighbors whom we treat as such and not simply profit makers for us and burdens
for others. A truly humane welcome would not see to it that they remain illegal
as we give them driver’s licenses, educations – which frequently leave them
speaking foreign languages and denied equal status to their neighbors and thus
remaining at the lower paid end of the economy – but make them legal, as
quickly as possible if we truly want them to stay here and become Americans.
Anything less, whether directly supported by capital or ignorantly accepted by
those who mean well but practice ill, continues a rotten system that abuses far
more than one or another sector of the population but all of us who carry the
burden of an out of control system that ultimately threatens all and not just
some humans, whatever language we speak or culture we are taught to embrace.
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