por Jorge Mujica
Mexico del Norte
According to general wisdom, this country is supposed to be “A nation of immigrants”. It must be true, because very few are the gringos who can take a look at their genealogy without ending up in two or three generation on the other side of the sea. Either sea, Atlantic or Pacific. The ones not descending from Brits are descendents of their Irish or Scott neighbors, or they jumped another sea, the English Channel, and are descendants of German, French, Polish, Norway, or from countries that don’t even exist today, like the Soviet Union or Prussia. Or they jumped even more seas, and came from Italy or Greece and beyond.
Or they come from across the other sea, from China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, or from many African countries, in which case they were not voluntary migrants. Just the same, almost everyone crossed at least a sea, until we started coming here.
But as the Spanish saying goes, “Como te ves me vi…,” or “you are seen today as I was seen sometime ago…” It is one thing to be a descendant of immigrants and another one to be a “friend of immigrants,” despite the declarations of a bunch of politicians. Each wave of immigrants has tried to stop and discriminated against the next wave of immigrants. Working on a project, the Immigration Calendar for 2011, I was frankly surprised about this resistance. The first law restricting immigration dates from 1790, just 14 years alter the Declaration of independence.
It restricted immigration to people of “good moral character”, absurd classification between “good” and “bad” immigrants still used today. Eight years later the Alien Sedition Act was issued to deport “dangerous immigrants”. The XIX Century did not see many anti immigrant laws, but many brutal anti immigrant actions.
Two examples are the assassinations disguised as executions of the Irish miners organized in the “Molly McGuires,” and that of the Martyrs of Chicago of May Day. Legally, at the end of the century it prohibited foreigners to own land in the United States.
The Alien Danger
In 1911, Joe Hill, the very dangerous Swedishborn immigrant, was executed before a phony trial in Utah in 1917, after a twoweek strike, 1,186 “dangerous” miners were deported from Arizona, and in 1927 the dangerous Italians Sacco and Vanzetti were “legally” assassinated. Seventy years after their execution their trial was declared invalid. Between 1932 and 1936, a million-and-a-half Mexican immigrants and their U.S.- born daughters and sons were deported and “depatriated” to free jobs for American citizens, just like the Barack Obama administration is doing these days.
In 1917 Asians were banned from immigrating to the U.S., and by the way, it included “illiterate, alcoholic, stowaways, vagrants, persons of psychopathic inferiority, and epileptic immigrants.” Just because, Philippines were banned in 1934. In the second half of the century, “subversive actions”, from Nazi to communist, were seen as impediments to immigrate. From 2001 on, don’t even think about it… we are all terrorists in the eyes of the government.
But let’s be fair, despite that I have done 400 writings saying we are not dangerous immigrants, the truth is, we are. Among dozens of examples of this are the Molly McGuires, Alfred Renton (Harry) Bridges, Joe Hill and Daniel DeLeón, all worker’ organizers; John Altgeld, dangerous Illinois’ immigrant governor who opposed the use of the Army to break the Pullman strike; Lucy González Parson, striker, suffragist and rebel rouser beyond borders.
Beyond individual examples, there were crowds of Greek, Italian, German, Swedish, Russian and Irish immigrants who founded labor unions, stroke everywhere and sat-in in factories and mines, forcing the country to set up the Social Security, Unemployment Compensation, Minimum Wage, 8 hour workday and many other “foreign” and “dangerous” ideas.
It is our time now, it is our wave, and we hold the most dangerous of all ideas, the idea that we all are equal and that we have the same right to immigrate as many others before us. We face the same treatment they all faced, but in the end we shall overcome. And I just hope we change the dynamic of trying to screw up the next wave of immigrants. It is 2011, time to change the country as the others changed it before us.
And, by the way, learn history. Instead of hanging a pretty cats or horses calendar in your kitchen, buy the “We The Immigrants 2011” calendar. Order it at wetheimmigrants@gmail.com
