Immigrants Are Good For Our Nation
The people who tell you otherwise are robbing you blind and pointing at those they used to steal from as the guilty party
America was built upon slavery and colonialism.
The British Empire was much the same, though they got rid of slavery far sooner than we did.
France, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain…most of Europe, at some point or another, held colonies in their possession. Colonies existed to steal land and resources from those who lived on it and who possessed it. Treaties that ceded control of the wealth and land of distant lands were written in languages that natives did not understand, when the colonizers were “generous,” and seized by force when they were not. Other places, like China, became a playground for the Great Powers, because they had not the strength to resist our militaries. When the Boxer Rebellion sprang forth against the colonists from all nations in 1905, America, France, Britain, Germany and Russia banded together to squelch it.
Those nations, later on in the Cold War years, were breeding grounds for dissent and anger at the former colonizers, and so America intervened with all of our military and economic strength to remove troublesome leaders and install dictators, pliant rulers who kept out the ideologies we didn’t like and provided us their resources at cut-rate prices. We bribed, cheated, exploited and flat-out robbed these peoples around the world of wealth they should have owned and prosperity they should have enjoyed. It is those lands today that have often become constant warzones, with greedy leaders forcing the rest to fight over the scraps that have been left behind in the worst case, or in the best case, lands that cannot feed their people, provide clean water, clean air, or basic services consistently.
Despite our centuries of injury we have inflicted, the peoples of these lands still want to come to our nations. To America, and Britain, and France, and Germany, so on and so forth. They see our comfort, our higher standard of living, our better opportunities, and what they believe to be our greater freedom, and wish to share in it. From Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to Ethiopia, Somalia and Libya to Syria, Palestine, Vietnam, and Indonesia, just to name some examples, people who believe in what we offer and what they can work hard to earn will sacrifice anything for themselves or their children to have a chance at better than we left them.
For that optimism and yearning, they earn our racism, our hatred, our scorn, and our rejection.
No matter what we said at our founding, the fact is, since the time of Andrew Jackson America has been an expansionist power, taking land that is not ours from those who are native to it, holding overseas territories without representation. Puerto Rico should be a state or independent nation, not a “territory” dependent on the whims of white men in Washington for their needs. The people of Guam and the Marianas Islands deserve the ability to earn the same wages and benefits as any other American. Hawaii is a state that was a prosperous nation before we deposed its monarch and took it over. Native Hawaiians are poorer and worse off than when America seized it in the 1890s. We are not deserving of the esteem we are held in by those peoples, yet they do so anyway.
Here’s some facts to consider:
Even undocumented migrants pay taxes via a TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number). They pay taxes to programs they will never receive benefits from, like Social Security and Medicare.
Immigrants are not “stealing our jobs.” During the Biden adminstration, despite the alleged twenty million undocumented migrants supposedly taking our jobs, unemployment reached lows that hadn’t been seen since World War II.
Immigrants built our railroads, worked our farms (and still do), continue to service our infrastructure projects, and generally perform all the backbreaking, low-wage work that Americans disdain.
We do not have any meaningful punishment for those who pay for undocumented labor in large numbers. The agricorporations, the cleaning industry, the service industry—they all will hire migrant workers knowing that they are undocumented, or underage, or even pay for some to be shipped here in big rigs like cargo. It is a new sort of slave trade, and yet the big offenders never face criminal penalties. They never face fines that would hurt them enough to stop the exploitation. America runs on this system and it will only punish the poor saps who took the jobs, not those who offered them deliberately to those they could underpay.
This entire nation is waves of immigration. The Native Americans were here first. Everyone, even if they trace back to the bloody Mayflower, are immigrants. Every single time, the next wave of those who came over were scorned by the last. The Scots-Irish, the Irish proper, the Germans, the Italians, the Hungarians, the Balkan peoples, the Jews, the Lebanese, the Mexicans (even though nearly one-third of America USED TO BE MEXICO BEFORE WE STARTED A WAR TO SEIZE IT), all of them have faced hatred, racism, and violence. And yet, they still come.
Whether it be from Stephen Miller with his beady eyes and black heart, Donald Trump’s molten head and narcissistic personality, Nigel Farage’s toothy grin and violence-inducing lies, Elon Musk’s apartheid soul, or Marine Le Pen’s Nazi-descended rhetoric, everyone who pushes the hatred and dehumanization of immigrants are privileged white people. People who profited from racism (Trump’s apartment complexes in the 1970s, Musk’s literal South African diamond mine, Farage’s Russian bankrollers) will always point to it first. They’ll point to it without providing actual evidence, and at the same time, they deliberately sabotage the economy so they can benefit. When this leads to the inevitable conclusion, they’ll point at another minority group and scream that it’s their fault, and like the gullible, spiteful people Americans too often are, we swallow the lies. We perpetuate the hate. We don’t ever think about what benefit the liars gain or point out the sheer ludicrousness of thinking that the richest man in the world, who pays very little in taxes, is telling the truth about who’s taking their jobs and living standards away.
Without immigrants, there is no America. Without immigrants, many nations would continue to lack the beautiful mélange of foods and spices and flavors that come with immigrant families. Without immigrants, our economy would not function—and in Britain, the hostility to immigrants and Europe from the far right, culminating in Brexit, has decimated their living standards. They’ve gone from a well-off nation to one where the old and the sick are literally having to choose between heating their home in the winter or not eating. The Labour government, which promised to stop all of this, has instead embraced it because of some delusion that they can win over the racists on the far right electorally. Go ask Kamala Harris how well that shit worked out, embracing the right.
People want better lives, drinkable water, affordable food, clean air, healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them, the ability to take a vacation. None of those things is taken away by poor immigrants who want those things too. It comes from the wealthy colonizers who will stoop to any low to not have to return some of their ill-gotten gains to the people they took it from. We don’t want to pay the bill we racked up through centuries of white colonialism, so we turn our guns and our laws and economic warfare upon them. Those who tell us to hate, who point their fingers and scream the loudest are laying on yachts and living in mansions, throwing money at AI technology designed to steal even more from us ordinary folk so they can build a rocket to another planet once they’re done pillaging this one. It’s embarrassing we keep playing their game. It’s disgraceful that people who know better play their game because they’re too afraid to level with people and make the necessary choices.
Immigration isn’t the problem. It’s us. We’re the problem. We’ve been the problem for at least the last 150 years (the cartoons at the top were from 1870 and 1874, respectively). We created our monsters and we refuse to put them down now, and we’re punishing the people who help make our lives better for coming later than we did. It’s immoral, it’s unjust, and it’s downright criminal. It’s long past time for the Western nations to collectively look in the mirror and recognize that this is a problem we made through colonizing and enslavement and exploitation. If we want to resolve the problem, let us make legal immigration faster, easier to understand, and easier to access. Let us work with the nations we screwed over to help revitalize their economies and stabilize their food supplies. Let us invest in them some of the gains we extracted.
It’s the least we can do to make good on the sins of past generations.