THE PERENNIALLY FALSE DEBATES BETWEEN CURRENT NATIVISTS & IMMIGRANT RIGHTS ADVOCATES

"But they came here legally, my ancestors came here the right way" the nativists say. "The people coming today, even those seeking asylum, are illegal criminals, they have no rights."

1. But back then, when today's nativists' ancestors came, no papers whatsoever - no pre-authorized U.S. visas, no birth certificates, not any other identifying document for that matter - were required to enter the U.S.; their greatest challenge then was how to buy for themselves and their families a steam ship ticket; and secondarily, to pass a quick health inspection. Millions went through it and were GIVEN papers (even new names!); a few were temporarily quarantined at the Ellis Island hospital; a tiny number died or were returned. This century of massive European migration, from the 1820s to the 1920s, was an era of "free migration," of "open borders," of the Statue of Liberty's Golden Gate.

This was not true for Asians and Africans, who were excluded in various stages. It was not true subsequently for Southern/Eastern European either after they were barred from coming from 1924 to 1965. But by then, the tens of millions of European ancestors of today's rabid nativists and restrictionists had arrived and settled in the United States, legally and freely, unfettered by having any "papers" whatsoever.

2. The Mexican, Caribbean, Central American and Filipino cases are all sui generis and very complicated, zig-zaging between open borders, restrictionist laws, guest worker legal programs, and irregular flows of undocumented seasonal migrants and later one-way, settled but criminalized immigrants and asylum seekers. The settled diasporas have been racialized, panethnicized, and alienized, but they have pushed back, then won full rights as Americans, and are now under attack again.

3. The irregular, unauthorized, and criminalized migration flows arriving at the U.S. southern border shifted from mostly Mexican male laborers to Central American refugee families, and now from Venezuela and others countries of South America and the Caribbean (Cuba, Haiti).

European refugees were NOT allowed until the late 1940s. But since WW II, after the Holocaust and with tens of millions of misplaced Europeans, the U.N. enshrined in international law (1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol) the obligation to protect refugees and admit asylum seekers fleeing persecution - conventions which the U.S. signed and later adopted as its own national law (Refugee Relief Act of 1953, Refugee Act of 1980). 

The Central American/Caribbean caravans of asylum-seekers today are exercising the LEGAL international rights; their peaceful actions seeking asylum in the U.S., whereby they seek and turn themselves to border authorities, are LAWFUL. They are not "criminals" in either international nor national law. WE are criminalizing THEM! Imagine if we had criminalized all those boat people arriving from Europe a century ago!

4. Finally, as to anybody within the jurisdiction of the United States having "no rights" - whether undocumented immigrants in the interior, asylum-seekers at or entering the U.S. borders, immigrant rights advocates engaging in peaceful protests and civil disobedience - even detained and incarcerated folks, whether citizens or not - HAVE CONSTITUTIONAL rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights. If you read those amendments, none say they only apply to "citizens" - they always say "persons." 

Immigrants are persons, they are people - whether documented or not, authorized or not - even those detained for immigration irregularities, even those that do comit crimes - HAVE CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED RIGHTS: The right to due process in legal matters, the right to free speech and assembly, the right to asylum, the right to protect against cruel and unusual punishment, and foremost, the rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Furthermore, among those living here without papers, most work and pay taxes, and most have lived here more than 10 years. Their children born here are citizens. Dreamers born elsewhere and brought here as children without papers, they have the constitutional right to education K-12, and in many states are treated as equals to all other state resident college students.

It's now clear that the MAGA Republicans in the Trump 2.0 regime and in Congress are busy violating existing international and national laws, trying to abolish constitutional protections for immigrant rights - such as birthright citizenship and the rights to asylum.

It is also clear they are cynically conflating the relative miniscule occurrences of violent crime perpetrated by immigrants with the irregular but criminalized status of undocumented immigrants. As the White House spokeswoman said, that any unauthorized immigrant that crosses the border (a civil infraction, which again is a right of asylum-seekers) "is by definition a criminal." Native Americans might answer, "When are you packing, Pilgrim?"

So this perennial, furious, and ongoing debate is false. As false as the "debate" over how much immigrants contribute to this country's well-being and prosperity (a lot!), or bring disease (they do not), or whether countries are dumping criminals and mental ward people on the U.S. (of course not!), or sending terrorists (certainly not through the southern border over the past two-and-a-half decades since the attacks of 9/11, who came legally with visas or over the Canadian border, and 3 decades since the Clinton/Gingrich hysteric anti-terrorism bills targeting minor offenders and even legal permanent resident immigrants!). 

So let's deal with what the debate is really about, shall we, behind all these phony, manufactured, but relentlessly promoted, pseudo "debates" that have the MAGA folks foaming at the mouth.

The real debate, which is rarely avowed by the MAGA folks, is two fold: 

(a) The first, disgusting true debate is over the resurrected White Christian nationalist claim, drenched in racism and xenophobia against immigrants of color, that the country is being deliberately "invaded" by non-white, non-Christian black and brown immigrants, brought in by a cabal of globalist, powerful Jews (ah, raw, white antisemitism rears its ugly head once again in this land of the free, home of the brave). In polite company, MAGA folks default to the phony debates about "crime" we discussed above. But they show their hand again and again - Trump himself habitually does ("they’re poisoning the blood of America", "they're emptying their jails and mental wards," etc.).

(b) The other real, and equally callous debate, which is very similar to the climate change debate in the United States (not the phony claim it does not even exist), revolves around the matter of responsibility -- responsibility for causing the migrant, refugee flows in the first place; responsibility for releasing most of the green-house gases causing catastrophic climate change.

Both kinds of debates involve cloaking the century or more of depredations by the U.S. superpower with willful amnesia and cynical washing of the hands from any U.S. accountability for the global problems that it help cause: in the case of migration flows, pretending the U.S. did not destabilize those countries and forcefully displaced the populations into irregular migration flows through wars, interventions, and predatory, neoliberal economic models that pauperized those countries for the benefit of transnational corporations.

So we need to confront, denounce, and ultimately defeat both the immigrant restrictionists AND the climate change deniers for their self-serving, callous, mendacious, and disingenuous arguments for violating human rights, persecuting and criminalizing refugees and asylum-seekers, and accelerating disastrous global climate change without taking any responsibility for causing it.

The world today is on fire -environmental and geopolitical - and  ideologically speaking, its citizens in the Global North, especially in the U.S., are drowning in manufactured lies and panicked into embracing fascist "solutions." Those "solutions" will only aggravate matters.

So, what is to be done? The ancient wisdom of the Good Book proclaims, "The Truth shall make you Free."

So, step one, shed the lies. Step two, fight the Good Fight, armed with the Truth. Step three, save the world!

You got your homework assignment, people!