Borders are a pain in the butt

Take a look at these three rivers.



Aren't they all beautiful? I've always loved rivers. I've also always been impressed by the fact that you can cross some rivers and be in another state (political boundary). Or another country (political boundary). However, it is illegal to cross one of the rivers pictured (I won't tell you whether it's A, B, or C) . You must cross at an approved facility and have your paperwork in order. The white man says so.

Sometimes, I confess, I despise boundaries.

You know those brown skinned people who keep trying to cross our border and we call them illegal immigrants?

Well. Let me set the record straight. We white people are the immigrants. And we black people, for the most part, are the (involuntary) immigrants.

That little river down there we call a "border?" That little stream was never a "border" until whitey arrived. Prior to us, that was just another river, not unlike the Little Missouri.

Suddenly the white man made it a border with his artificial boundaries and now everyone sneaking across it, as well as the "line" across the deserts of California, Arizona, and New Mexico) has been declared an "illegal immigrant."

I am the descendant of illegal immigrants.

The same can be said of our northern border. Amber waves of grain, as far as the eye can see. But somewhere in the midst of all the waving grain is another border between us and Canada. And next year you'll need a passport to legally cross it.

I wanna give a shout out to the three affiliated tribes based in New Town, North Dakota.

I seem to remember that my grandparents came from Viking Territory. And then we tried to conquer the Dakotas. Of course, the goverment gave my grandparents the special little homestead. God Bless the U.S. Government.

Want to talk immigration? OK, let's go. We'll start with this John O’Sullivan piece at National Review Online, referring to the massive protests by immigrants awhile back:

If one listens carefully to the rhetoric of the marchers and their organizers, they deny the right of Congress and the voters to control immigration, to expel illegal immigrants, or even to place any conditions on their remaining — the conditions that the voters insist on as the minimum for any genuine compromise.

Such rhetoric comes under two headings. The first holds that the illegals are already Americans with the rights of American citizens since any distinction between citizens and foreigners is suspect as xenophobic or racist. The second is that the Americans are the real foreigners since they invaded America, stole it from the Indians and Amerindians, drew their own illegal borders across it, and now seek to criminalize the original inhabitants.

These two positions plainly contradict each other. Neither is likely to appeal to the voters. But the second is much more repellent to ordinary Americans than the first.

Repellant? Of course it is because the truth is often ugly. Read on... this piece at Houston Catholic Worker by Brian Frazelle is particularly interesting (emphasis mine):

There is always a touch of irony when a citizen of the United States complains about immigration. Except for those of pure Native American origin, every one of us is of immigrant descent. Native Americans inhabited the continent for over 12,000 years before the arrival of Europeans. The United States gained its territory largely through the dishonest and violent removal of the indigenous population. Yet somehow we maintain the idea that this land is ours alone and that it is not only harmful but immoral for other people to enter it.

Picture this: a state within the U.S. has been receiving a large number of immigrants from a foreign country. The immigrant population becomes so great that the public school system institutes bilingual education in many areas. Over time, abetted by political events, this practice becomes controversial and a public backlash forms against bilingual education and the immigrants themselves. One disgruntled state legislator declares, "If these people are Americans, let them speak our language."

Does this story describe California or Texas in the 1990s?

No, it describes Nebraska in the early part of this century. The immigrants in question are German immigrants (Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1990. ps.159-60). The history of the United States is a story of successive waves of immigration, each wave arriving from a different area on the globe. With each new influx of immigrants, the older population has balked, claiming that the new arrivals would cause harm to the nation. Chances are, what is said today about Hispanic immigrants was once said about your own ancestors.

We often question guests of Casa Juan Diego about their work experiences back home. Laboring in Mexican factories, they receive a little over $3.00 a day, not nearly enough to maintain an adequate living standard. This alone may not surprise people. What is surprising is that more likely than not, these workers are employed by United States' companies!

U.S. and European corporations now have the permission and the technology to locate factories throughout the third world. There they do not have to abide by the wage, safety, or environmental standards that are in effect here. Consequently, people in Mexico and Central America are receiving slave wages to manufacture products such as clothing or automobiles that will be profitably sold in the U.S.

The following text was borrowed from Texas Indians by R. Edward Moore. I hope he doesn't mind.

The Conchos lived next the Jumano Indians - just south of them. Most of the early accounts describe the Concho and Jumano as being friends and being very similar in appearance and culture. During the Spanish Colonial period the Jumano and the Concho Indians joined together several times to revolt against the Spanish. They did this because the Spanish were coming into their territory and capturing them as slaves. They would make these slaves work in Spanish mines. Working in the mines as a slave was very hard and dangerous work.

This slave raiding by the Spanish seems to have helped destroy the Conchos. Their numbers got smaller and smaller. The diseases the Europeans brought also hurt them. Many of them died from disease. When their numbers got very small, some sources say they joined the Jumano and became Jumanos. This was sometime in the early 1700s.

Today, there was this article from the NY Times regarding the plight of fruit farmers in California who are unable to get labor to harvest their crops due to our national obsession with the brown menace from our neighbor to the south (emphasis mine):

Now harvest time has passed and tons of pears have ripened to mush on their branches, while the ground of Mr. Ivicevich’s orchard reeks with rotting fruit. He and other growers in Lake County, about 90 miles north of San Francisco, could not find enough pickers.

Stepped-up border enforcement kept many illegal Mexican migrant workers out of California this year, farmers and labor contractors said, putting new strains on the state’s shrinking seasonal farm labor force.

As they sum up this season’s losses, estimated to be at least $10 million for California pear farmers alone, growers in the state mainly blame Republican lawmakers in Washington for stalling immigration legislation that would have addressed the shortage by authorizing a guest-worker program for agriculture. Many growers, a dependably Republican group, said they felt betrayed.

“After a while, you get done being sad and start being really angry,” said Toni Scully, a lifelong Republican whose family owns a pear-packing operation in Lake County. “The Republicans have given us a lot of lip service, and our crops are hanging on the trees rotting.”

While the xenophobic debates flare up across our nation, along with insane proposals for expenditures to benefit Boeing and other corporate conglomerates, I am ashamed of my own race. I'm not ashamed of being an American. I am one -- and I am equal to the brown babies who were born today to "illegal immigrant" mothers across our land.

The House has passed, and the Senate seems ready to go along with, a measure to require construction of a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border. That would cost at least $2 billion, and that's in addition to a $2.5 billion initiative, entrusted to Boeing Co. this week, to erect "virtual fences" along the northern and southern borders.

That, taken from the Washington Post, exemplifies the radical right-wing hate-mob's attitude towards natives who have claimed this land far longer than the white man who robbed them of it for their own gain.

Won't that fence be a beautiful addition to a beautiful & natural landscape? And, by the way, it won't do shit to stop "illegal" immigration. Money down the drain. Your tax dollars.

Think about it while you are paying a hell of a lot more for produce.



This post was written and inspired by txrad (the Viking reference) and konagod.

Proudly crossposted at B3