YOUR IMMIGRANT MOTHERS, AND OURS, SHARE THE SAME HEROIC STORY!
- Gonzalo Santos
- Mar 11
- 5 min read
This is a letter to all my beloved U.S. communities, but especially to those whose forefathers and foremothers came from Europe:
Unless your ancestors came before there were modern colonial and national borders, as the ancestors of all indigenous First Nations of the Americas did millennia ago, or your ancestors where brought in chains from Africa by European colonial powers to be sold into slavery to work in the plantations and mines, this message pertains to you and your ancestors.
Among "white" Americans, about 40% of you can trace their ancestry back to Ellis Island, the primary East Coast immigration station for the United States, from 1892 to 1954 - a period when practically no one else was admitted that was not European. Twelve million European immigrants were processed and admitted (a tiny fraction denied entry, mostly due to communicable illness).
"Processing,” take note, did not require any documentation whatsoever, until 1924, and everyone was welcome from every corner of Europe, now matter how poor or old - although the Statue of Liberty was officially unveiled in 1886, Emma Lazarus’s famous poem connecting it to such “huddled masses yearning to be free” was placed at its base in 1903. After 1924, when the "Golden Gate" was shut to all Asians and non-WASP Europeans (a process started against the Chinese immigrants in 1882), only a trickle came, exclusively from WASP countries (U.K., Germany, France, Netherlands, Scandinavia).
For many decades during the open period, the biggest challenge faced by this mass migration flow from Europe was procuring the relatively expensive tickets to cross the Atlantic on a steamship. As the ships got larger (the incentive to build the Titanic), the ticket price came down; e.g., 3rd-class tickets in the Titanic were only 7 British Pounds, or US$35 in 1912. That's how Donald Trump's paternal enterprising grandfather and his own pauper, determined mother came, respectively, from Germany and Scotland.
And yet, if you watch the latest Ken Burns documentary, "The Statute of Liberty", the resilience, heroism, and idealism of those arriving immigrant mothers and grandmothers clutching their poor but happy children - especially prior to 1924 - is unmistakable and most inspiring.
Why then, I ask, with infinitely harsher legal, economic, and geographic barriers facing our current immigrant mothers with their refugee children, arriving desperately from many regions of the Americas and war-torn/famine parts of the world, would anyone WHOSE OWN ANCESTORS indomitably came against all odds, be so callous and indifferent as to want to criminalize these mothers, instead of welcoming them and celebrating their moral and physical audacity, their indomitable perseverance, and their unbound heroism, many crossing by foot jungles, deserts, and rivers seeking life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for their children, exactly the same as their female ancestors did?
I refuse to call this the eternal moral and social failure of "human nature." Especially given how we actually experienced much more welcoming immigration regimes in the history of the U.S. — in the colonial era and up to 1882, then from 1965 to the 1990s. We did embrace the foreigner before!
But we have been inexorably and undeniably regressing ever since then; first, infamously, with the callous California's Proposition 187 in 1994, passed by a huge majority of the white electorate; then the draconian and punitive restrictionist laws of 1996, a template for today’s laws; and after 9/11 in 2001, in that sordid and deliberate and cynical conflation, on the part of politicians and media, of irregular migration with terrorism and criminality.
We are now living, without doubt, in the worse period of xenophobia and mass hysteria against immigrants and asylum seekers in one hundred years, when the Golden Gates were shut on both coasts - leaving it open, ironically, to the circular yearly flows of sojourn migrants from Mexico to help develop the U.S. Southwest (agriculture, railroads, and mining), once Asians were excluded, Native Americans locked behind their concentration camps we call "reservations", and non-WASP Europeans barred from coming.
A necessary clarification of the true origins - not human nature - of today’s broken and unjust migration regime in North America: Tragically, the much-celebrated liberal opening to migration flows from all over the world after 1965 had a deep flaw in its architecture. Beyond unlimited family reunification visas, it mandated the same number of permanent visas be "capped" for all countries, those with a history of migration and those with none - all in the name of “fairness.” Migration from Mexico, which had long relied on yearly circular flows in the hundreds of thousands of migrants (irregular or contracted), now was forced to go through the funnel of only 25 thousand visas per year, causing migrants to come irregularly ("illegally") and settle permanently (if unauthorized). The borders hardened and the historically mostly-male migrant workers began to bring their families with them to stay, as they suffered from hardened borders, increasing stigmatization and criminalization, and being regularly scapegoated and accused of being "invaders" and "criminals" with nefarious purposes by the entire Republican Party (with ample help from the Blue Dog Democrats) and the echo chambers of manufactured hysteria in a new media ecosystem (rightwing talk radio and cable TV). Reagan was the last Republican president who recognized their full humanity, and signed an amnesty for those locked in without papers, but even he increased the militarization of the border and criminalized hiring them. Clinton was worse, imposing mandatory deportations for minor infractions, setting the legal framework for the American Gulag of immigrant prisons, and barring for 3 & 10 years the return of deported immigrants.
With Bush Jr., Obama, Trump I, Biden, and now Trump II, things have just gone from bad to worse.
We have reached the asymptotic logical limits of such an amoral, political, and social reversal and degradation process now, which has spilled into the major crisis and chaos we witness in the political economy of the United States and the entire North American region. Witness, for example, the unheard-of intrusion and deep disruption caused by the wholly-manufactured immigration crises (internally, with 12 million artificially-kept undocumented folks; externally, by blocking and deporting, with the support of the Mexican government, hundreds of thousands asylum-seekers arriving, or seeking to arrive, at the southern U.S. border) in the otherwise almost sacred process of neoliberal economic integration of North America as a mighty trading block in the world-economy.
Not recognizing the humanity and morally-justified actions and dreams of the migrant mothers for the sake of their children has now led to threatening the entire economic, political, and social edifice upon which the American experiment and future depends: an open society, democracy, shared prosperity, justice.
Are we willing to pay that price to kill those immigrant mothers’ dreams? Are we so afraid of them that we kill our own?
Without knowledge of our own history, we are bound to repeat its errors. We’ve had jingoistic nativist mass hysterias in the past. Without human empathy and solidarity for all, we are bound to follow again demagogues that instill, aided now by vast digital propaganda systems, fear and hatred against foreigners in our midst and incoming ones, casting them as "criminal invaders," and hiding ourselves behind ever-narrower, higher, crueler, and morally and practically indefensible walls of privilege - morally indefensible because our foremothers climbed them to give us our future, practically indefensible because no physical barrier or repressive regime will stop humanity on the march. Another world is needed, another North America is necessary.
The migration story is humanity's story, from time immemorial to today. We shall only elevate and advance the later by embracing and honoring the former.
WE are not criminals, our mothers and grandmothers never were nor are criminals. Neither were YOURS - we are all part of the same human story. Get that into your closed minds, Americans, and soften your artificially-hardened hearts. And get this, too: we, the children of today’s immigrant mothers are not waiting for you to do so, as we mobilize to resist, until we secure our fullest human rights, in every aspect and every way we can.
STOP THE DEPORTATIONS!
A JUST AND HUMANE MIGRATION REGIME FOR NORTH AMERICA NOW!