[News] Stop Saying This Is a Nation of Immigrants!
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue May 30 14:08:27 EDT 2006
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/>http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/
Stop Saying This Is a Nation of Immigrants!
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
A nation of immigrants: This is a convenient myth
developed as a response to the 1960s movements
against colonialism, neocolonialism, and white
supremacy. The ruling class and its brain trust
offered multiculturalism, diversity, and
affirmative action in response to demands for
decolonization, justice, reparations, social
equality, an end of imperialism, and the
rewriting of history -- not to be "inclusive" --
but to be accurate. What emerged to replace the
liberal melting pot idea and the nationalist
triumphal interpretation of the "greatest country
on earth and in history," was the "nation of immigrants" story.
By the 1980s, the “waves of immigrants” story
even included the indigenous peoples who were so
brutally displaced and murdered by settlers and
armies, accepting the flawed "Bering Straits"
theory of indigenous immigration some 12,000
years ago. Even at that time, the date was known
to be wrong, there was evidence of indigenous
presence in the Americas as far back as 50,000
years ago, and probably much longer, and entrance
by many means across the Pacific and the Atlantic
-- perhaps, as Vine Deloria jr. put it, footsteps
by indigenous Americans to other continents will
one day be acknowledged. But, the new official
history texts claimed, the indigenous peoples
were the "first immigrants." They were followed,
it was said, by immigrants from England and
Africans, then by Irish, and then by Chinese,
Eastern and Southern Europeans, Russians,
Japanese, and Mexicans. There were some
objections from African Americans to referring to
enslaved Africans hauled across the ocean in
chains as "immigrants," but that has not deterred
the "nation of immigrants" chorus.
Misrepresenting the process of European
colonization of North America, making everyone an
immigrant, serves to preserve the "official
story" of a mostly benign and benevolent USA, and
to mask the fact that the pre-US independence
settlers, were, well, settlers, colonial setters,
just as they were in Africa and India, or the
Spanish in Central and South America. The United
States was founded as a settler state, and an
imperialistic one from its inception ("manifest
destiny," of course). The settlers were English,
Welsh, Scots, Scots-Irish, and German, not
including the huge number of Africans who were
not settlers. Another group of Europeans who
arrived in the colonies also were not settlers or
immigrants: the poor, indentured, convicted,
criminalized, kidnapped from the working class
(vagabonds and unemployed artificers), as Peter
Linebaugh puts it, many of who opted to join indigenous communities.
Only beginning in the 1840s, with the influx of
millions of Irish Catholics pushed out of Ireland
by British policies, did what might be called
"immigration" begin. The Irish were
discriminated against cheap labor, not
settlers. They were followed by the influx of
other workers from Scandinavia, Eastern and
Southern Europe, always more Irish, plus Chinese
and Japanese, although Asian immigration was soon
barred. Immigration laws were not even enacted
until 1875 when the US Supreme Court declared the
regulation of immigration a federal
responsibility. The Immigration Service was established in 1891.
Buried beneath the tons of propaganda -- from the
landing of the English “pilgrims” (fanatic
Protestant Christian evangelicals) to James
Fennimore Cooper’s phenomenally popular “Last of
the Mohicans” claiming “natural rights” to not
only the indigenous peoples territories but also
to the territories claimed by other European
powers -- is the fact that the founding of the
United States was a division of the Anglo empire,
with the US becoming a parallel empire to Great
Britain. From day one, as was specified in the
Northwest Ordinance that preceded the US
Constitution, the new republic for empire (as
Jefferson called the US) envisioned the future
shape of what is now the lower 48 states of the
US. They drew up rough maps, specifying the
first territory to conquer as the "Northwest
Territory," ergo the title of the
ordinance. That territory was the Ohio Valley
and the Great Lakes region, which was filled with
indigenous farming communities.
Once the conquest of the "Northwest Territory"
was accomplished through a combination of
genocidal military campaigns and bringing in
European settlers from the east, and the
indigenous peoples moved south and north for
protection into other indigenous territories, the
republic for empire annexed Spanish Florida where
runaway enslaved Africans and remnants of the
indigenous communities that had escaped the Ohio
carnage fought back during three major wars
(Seminole wars) over two decades. In 1828,
President
<http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=25>Andrew
Jackson (who had been a general leading the
Seminole wars) pushed through the Indian Removal
Act to force all the agricultural indigenous
nations of the Southeast, from Georgia to the
Mississippi River, to transfer to Oklahoma
territory that had been gained through the
<http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/34.1/thomson.html>"Louisiana
Purchase" from France. Anglo settlers with
enslaved Africans seized the indigenous
agricultural lands for plantation agriculture in
the Southern region. Many moved on into the
Mexican province of Texas -- then came the US
military invasion of Mexico in 1846, seizing
Mexico City and forcing Mexico to give up its
northern half through the 1848 Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo. California, Arizona, New
Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Texas were then opened to
"legal" Anglo settlement, also legalizing those
who had already settled illegally, and in Texas
by force. The indigenous and the poor Mexican
communities in the seized territory, such as the
Apache, Navajo, and Comanche, resisted
colonization, as they had resisted the Spanish
empire, often by force of arms, for the next 40
years. The small class of Hispanic elites
welcomed and collaborated with US occupation.
Are "immigrants" the appropriate designation for
the indigenous peoples of North America? No.
Are "immigrants" the appropriate designation for enslaved Africans? No.
Are "immigrants" the appropriate designation for
the original European settlers? No.
Are "immigrants" the appropriate designation for
Mexicans who migrate for work to the United States? No.
They are migrant workers crossing a border
created by US military force. Many crossing that
border now are also from Central America, from
the small countries that were ravaged by US
military intervention in the 1980s and who also
have the right to make demands on the United States.
So, let's stop saying "this is a nation of immigrants."
[]
<http://www.reddirtsite.com/index.html>
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/0504taylor.htm>Roxanne
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/1202dunbarortiz.htm>Dunbar-<http://www.monthlyreview.org/0703dunbarortiz.htm>Ortiz
is a long-time activist, university professor,
and writer. In addition to numerous scholarly
books and articles, she has written three
historical memoirs,
<http://www.reddirtsite.com/>Red Dirt: Growing Up
Okie (Verso, 1997),
<http://www.citylights.com/pub/catalog/BCoutlaw.html>Outlaw
Woman: Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (City
Lights, 2002), and
<http://www.southendpress.org/2005/items/7417>Blood
on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (South
End Press, 2005) about the 1980s contra war against the Sandinistas.
[]
[]
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(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org
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