Everybody’s An Alien But Me; I’m not So Sure About You
It bodes ill for a tribe when those in it think those who are among us who sport both virtue and wit along with intelligence advertise their good qualities by having an accent; they are more times than not liable to be expensive morons if they lack one. I’ve had that horrible feeling for the last two decades I’ve lived in America. So have a lot of people.
We are by now likely to trust the morals, honesty and industry as well as the sheer intellect of anyone from Mexico to China to East Europeans when we meet them more than our native born posh sociopathic brats. Since nearly all of them come from some place they’ve deemed intolerable or certainly inferior to the United States, they appreciate freedoms that our own American born citizens, having no more knowledge of human history than they do of culture or geography, might think are their natural legacy.
As things stand as I write this there are probably seven or eight million or more illegal aliens in the United States, some say; since they don’t advertise their status for obvious reasons nobody knows how many there might be.
It means illegal aliens are roughly a population among us three times the size of any Scandinavian populace, many of them skilled workers because they were educated elsewhere, none of them able to manipulate our Welfare engines and diverse entitlements, living as our common ancestors did on their wits and ability to scramble, work hard and maintain their value to those who pay wages enough to sustain themselves.
They are like our own forefathers in enterprise, brave and intrepid folk who have come here with nothing, left everything they could not carry behind them, because they want to live in a relatively free nation. It’s much more of an embrace of liberty than being born here.
For a country at least half of whose philosophy and police was formed by a West Indian poor boy genius, Alexander Hamilton, the United States has been singularly unappreciative of the contributions of foreign-born citizens who have seen that State of Liberty as they slid on a boat into New York. Although the colonies and the new United States was founded by a population of aliens who had escaped from other places, so many of whom were criminals in their places of origin that Benjamin Franklin wrote a satire on England’s partiality for exiling them to their American colonies, there has always been some two tiered provision in the Constitution that has denied the rights of somebody or other. Sometimes it was Blacks, other times it was women.
In 1803 when the United States took over the vast territory it called Louisiana, one which included the Mississippi, Missouri and other states, those residents of this autocratic and religion-mad French-owned territory found themselves to be United States citizens in an ultimately loose free society whether they liked it or not.
After 1848 when American annexed most of northern Mexico the same thing happened to anyone who lived from Texas to California. Then many Americans realized that a lot of Chinese could outwork them in equal competition. From 1880 to 1950 one couldn’t come here from Asia, not merely China. From 1920 to 1950 if one were not from Northern Europe, the very place whose colonial arrogance that had provoked our 1776 Revolution, one had to sneak into the country from a rowboat at midnight.
If one were Black though one had titular legal equality after the Civil War the United States didn’t get around to enforcing that law until a mix of the activists on the Supreme Court and the inimitable deal making Lyndon Johnson pushed other laws, perhaps not all that much enforced either, to gerund Afro-Americans de facto citizenship.
If one were a divorced father in America from the feminist and Welfare heyday of those legal slaughterhouses one lost one’s citizens when one was an adult though one still had the right to vote. As long as one’s ex-wife lived or one had children under 21 any judge could tell one what one was to do with one’s income and property while he told one the law says his kids were to be raised by his enemies to hate him forever.
When I mentioned this two-tiered practice to the ACLU I was told civilly by one of the ACLU doesn’t bright young female lawyers take up calls action suits about that; it focuses on equal pay for women in executive positions in the corporate world. So much for the ACLU, folks.
The worst condition in America is to be American-born from a group that was here tens of thousands of years before the Mayflower showed up in a New England bay: the Indians. They still don’t have the franchises of the people who supported their control of over the land on which the United State exist.
If one happens to be American born but smoked the wrong leaf in a park and was picked up by the police, or as is common, didn’t do it and was arrested anyway b y the police, convicted by the Justice system of this heinous act, one loses all right also even if one isn’t an Indian.
Yet the United States runs on some mix of illegal aliens, prison graduates, some others about whom no questions are asked to the point where in the California gubernatorial debate one of the candidates pointed out that California couldn’t survive a day without the work of its illegal aliens. It’s not the only place.
Most America cities now including my own New York couldn’t make it a week if it Mexicans disappeared. It’s something the INS winks at because in their view if you can’t have slavery anymore having illegal aliens and lots of felons when the felony is enjoying some harmless private taste is a mechanism of disenfranchisement works for everybody.
If the United States were to identify and deport their legal aliens, who aren’t hard to find, in sheer mass are one out of 250 people living here at the least, the corporations would loose cheap labor, the aliens would have to give up the halfway and shadowy status that is available to them, a life that is at its worst incomparably better than where they came from or the aliens would go back there. It’s about as likely as the now increasingly remote descendants of Black slaves returning to Africa to find their roots and take their respected place in their supposedly native continent.
Just as there is nothing more severely American nowadays than being Black, there is nobody living more patriotic lives in the United States than 99% of its Arab-American exiles along with the general run of our illegal aliens. They are our true patriots, the ones closest spirits among us to the world of our 1776 founders.
Most importantly, the employees of the INS have to do nothing. The whole multi-faceted operation, semi-legal itself to totally illegal, only registers to anyone in America as something less than an impeccable contract for all when we get bomb out by suicidal fanatics who trained to do it in our own country. Even then the INS makes a few cosmetic movies but basically keeps the huge class without franchise, vote or other rights in its now traditional place in our democracy: at the bottom.
The corporation can play the alien less than minimum wages, the aliens can be happy they aren’t kicked back to some boondocks where they’d be making even less and may even be massacred afterwards for an encore, and keeping marijuana illegal keeps one more huge tax free business viable.
For this reason until September 11th, 2001, the INS was a model of ineptitude whose ultimate incompetence in all matters made everybody in America happy. Santa Claus was never as popular among some folk as the INS. It offered profit to corporation and redemption to everybody else as few religions ever finally deliver.
Of course, given the scurvy involutions of human nature, those among us with a talent for sociopathy, a quality almost necessary in our nation if one doesn’t wasn’t to be prey.
Like some of our other wonderful laws, slavery, Prohibition, lack of women’s suffrage, Jim Crow, a crusade against pleasure, a distaste for consensual polygamy or the recondite and mysterious delights of sleeping with one’s own sex, our feeling of our leaders if not the country that smoking a reefer is a satanic enterprise worse than serial killing, various businesses, institutions and shadowy groups whose nature and structure is beyond language itself, have manifested themselves in our national culture to combat the rampant madness of these crazy laws.
Not in the back of the line is the American federal government itself, at once withholding citizenship from illegal aliens yet registering them to collect their income taxes while denying them any franchise whatsoever in a naked Washington protection racket.
One could go on. The result of all these laws is always the same. One creates by some nutty edict a class of people internally whom we cannot do without yet we treat as if they are slaves or something like slaves. Then there is some Abolitionist movement and if successful the hunger to make slaves shifts to any other group without clout or support who becomes designated prey.
If one buys a paper and can’t read one might think the news is always the same. If one can read one might notice more quickly that different kinds of people are being arrested, locked up, arraigned and treated lock cockroaches from decades to decade. One has to suspect that the laws that brought my family here and inspired Emma Lazarus to write her famous poem about the Statue Of Liberty was itself not a total act of compassion and charity. 19th century America was a place that had large populations of Indians and some very ornery maverick Whites and slaves who for different reasons weren’t happy with Washington. It might be that the emigrants who filled the factories after the Civil War were hired economic soldiers the new oligarchs needed to man their business places with more loyalty than American had for the very people who were closing down their small autonomous farms.
I do know that many of these emigrants, though they had lived here over a half country, never become American citizens until the First World War and its jingoism began to make distinctions about who was one of the boys, who an outsider and hired gun or cattle for the tribe. The racist laws against even most Europeans were engaged by Woodrow Wilson’s attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer after the Bolshevik Revolution when he and his peers perceived that many of the emigrants they hah let into the United States were of a socialist persuasion.
Given the ways corporations treated workers it should have been hard for them to figure out that anybody at all, American-born as well, was looking for some champions of their interests and that in the 19th century labor unions were nearly all run by radical Irishmen.
Palmer wasn’t about to run all the Irish back to Ireland, they were too strong a Democratic voting bloc for Wilson, but he did make sure that after 1920 all East Europeans were a person au gratin as well as non grata here.
One should say about the Palmer laws which included razing the homes of American citizen he suspects of having nefarious left wing opinions, closing down all the whorehouse in New Orleans and doing other damage to the fragile estate of pleasure and security among us, that all of the 1920 programs of the Socialist party that was such an odium among Wilson’s and Palmer’s crowd was enacted as law twelve years later under FDR. Palmer may have ruined a lot of lives but in the end the common people got franchised here pretty much as they had to be to keep this country stable.
As a doddering crone who remembers the octogenarian oldsters of my own family in their ripeness and over ripeness, some of whom had accents, once were granted birth by God as a marginal muzhik in some autocratic boondocks, has seen the very laws and franchises of my country change more in a me volatile way than the celestial cycles of caterpillars turning to butterflies, I find these latest antics as well as the history of how America treats its political amaranth incomprehensible.
What was the matter with the laws that brought our armies of hard working emigrants here that adorned this land and were grateful to be here in the first place that they changed’ What perverse itch got into our lawmakers to deny us the strength that could have come from the bravest and best of the population of the entire planet over centuries’
We don’t even know what we’ve lost from keeping out Asians from 1880 till 1960. We might imagine had they come this way a much more interesting and diverse country we never have the fortune to live in.
If we think of an America adorned by the hundred million Europeans that Europe itself killed in the Second World War or Stalin’s genocidal purges almost none of whom could get into the United States because of its Nazi-like bigoted laws, utterly opposed to every American principle of rough equality of all people there was, we might have some sense of what we have lost by letting those folk literally go up in German smoke, vanish into the snows of the Gulag or be shot as one episode in a large and proper stratagem for some nation of louts to expand its aegis over one more valley than it had before.
We also have missed the singular and ferocious character of African genius that might have given our country an deep and large enrichment from another angle when we shrugged at the genocides in Rwanda and didn’t offer their victims wholesale asylum. Now is our big chance to expand African emigration and reap the rewards from other people’s catastrophes.
Since the politics of the world is always more or less the same, almost always dismal, we have always stood to gain for the worst of reasons from the disasters of the rest of the planet. In fact, if we were even a trifle more satanic they we are, we would have promoted these atrocities everywhere on Earth we could do so secretly to garner the best of their survivors.
The reason we haven’t equitable laws about emigrants has been about the trail of money and still is. They will change only when those with power can make a nickel more by reforming them. People once felt wage earners would cost more to employ than slaves, emigrants might organize to turn this counter Bolshevik, Northern Europeans looked and acted more American than Congolese pygmies, smoking a joint would correct our youth but an illegal murderous colonial war wouldn’t, fey bedroom practices would infallibly destroy our manhood but the catastrophic results of ordinary and mediocre heterosexual legal mating promoted equally by the Right and Left with its government bounty on broken homes and divorce wouldn’t.
In fact most of the social damage that has been done in America has come from the very government that promoted such crazy laws by stealth, not its dissenters.
In fact our enemies from 1776 through 1945 with a few expectations have been Northern Europeans. The most consistent enemy in our history in war and peace has been England. We till can’t get England out of our schools and mount an education that reflects our republican and diverse populist genius. Subtle English influence to center this contra as its cultural province is one of the many reason why our schools don’t work in peace or war. Most of us make excellent Americans but third rate English provincials.
We’re had plenty of corruption and Marxist ingress from zealots who have moved into their present clout by stealth; they are all certified to act as they do by the government. Nothing has corrupted our internal like our native North European jingoists. They were the most aggressive and venomous racists in our history. Nothing has coarsen us like our external colonial depredations and colonial penetrations even in peace. You’d need quite an army of horrible aliens to offer us anything more destructive and stupid than the social catastrophes we invent without their help.
When I worked for Welfare as a very young man I was one of the corruptor myself. Believe me, I wasn’t qualified to corrupt a cockroach.
My great grandparents were aliens; I’m the result of millions of years of alien life. I have to be for aliens as I am sometimes for myself. As an American who values anybody with an accent even if it’s a cyborg I’d like to see all this venomous craziness about the limits of rights of illegal aliens end like advertisements for typewriters and 1987 calendars.
In fact I’d like to see our government promote the best aliens in the world coming here. Mediocrities are not so bad either. Still these days they aren’t good enough by themselves for us. We need a vast horde of geniuses to buoy us up and support our artificial native incompetents to the posh and stuporous life to which they would like to be accustomed.