THE IMMIGRATION PROBLEM
We are getting close to a study of the Exclusion Acts…they were a series of laws, concentrating around federal law that for almost 100 years kept Asian immigration at ridiculously low legal levels.
This after the Chinese immigrants helped build the transcontinental railroad. This made Leland Stanford and the “robber barons” (a nickname for the ruthlessness the “entrepreneurs of transcontinental railroad”) who bullied their way across the Great Plains, killing thousands of Native Americans and millions of bison.
The Chinese were running from a series of civil wars in their homeland…sound familiar…right now thousands are seeking refuge in America from Central America, Asia, Africa; you name it
Why? It is as Trump declares to get away from “shit hole” countries? Why do people emigrate?
The fact that most of these emigrations are from equatorial regions, where global climate change is the most dangerous, tells it all.
Governments tend to be overwhelmed by the byproducts of climate change; witness the disaster going on in our own country, as people are stressed and endangered by a pandemic that is traceable to climate change causes.
And this will not go away.
People have migrated since and during the Ice Age, fleeing weather than no longer can sustain large populations.
And the byproduct of this migration is nativism. Nativism is tied to xenophobia, the fear of strangers from different cultures.
Our sitting President was elected from this hatred.
Some of it is based in reality, there are many people who just cannot live in over heated environments, with the level of oceans rendering their homelands non sustaining to human life.
What would you do? Right now in California we will see an exodus out of fire zones back into cities, anywhere but “here”…
And the stresses on the cultures in the “target” areas (that can still sustain a decent life style) are growing.
The reaction is the same it has been for ages. Those living in areas that still can provide living space are overwhelmed by the newcomers..
This happened in the 1800s with the “potato famine” in Ireland and parts of Europe who fled in mass to the Americas…and the Irish were hated by the nativists.
For example, the Civil War was fought with a disproportionate numbers of Irish Immigrants who had fled poverty in Ireland to run right into a Civil War and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad in the same decade..
The Irish died for a country they just had arrived in; and built the transcontinental railroad side by side with the hated Chinese.
Before the war, the xenophobia toward Irish and Chinese was what broke the back of the Whig Party, whose decline helped Lincoln win the Presidency and caused the Civil War.
The Civil War in many ways was caused by nativism, the country was at war with itself, the African American “immigration”, the Irish and Chinese “immigration” that caused violent reactions; and political change that drove the country into war.
That is the same thing that is going on now…our political parties have divided more than usual into a government that cannot heal itself…A government of no compromise; as Republicans (Lincoln’s Party) are the exclusionary party while the Democrats are inclusion.
If we had time machines and people from 1860 who could see this party sea change they would go mad….
Anti-immigration is as old as the Republic, is tearing Europe apart right now as well, and does not bode well for international peace.
And race was never mentioned because the clash of cultures is really what all of this is about; race was an invention to make hating easier.
RACE WAS AN INVENTION TO MAKE HATING EASIER….and more helpful to unscrupulous politicians…..