The Senselessness of US Immigration, Border Angers, Races, Skin Color, Words, & Destiny’s Reviled Manifest
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I knew a guy who had the most excellent Australian accent ever. He was the Crocodile Dundee of SCSU in the mid 1990s, where I went to complete my degree after two years of college in the early 1980s. He was boisterous, funny, and always animated. Do you have a picture in your head as to what Nick looked like? Tannish skin, slim, great smile, handsome, and half Chinese and half Thai.
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Strangely his parents were not given a friendly welcome when they arrived Down Under with too many of their kind overrunning the continent. Why does “their kind” sound so familiar? Could it be that Aussies seem to have a problem with too many immigrants at their doorstep?… Or near their shores, I guess. It is as if white Australians are an arrogant, selfish, horde as well as a forgetful lot about their history. They kinda were the first interlopers, and not very nice ones; if Aborigines are any judge of white caricatures at all. Americans, on the other hand… Well, I don’t need to get into hitting that too-close-to-home thing right now.
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Just so you know, Nick Kim was not an immigrant here; he was on a student visa. He was heading back to Australia to work for an international corporation like Pepsico, he hoped. His parents were immigrants to Australia, and he was born there. He was as Australian as any with British heritage. If various forms of immigration were not possible, Nick’s excited demeanor and camaraderie would have left psychic holes in my mind where many good memories are. And I only knew him for one semester.
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About 15 years before, I had worked for a small Minneapolis upholstery shop owner, Mr. B. Breland, part of the Great Migration from the Jim Crow South in the 1950s, who at one point while I was there, employed a 4th generation Mexican American from a century old St. Paul Hispanic neighborhood. He was more Minnesotan than many Minnesotans. Even thinking I need to say how long someone has been here, why they are here, why they deserve being called a real American or Minnesotan like me, or why they should be respected here in this land of which we forcefully settled and appropriated, reveals how corrupt our thinking is regarding immigrants and immigration.
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Have you even thought about why I am here, or if I am an immigrant? Does my skin color make you think I have lived here my whole life? What if I told you I was fourth generation like my former co-worker from St. Paul? Do I win the immigrant contest because I am white, even though we tie in generation multiples? No one wins when we make these kind of judgements. We are merely perpetuating a way of thinking that disrupts and corrupts our progress. Yes, clearly my Irish-Polish heritage makes me the best American type, but I did not work very hard at all to get this designation, as you might have noticed.
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Though my wife seems to think her Swedish Swiss heritage gives her the edge. That said, our two daughters inherited our four nationalities; they may be the best heritage combination ever produced! It seems as if my wife and I are prejudiced somehow. While I cannot be sure what is going on, it is so natural to consider my clan as the best. Of course, it is weirder that other people do it as well. Hmm.
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Additionally, you do not have to go too far back to see when White people also had various ethnic hierarchies, before they were mostly blended out of existence in the U.S. I was surprised to find out the Irish were not always at the top of the heap. It just made so much sense to me, being who I am, brought up the way I was, hanging out with the O’Connell clan every chance I could. Adding Polish to the mix should also have been something every Irish person sought. Yet, when my parents met in the late 1950s, Irish Catholics marrying Polish Catholics was not something that happened often. Just looking at me you know such a union could produce nothing but perfection.
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Shoot, my dad said that Catholic immigrants from east Warsaw, Poland, were not supposed to marry immigrant Catholics from west Warsaw. I can’t be sure that is true, but dad wasn’t anymore likely to bullshit you than I am. Why would White people not want to marry other Whites merely because of a border? Borders are not even real lines; we made them up to mark off the land we stole from American Indians and Mexicans. Now skin color that’s a whole different thing.
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Skin is a layer of skin. Color is a color. When you put those both together, you have, well, two words. Words are used to lord over others, if you have the chauvinist flintlocks to do it. Whites came here, stole almost everything, then changed the rules to fit our needs. Since all is fair in love and trails of tears, slavery, arrogance, avarice and anything else that helps our cause, we the chosen ones, can Manifest Destiny anyway we want. That’s just what impartial, white-prejudiced privilege, and the superiority such skin-color megalomania provides us. There is no way to deny that.
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While many do deny that, these do-gooders are coming from a perspective that is abnormal for many Whites to adjust to, which are liberty, freedom, respect, and fair play for all, skin color be damned! When I call someone a do-gooder, it is meant as an epithet, just like when townsfolk snarled that phrase at my parents on a regular basis.
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My parents’ mixed-marriage, an unholier than thou, separate Catholic-heritage union, put them on a slide towards helping others as much as possible.
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When you fall as far as my parents did into community organizing for racial diversity in the 1960s South Bend, and fighting for people with disabilities into their 80s, the progeny will absorb and internalize much of this bellicosity and its blowback. Many status quo Whites are threatened by do-gooders, who confront the comfortable, and afflict them upside the head, or something to that effect. While we need rules to live by, we can’t make immigration about us versus them. History tells us that the rules have never been set in stone, and so no one should get summary stoned because of our current immigration rules, unless it’s legal, like in Colorado.
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Back in the 1890s, my great grandmother came over the Atlantic all by herself at age 18, without anyone inviting her. My mom’s ancestors came here only because they had no more potatoes, or serpents, in Ireland. I guess some saint killed all the potatoes after he julienned every snake on the The Emerald Isle. What kind of bogus ticket into the United States is that? Huh.
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Yet here I am. Even though my ancestors would have been docked by DACA qualifications, maybe even doxxed, having almost no education. Yeah, okay. We cannot let “everyone” in, but do not use words that entail skin color, dog whistling passed graveyards or anywhere else, or place of Oregon, or origin, a certain type of religion, (unless it’s protest-ants or pale-faced papists) or anything else kinda sketchy to exclude people not from Norway, and the other Scandalous nations, a.k.a. Nordicks. Remember, I know a Swede.
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If my ancestors can arrive here, almost no questions asked, having nothing, with only a snake removal and rout that made hash of their potatoes as an excuse, we can surely allow people fleeing actual terrible conditions today to try out our nation’s opportunities. Sure, set up some rules for these immigrants. For example, if they are not productive citizens in 10 years, we can give them another 10, like I would have needed.
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Even give a free pass to some people like we did the first white settlers (legally ruled as trespassers and squatters), our cannibalistic Jamestown (let’s hope not kissing) cousins. (And these lack of any sense, forethought, and planning whites called the natives savages. Huh.) If human flesh gobblers got a pass, who are we to curtail the flow of immigrants from anywhere?
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Standing up for those who are disenfranchised, discarded, never enfranchised, and other oppressed and forgotten peoples is a hard slog, but life is short and ice cream is cheap. Join the fight for diversity without discrimination, providing everyone a real opportunity, and developing a humane and transformational immigration policy for the 21st century. Then pass the strawberries.
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Damn. I need sprinkles, and a spoon, too!
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