…The current immigration legislation now being debated is only the latest chapter in white America’s attempt to put its oppressive boot on the neck of people of color we see as inferior or now label “terrorists.” And we created a new public enemy number one after 9/11, Muslims, and have persecuted them with a vengeance. Just like the saying that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes”, attributed to Mark Twain, what the US has practiced in recent years is not like Nazi Germany at its worst, but there’s similarity enough to be very disturbing and we’re heading in the wrong direction….
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Note: This is the fourth of a five-part series.
George Bush has proposed and the Senate may pass its version of a temporary or guest worker program as part of their immigration legislation when they return from spring brake. Shades of the infamous Bracero Program that was in force from 1942-1964 and gave employers license to exploit over three million Mexican migrant farm workers, deny them their rights and subject them to severe harassment and oppression from extremist groups and racist authorities. Whether or not we enact a new version of that old program, we’re currently moving toward establishing a police state as I’ve already alluded to above to control and restrain the home population from resisting or interfering with their global empire project. The easy targets are those we label possible or likely “terrorists” followed by anyone with dark skin living here, wishing to, already arrived undocumented or others we may allow in to be used, abused and then discarded when no longer needed.
We have a tainted history in our treatment of immigrants going back many years. I discussed earlier what we did to the Chinese who built our transcontinental railroad in the 19th century. It was no different in the 1930s when in the desperation of the Great Depression, Latinos were viewed as taking jobs and getting government benefits from “real Americans.” As a result, up to two million Mexicans were “relocated” to Mexico during that decade even though 1.2 million of them were born in the US and were US citizens. In California alone, 400,000 Latino US citizens or legal residents were forced to leave. This virulent racism resurfaced in 1954 when under “Operation Wetback” (the name alone wreaks of race hate) and in a national reaction against illegal immigrants, over one million here illegally were deported back to Mexico by trucks, buses, trains and even ships. In some cases even their US born children were sent with them even though they were US citizens. It’s a wonder we didn’t put them all on forced marches and make them go back the hard way.
The stalled compromise Senate bill, endorsed by George Bush, is little more than election year politicking to win the Hispanic vote. In addition, it would create a permanently legal underclass of low-paid workers, allow employers the right to exploit them and put added pressure on US workers so as to restrain their wage and benefit demands.
The Senate bill divides illegal immigrants into three groups. Those who arrived after April 1, 2001 could stay permanently if they pass background checks and pay back taxes and a $2,000 fine (no easy task for them); worked at least three of the past five years; work another six years and get in the queue behind other applicants already in it. Immigrants who arrived between April 1, 2001 and January, 2004 would have to return to a US port of entry and re-enter the country legally with a temporary work permit. They would also have to pass background checks and pay back taxes. Finally, illegals who arrived after January, 2004 would be required to leave the country. They could only return on temporary work permits.
Any immigration bill, if passed, will create an overwhelming burden of documentation and verification on millions of immigrants as well as the federal bureaucracy and employers. Immigrants going through the process would be forced to give up their right to privacy protection, asylum and due process. If an Employment Verification System is part of a final resolution, they would also have to get a federal agency’s permission to work. In addition, it would require them to learn English and would subject them to overwhelming bureacratic red tape that under the best of conditions likely would be rife with errors and delays that would be nightmarish to resolve. And to boot it would create an easily accessed database that would make all those in it easy pickings for identity theives.
Employers under the Senate plan would be required to verify that their new workers are in the country legally. They now only need to ask for worker documents showing those they hire are allowed to be here. The plan envisions a tamper-proof means of ID, such as a driver’s license with a picture, a fingerprint or an iris scan. If that provision becomes law, it’s step one on the road to a national identity card for everyone, possibly to include an embedded chip so Homeland Security, the NSA and other snoop agencies could keep tabs on all our moves and whereabouts. “Big Brother” is alive and well and “in our face.”
The immigration service would also have its hands full under this plan. It would have to cope with the overwhelming burden of doing background checks and verifying the identity, work history, tax obligations and English language competency of 11 million or more people. This is on top of their already enormous burden handling the influx of immigrants into the country. The IRS and Social Security Administration would also be obligated along with employers to help immigrants calculate what back taxes they owe and what they had paid into Social Security accounts. Employers would have to report these earnings and would be in violation of the law if they didn’t.
A COMPARISON OF CURRENT PROPOSED IMMIGRATION LEGISLATION TO HITLER’S NUREMBERG RACE LAWS
What’s on the table being debated in the Congress is not as extreme as Hitler’s infamous Nuremberg Race Laws, but there are some ominous comparisons. Early on in Nazi Germany Hitler wanted to assert the superiority of the “Aryan race.” He hoped to create a Master Race of pure blue-eyed, blond Aryan Caucausian Nordic types, and even though the notion of Aryan has no racial meaning he inferred that it did in what he preached and the laws he had enacted. The chosen ones were the Herrenvolk and all others were called Untermenschen or subhumans. In the US today Causausian Judeo-Christians are our Herrenvolk and all others are the Untermenschen, especially people of color and Muslims.
We don’t say that openly, write our laws with overtly denigrating or restrictive racist language in them or practice a policy of extermination today to create a “racially” pure society. But we did just that for 300 years to our native population and in the process slaughtered about 18 million of them as we built the nation we now have. Hitler, in fact, used what we did as a model for his own plan to exterminate the Jews and other undesirables he wanted eliminated.
We also used black Africans as slaves over the same period we eliminated our native population and then after freeing them held them in the bondage of Jim Crow laws and racist attitudes that exist to this day despite the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. We never accepted black people or any others of color as co-equals even though we piously say we do and enacted laws that codify it.
The current immigration legislation now being debated is only the latest chapter in white America’s attempt to put its oppressive boot on the neck of people of color we see as inferior or now label “terrorists.” And we created a new public enemy number one after 9/11, Muslims, and have persecuted them with a vengeance. Just like the saying that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes”, attributed to Mark Twain, what the US has practiced in recent years is not like Nazi Germany at its worst, but there’s similarity enough to be very disturbing and we’re heading in the wrong direction.
Hitler, too, began slowly and moderately after being named German Chancellor in January, 1933 (about one month before Franklin Roosevelt became our 32nd President). He needed time to consolidate power and at first didn’t want to scare the voters before they lost their franchise or moderate politicians before they no longer had any say. What began modestly gradually became more extreme and isn’t too dissimilar to what’s happening here now. Bill Clinton’s signing into law the 1996 immigration reform act (IIRAIRA) and anti-terrorism act (AEDPA) discussed earlier can be seen as the first shot across the bow in the current war against immigrants. Then after 9/11 the gloves came off, and it was off to the races with the infamous Patriot Act, mass witch-hunt roundups of those labeled potential terrorists and now an extreme and hostile attempted crackdown on those immigrant groups we’ve targeted – those of color, especially Latinos and Muslims. What’s next? Unless the current mass public protest uproar continues, gets stronger and makes the lawmakers nervous enough to believe we really mean business and won’t stand for this, you can bet it will only get worse until we’re all targeted and become potential victims. That’s about how Hitler did it, and we seem headed in the same dangerous direction. Good Germans back then didn’t complain as long as it happened to others until one day many discovered it could happen to them too. By then it was too late. That’s how tyranny works.
Coming in Part 5 on Saturday, May 12: A New Civil Rights Struggle
Written by Stephen Lendman, (email – lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net) who lives in Chicago. Stephen maintains a blog at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com, and writes a regular column at www.populistamerica.com
