8/29/2007
Wherever I turn, everything looks unworldly
Already
--Charles Wright
Another birthday’s come along. August 20th. If you’re not careful, the days that felt like gardens in your youth turn to parchment and crack. They burn. You have to stay wet. You have to drop seeds and feel the dew. Or your hair gets brittle as weed stalks in Tucson summer, and you break.
Getting old—was that an AARP card Cinderella hid from me? Still…consider the alternative. Another year on this side of the dirt sounds good. So many years as a caterpillar, eating tasty plants. What’s going to happen when the wings sprout?
There’s a blue eggshell between me and the other side, where the shadows live. It grows thinner. But I have my feet in the black loam, still. I’m looking around. I’m walking.
Tonight, they are predicting another gulley-washer: four or five inches of rain and high wind and thunder. On TV, though the day is steaming and bright, the crawls warn of Illinois floods. I am listening to Clutch, the gods of freak rock revelation. I’m listening to Steve Vai, to Killing Joke, to Gogol Bordello, to The White Stripes, to The Horrors, to Blodwyn Pig. As Clutch says, I’m “tipping cows in fields Elysian.” I am waiting for rain. I am hoping for a rainstorm of ink. I’m killing time. Killing the time to write.
Writing is waiting to wish me a happy birthday.
#
I am sitting here at my desk, thinking of the writings we have shared on this blog by David Grayson, about his own desk. David Grayson! It must be writing time again. So many travels, so much upheaval. We took our trip to the Virgin Islands after the deep scare over grandma and her ruptured heart, and Cinderella’s sister’s stroke—bad fear and sorrow all at once. And then we went on our UK journey and our QMII crossing of the unquiet Atlantic. Then another sister of Cinderella’s came for a week, and we had cousins stampeding happily through the house. I didn’t write much. I wrote the UK Wastelanders, which are good stuff. They make me happy like David Grayson’s days made him happy. Then our main computer threw a horseshoe, and we’re still in the cyber stone age here. Then Eric, to his mother’s sorrow, went away to college. And here came “Uncle David” for our mutual birthdays. (Like idiots, we drove the 7 hours to Cleveland to look at amps and shoes and guitars at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. Quicksilver Messenger Service freaks, be advised: John Cippolina’s bizarre amp set-up with massive brass horns jutting from the top of it is sitting there, waiting for you to go look.)
And here it is, school time for the girls. Ah yes, and The Perpetual Book Tour is about to groan to life again….
I’m signing a big fat contract today for mucho dinero and new books. Did I tell you? A three book contract. And the Hummingbird sent real royalties—like ten times the amount I ever got before for all my books combined. But now I have to get to work.
Clutch says: “Bang, bang, bang, bang! Vamonos! Vamonos!”
#
Our dear friend from Kankakee, Illinois, Mary-Jo Johnston, has fallen away from us, struck down by a stroke in her beloved library. And now she’s gone. She told a co-worker she could die happy when they put a plaque on the library with her name on it. And I believe she did.
Things will never cease, of course. The tornadoes are coming, always coming, you can see them down the country road, throwing trees in the air, ripping the roofs off our lives. We don’t know what will hit us tonight, after midnight. But it’s time to write.
Writing reseeds death, brings of it a fresh harvest.
#
David Grayson wrote a little piece in one of his books called “I Am Impatient These Days.” It says:
“I am impatient these days: there is not time enough in this life. I need more lives. I have made plans already for three or four. I could easily expand to ten or twenty, all full-flavored, ardent, interesting. Full of curiosity! Looking into the sciences one after another, traveling to unexplored places, not only geographical, but psychological, social, economic; reading all the good books I do not yet know, and in all the languages; meeting every interesting human being then alive and with leisure—with leisure!—to know, to talk, to love. And to write! Time to write, and having written, to rewrite. I have enjoyed this earth; the only flaw is that my time here is too short.”
Amen, brother. Why do we have to leave?
#
We once took “Paw-Paw” Bill, my step-kids’ grandpa, to the Grand Canyon. We knew, and he knew, that it was his last trip. The cancer was a constant scream of pain inside him. It was heroic, every day he walked around the rim, but it was his farewell to this holy earth and to his beloved grandchildren. I was happy to provide it, though it made me cry every night. I’ve never seen so open a response to the world. There was no one there so young as our old man. His eyes were etched with pain, yet luminous and delighted. We sat on a stone wall so he could catch his breath, and huge ravens came to branches in front of us and squawked at us. Condors circled above. Bill laughed and coughed and sighed. He did not buy the whole God concept. He just couldn’t believe there was anything beyond the rock and color of the canyon. All the more lonesome, those final hours.
But we agreed that, if there was an afterlife—I was not going to dishonor him by preaching at him—then this would be the place to spend eternity. Paw-Paw didn’t want any heaven. He just wanted to be allowed to spend all time in the Grand Canyon, painting it in every light.
I have his paintings here in the house. His walking stick sits beside my bed. We keep his Grand Canyon hat on the dashboard of The World’s Largest Van, so he’s always on our journeys. His last words to me, as he lay dying in bed, came over a crackling long-distance cell phone, as I tried to speed the family through Monument Valley to get to him in Tucson before the end. He said, “Am I coming to your house?”
I hope God was listening. I hope Paw-Paw came into my house. I hope the color of the land opened like a door and he entered. I hope he’s sitting on a monument deep in the Canyon, adding purple and burnt orange to his canvas. Why not?
#
Like David Grayson, I have a desk, and here I make up these words I send to the world. I put my messages in bottles here, and I throw them out, hoping you will find them.
It’s a small maple desk on the second floor of our house. I’m in a kind of loft, between our “master suite” and the rooms of the kids. The stairway down is behind my back. My desk is placed before a window that looks into the center of a vast and very old red oak in front. It towers over our house—I’m at squirrel- and bird-nest level, and I can spy on them from here. Our neighbor from across the street threatens to come out in her black bikini to distract me, but she hasn’t done it yet. Maybe she has, and I’m more focused on the keyboard and the notebooks than I thought!
The writing space is a kind of square U, painted white. To my left, beside our bedroom door, hangs a Plains Indian prayer wheel. Beside the desk, on the port side, are my poetry bookshelves. I have a few hundred poetry books here. The secret boiler-room. (A quick and random scan, skipping titles: Yosano Akiko, Sherman Alexie, Yehuda Amichai, AR Ammons, Basho, Wendell Berry, William Blake, Darrell Bourque, Charles Bukowski, Buson, Jim Carroll, Raymond Carver, Lisa Chavez, Leonard Cohen, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, Bob Dylan, TS Eliot, BH Fairchild, Ferlinghetti, Tess Gallagher, Ginsberg, Louise Gluck, Jay Griswold, Han-shan, Donald Hall, Jim Harrison, Robert Hass, Ikkyu, Issa, Jane Kenyon, Kerouac, Etheridge Knight, Komunyakaa, etc.) [In the middle: Ted Kooser and William Matthews to Pablo Neruda and Mary Oliver!] (On the other end: Shiki, Gary Snyder, Gary Soto, Kim Stafford, William Stafford, Dylan Thomas, Mona Van Duyn, Verlaine, Diane Wakoski, Frank X Walker, Walt Whitman, CK Williams, William Carlos Williams, Charles Wright, Franz Wright, James Wright, Robert Wrigley, Wordsworth, Yevtushenko….) (Have you read Richard Wright’s haikus?) (If you’re like me, just the list of names sets off poems and small bombs in your mind.)
Atop these shelves, there is a very old wooden cross from El Paso, a Route 66 road sign, framed aspen leaves, and models of Steve McQueen’s BULLITT Mustang and the bad-ass ’71 Dodge Challenger Kowalski drove in VANISHING POINT. Also the Texaco home lubricant can that plays a small role in my novel, IN SEARCH OF SNOW. Sticking out of it are two huge feathers: wild turkey and horned owl. Finally, there is the iPod dock that is blasting away as I write. (James Brown, “Make it Funky.”)
On the desk is this writing and electric pinball machine—Toshiba Satellite laptop. On the shelf behind the computer are succulents, cacti and ivy. To the left of the big screen (because I am blind as a mole and need a big screen), there is a framed picture of Basho walking in the snow. To the right, a framed picture of Pablo Neruda’s desk. Between these two poles, I write.
Also, a hand grenade, fat rock crystals—a green one and a clear one, statues of turtles, a coyote skull, and a figurine of Chac Mool, the ancient Mexican messenger to the gods.
On the main desk, a Harvard cup and a Route 66 cup jammed with pens. Got to have pens, man. A Swiss army knife. Work stuff like tape, and soul stuff like incense. Notebooks, David Grayson, scissors, crap. Oh! Chayo and I often put up my set of plastic 1950’s screaming monster movie victims, as if they’re running away from, and shooting at, my computer. That’s when you really know Dad’s writing! It gets scary in here!
I urge you to buy these from Archie McPhee ASAP. You can’t over-estimate the value of terrified victims when you write. (While you’re at it, get the Avenging Narwhal who angrily skewers cuter animals with his horn.)
To the right of the desk, a bookshelf of research materials and my own published books. That shelf is getting heavy with all these foreign editions. But mostly, dictionaries and thesauri. (Did you like that?) Mexican history, indigenous history, world history, and immigration texts. Herbal and healing books. On the wall beside the shelf, there is a framed tarantula that’s about as big as a plate. Those of you who knew me back in the early ‘80’s will recall the tarantula known as Lassie that lived in my bedroom. She sat upon a model of an ancient Ford truck, thus making my own private monster movie. (See screaming victims, above.) I also kept my pocket money in there, figuring, who would reach in the cage? Along with this meditative tarantula, there is a long frame with mounted dragonflies. Five of them. Very mystical, these little companions.
Finally, the starboard wall, behind which the gorgeous Megan resides, is a built-in book shelf also jammed with texts. There, you’ll find my haiku collection—both poems and commentary. And poetry and writing-craft anthologies. And religious/ theological/philosophical, even occult, books. Buechner, CS Lewis. Books on angels and demons. Books on the Tao and Zen. The Bible. The Watcher Angels and the Nephilim. The Book of Job. Up on top, also a hold-over from my boyhood bedroom, is my giant stuffed armadillo a savage cousin brought me when I was ten or eleven. He presided over many romances in that mysterious ol’ room of mine, as some of you might recall.
Underneath, in the closed cabinets, the atomic stuff: my notebooks, journals, diaries, blurts, confessions. Good God—you’re in there! I’m so sorry! What if someone reads them and finds out! Burn ‘em, I say! Too many exposed nerve endings down in there.
Finally, way over there, beside the shelves, is a ceremonial elk skull from South Dakota, with feathers tied on it with rawhide thongs. Beneath him, an iron lizard—a tiny sculpture on the wall.
Barring too many details, that is my desk. I wish I could send this note to David Grayson. Or to Paw-Paw. Or to Mary-Jo Johnson. Maybe I just did.
I’m listening to The James Gang, to Symphony X, to Devotchka, to Department of Crooks, to the Nortec Collective, to the underground music box set Cinderella got me for my birthday.
Ah, the Beatles on the iPod. Nobody here likes the Beatles but me. The old fart in the tower. But it’s my tower.
Everyone smiles as you drift by the flowers that grow so incredibly high…
Lucy in the Sky
Writing Meditation, 8/28
Already
--Charles Wright
Another birthday’s come along. August 20th. If you’re not careful, the days that felt like gardens in your youth turn to parchment and crack. They burn. You have to stay wet. You have to drop seeds and feel the dew. Or your hair gets brittle as weed stalks in Tucson summer, and you break.
Getting old—was that an AARP card Cinderella hid from me? Still…consider the alternative. Another year on this side of the dirt sounds good. So many years as a caterpillar, eating tasty plants. What’s going to happen when the wings sprout?
There’s a blue eggshell between me and the other side, where the shadows live. It grows thinner. But I have my feet in the black loam, still. I’m looking around. I’m walking.
Tonight, they are predicting another gulley-washer: four or five inches of rain and high wind and thunder. On TV, though the day is steaming and bright, the crawls warn of Illinois floods. I am listening to Clutch, the gods of freak rock revelation. I’m listening to Steve Vai, to Killing Joke, to Gogol Bordello, to The White Stripes, to The Horrors, to Blodwyn Pig. As Clutch says, I’m “tipping cows in fields Elysian.” I am waiting for rain. I am hoping for a rainstorm of ink. I’m killing time. Killing the time to write.
Writing is waiting to wish me a happy birthday.
#
I am sitting here at my desk, thinking of the writings we have shared on this blog by David Grayson, about his own desk. David Grayson! It must be writing time again. So many travels, so much upheaval. We took our trip to the Virgin Islands after the deep scare over grandma and her ruptured heart, and Cinderella’s sister’s stroke—bad fear and sorrow all at once. And then we went on our UK journey and our QMII crossing of the unquiet Atlantic. Then another sister of Cinderella’s came for a week, and we had cousins stampeding happily through the house. I didn’t write much. I wrote the UK Wastelanders, which are good stuff. They make me happy like David Grayson’s days made him happy. Then our main computer threw a horseshoe, and we’re still in the cyber stone age here. Then Eric, to his mother’s sorrow, went away to college. And here came “Uncle David” for our mutual birthdays. (Like idiots, we drove the 7 hours to Cleveland to look at amps and shoes and guitars at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. Quicksilver Messenger Service freaks, be advised: John Cippolina’s bizarre amp set-up with massive brass horns jutting from the top of it is sitting there, waiting for you to go look.)
And here it is, school time for the girls. Ah yes, and The Perpetual Book Tour is about to groan to life again….
I’m signing a big fat contract today for mucho dinero and new books. Did I tell you? A three book contract. And the Hummingbird sent real royalties—like ten times the amount I ever got before for all my books combined. But now I have to get to work.
Clutch says: “Bang, bang, bang, bang! Vamonos! Vamonos!”
#
Our dear friend from Kankakee, Illinois, Mary-Jo Johnston, has fallen away from us, struck down by a stroke in her beloved library. And now she’s gone. She told a co-worker she could die happy when they put a plaque on the library with her name on it. And I believe she did.
Things will never cease, of course. The tornadoes are coming, always coming, you can see them down the country road, throwing trees in the air, ripping the roofs off our lives. We don’t know what will hit us tonight, after midnight. But it’s time to write.
Writing reseeds death, brings of it a fresh harvest.
#
David Grayson wrote a little piece in one of his books called “I Am Impatient These Days.” It says:
“I am impatient these days: there is not time enough in this life. I need more lives. I have made plans already for three or four. I could easily expand to ten or twenty, all full-flavored, ardent, interesting. Full of curiosity! Looking into the sciences one after another, traveling to unexplored places, not only geographical, but psychological, social, economic; reading all the good books I do not yet know, and in all the languages; meeting every interesting human being then alive and with leisure—with leisure!—to know, to talk, to love. And to write! Time to write, and having written, to rewrite. I have enjoyed this earth; the only flaw is that my time here is too short.”
Amen, brother. Why do we have to leave?
#
We once took “Paw-Paw” Bill, my step-kids’ grandpa, to the Grand Canyon. We knew, and he knew, that it was his last trip. The cancer was a constant scream of pain inside him. It was heroic, every day he walked around the rim, but it was his farewell to this holy earth and to his beloved grandchildren. I was happy to provide it, though it made me cry every night. I’ve never seen so open a response to the world. There was no one there so young as our old man. His eyes were etched with pain, yet luminous and delighted. We sat on a stone wall so he could catch his breath, and huge ravens came to branches in front of us and squawked at us. Condors circled above. Bill laughed and coughed and sighed. He did not buy the whole God concept. He just couldn’t believe there was anything beyond the rock and color of the canyon. All the more lonesome, those final hours.
But we agreed that, if there was an afterlife—I was not going to dishonor him by preaching at him—then this would be the place to spend eternity. Paw-Paw didn’t want any heaven. He just wanted to be allowed to spend all time in the Grand Canyon, painting it in every light.
I have his paintings here in the house. His walking stick sits beside my bed. We keep his Grand Canyon hat on the dashboard of The World’s Largest Van, so he’s always on our journeys. His last words to me, as he lay dying in bed, came over a crackling long-distance cell phone, as I tried to speed the family through Monument Valley to get to him in Tucson before the end. He said, “Am I coming to your house?”
I hope God was listening. I hope Paw-Paw came into my house. I hope the color of the land opened like a door and he entered. I hope he’s sitting on a monument deep in the Canyon, adding purple and burnt orange to his canvas. Why not?
#
Like David Grayson, I have a desk, and here I make up these words I send to the world. I put my messages in bottles here, and I throw them out, hoping you will find them.
It’s a small maple desk on the second floor of our house. I’m in a kind of loft, between our “master suite” and the rooms of the kids. The stairway down is behind my back. My desk is placed before a window that looks into the center of a vast and very old red oak in front. It towers over our house—I’m at squirrel- and bird-nest level, and I can spy on them from here. Our neighbor from across the street threatens to come out in her black bikini to distract me, but she hasn’t done it yet. Maybe she has, and I’m more focused on the keyboard and the notebooks than I thought!
The writing space is a kind of square U, painted white. To my left, beside our bedroom door, hangs a Plains Indian prayer wheel. Beside the desk, on the port side, are my poetry bookshelves. I have a few hundred poetry books here. The secret boiler-room. (A quick and random scan, skipping titles: Yosano Akiko, Sherman Alexie, Yehuda Amichai, AR Ammons, Basho, Wendell Berry, William Blake, Darrell Bourque, Charles Bukowski, Buson, Jim Carroll, Raymond Carver, Lisa Chavez, Leonard Cohen, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, Bob Dylan, TS Eliot, BH Fairchild, Ferlinghetti, Tess Gallagher, Ginsberg, Louise Gluck, Jay Griswold, Han-shan, Donald Hall, Jim Harrison, Robert Hass, Ikkyu, Issa, Jane Kenyon, Kerouac, Etheridge Knight, Komunyakaa, etc.) [In the middle: Ted Kooser and William Matthews to Pablo Neruda and Mary Oliver!] (On the other end: Shiki, Gary Snyder, Gary Soto, Kim Stafford, William Stafford, Dylan Thomas, Mona Van Duyn, Verlaine, Diane Wakoski, Frank X Walker, Walt Whitman, CK Williams, William Carlos Williams, Charles Wright, Franz Wright, James Wright, Robert Wrigley, Wordsworth, Yevtushenko….) (Have you read Richard Wright’s haikus?) (If you’re like me, just the list of names sets off poems and small bombs in your mind.)
Atop these shelves, there is a very old wooden cross from El Paso, a Route 66 road sign, framed aspen leaves, and models of Steve McQueen’s BULLITT Mustang and the bad-ass ’71 Dodge Challenger Kowalski drove in VANISHING POINT. Also the Texaco home lubricant can that plays a small role in my novel, IN SEARCH OF SNOW. Sticking out of it are two huge feathers: wild turkey and horned owl. Finally, there is the iPod dock that is blasting away as I write. (James Brown, “Make it Funky.”)
On the desk is this writing and electric pinball machine—Toshiba Satellite laptop. On the shelf behind the computer are succulents, cacti and ivy. To the left of the big screen (because I am blind as a mole and need a big screen), there is a framed picture of Basho walking in the snow. To the right, a framed picture of Pablo Neruda’s desk. Between these two poles, I write.
Also, a hand grenade, fat rock crystals—a green one and a clear one, statues of turtles, a coyote skull, and a figurine of Chac Mool, the ancient Mexican messenger to the gods.
On the main desk, a Harvard cup and a Route 66 cup jammed with pens. Got to have pens, man. A Swiss army knife. Work stuff like tape, and soul stuff like incense. Notebooks, David Grayson, scissors, crap. Oh! Chayo and I often put up my set of plastic 1950’s screaming monster movie victims, as if they’re running away from, and shooting at, my computer. That’s when you really know Dad’s writing! It gets scary in here!
I urge you to buy these from Archie McPhee ASAP. You can’t over-estimate the value of terrified victims when you write. (While you’re at it, get the Avenging Narwhal who angrily skewers cuter animals with his horn.)
To the right of the desk, a bookshelf of research materials and my own published books. That shelf is getting heavy with all these foreign editions. But mostly, dictionaries and thesauri. (Did you like that?) Mexican history, indigenous history, world history, and immigration texts. Herbal and healing books. On the wall beside the shelf, there is a framed tarantula that’s about as big as a plate. Those of you who knew me back in the early ‘80’s will recall the tarantula known as Lassie that lived in my bedroom. She sat upon a model of an ancient Ford truck, thus making my own private monster movie. (See screaming victims, above.) I also kept my pocket money in there, figuring, who would reach in the cage? Along with this meditative tarantula, there is a long frame with mounted dragonflies. Five of them. Very mystical, these little companions.
Finally, the starboard wall, behind which the gorgeous Megan resides, is a built-in book shelf also jammed with texts. There, you’ll find my haiku collection—both poems and commentary. And poetry and writing-craft anthologies. And religious/ theological/philosophical, even occult, books. Buechner, CS Lewis. Books on angels and demons. Books on the Tao and Zen. The Bible. The Watcher Angels and the Nephilim. The Book of Job. Up on top, also a hold-over from my boyhood bedroom, is my giant stuffed armadillo a savage cousin brought me when I was ten or eleven. He presided over many romances in that mysterious ol’ room of mine, as some of you might recall.
Underneath, in the closed cabinets, the atomic stuff: my notebooks, journals, diaries, blurts, confessions. Good God—you’re in there! I’m so sorry! What if someone reads them and finds out! Burn ‘em, I say! Too many exposed nerve endings down in there.
Finally, way over there, beside the shelves, is a ceremonial elk skull from South Dakota, with feathers tied on it with rawhide thongs. Beneath him, an iron lizard—a tiny sculpture on the wall.
Barring too many details, that is my desk. I wish I could send this note to David Grayson. Or to Paw-Paw. Or to Mary-Jo Johnson. Maybe I just did.
I’m listening to The James Gang, to Symphony X, to Devotchka, to Department of Crooks, to the Nortec Collective, to the underground music box set Cinderella got me for my birthday.
Ah, the Beatles on the iPod. Nobody here likes the Beatles but me. The old fart in the tower. But it’s my tower.
Everyone smiles as you drift by the flowers that grow so incredibly high…
Lucy in the Sky
8/28/2007
No object is mysterious. The mystery is in your eye.
--Elizabeth Bowen
Immigration Monday
--Elizabeth Bowen
8/27/2007
The foolish disregard what they see, the wise disregard what they think.—Zen Saying
COMMENTS and DISPATCHES:
Somebody wrote me and asked what my immigration policy is, in simple terms. It was a nice note, and I am grateful for that. And my response, in simple terms, is this: I don’t know. That’s what “Immigration Monday” is all about. Someone trying to swim through the mung, looking for clear water. I’m looking at it and hoping we, together, can work something out. Then, when I’m the president’s Immigration Czar, I can plagiarize all of your thoughts and look wise beyond my (considerable) years.
#
It’s happening again. I told people about the recent vanishing of workers in the American West. How the strawberry crop was endangered because Mexicans didn’t show up; how the maid services in motels from Idaho to Illinois were desperate for domestic crews because Mexicans didn’t show up. Later, how the apple crop in Michigan last year was facing trouble because the Mexican crews didn’t show up. Where did they go? Abducted by UFOs? No. They stayed home. That’s right! Immigration is already on its way to becoming yesterday’s news. (Wait—don’t send me hate mail: it has always been yesterday’s news. I can show you quotes by Ben Franklin against immigration; radio broadcasts from the 20s that sound like Lou Dobbs, though they’re about Italians and Germans. I can show you newspaper pieces from the 1800’s, the 1920’s, the 1930’s, the 1950’s that sound exactly like the stuff you read now. Except that the pieces from the 19th century are about evil Asians. Then it’s those wicked Irish. Mexi-phobia is a recent historical development, at least in border terms.)
Have you read Sitting Bull’s op-eds about immigration?
Yeah, my amigos—always look at page 5 or 6 to find the juicy immigration stories that allow you to draw your own conclusions, away from propaganda on either side. Today’s story is about the Western Work Force VANISHING. Perhaps the Rapture happened after all, it just took burger chefs, bus boys, motel maids, tomato pickers. The story isn’t obviously about Mexicans, but I guarantee you the smaller numbers of immigrants affects this data.
Check it out:
They offered $10 an hour to make cheeseburgers, but nobody would take it. (You will recall the strawberry fields rotting because the Raza de Bronce did not come, and the American workers would not pick.) Google apple crops—you will find that this year, again, the Michigan apple crops might be at risk because we are heading for A Day Without A Mexican, just like that maligned movie said.
It would seem to me that out-sourcing jobs is the same process as in-sourcing workers. It also seems to me that our efforts at border control are taking effect. Fear and dread are strong deterrents. What is interesting, in a social science sense, is whether we have anything in place to make the Moloch-machine of human sacrifice and slave labor function after we get what we want. Close the borders, sure. I dig it. But…apples? Strawberries? Burger King? Chicken pickin’? My suburban lawn crew? Maids? Toilet scrubbers? Painters? Who will do these jobs? Will the car builder dying on emphysema in Lansing do it? Not right now. Maybe later, when the Beaners are gone.
Is there some way to make Big Macs (The Royale With Cheese) in Delhi and have them teleported here?
I am watching and noting. I’m a nature writer. This is the interesting new flight pattern. I am wondering what its portents are.
#
Is it funny, or is it tragic? The freight railroad running from Central America through Mexico is a Wyoming rail line. They pulled out of Mexico. Now, hundreds of “illegals” from Guatemala and Honduras have spent two and a half weeks on the rails, waiting for trains that will never come. They’re walking around Mexico, looking for help. The Mexicans don’t want them. Funny thing—Mexicans seem to think they use social services they are not entitled to; Mexicans think they are trying to become Mexican citizens illegally; they think the illegals take jobs for lower wages, raise crime, steal, sully the language, horn in on education, overburden the ship of state. You know a refugee is in trouble when the slums in Chiapas are a real step up. And, apparently, nobody in the Mexican government is gifted with an ironic world view. The only thing lacking is a Mexican Rush Limbaugh.
Mexico—the new Kansas?
#
I’m sick of it all. But I was sick of it in 1993.
It’s my birthday week.
I have things to write that don’t make me want to jump off bridges.
Here are two guest writers because I don’t want to think about it anymore. Sometimes, you have to take a rest from the wars and watch Mr. Bean with your daughter. I offer you an eloquent reader of the blog, and our Border Patrol friend, Warrior.
Redefine The Line!
Lucius Immigrinus Tijuanensis
A LETTER:
Luis, I find your online journal wonderful for us fellow writers and artists and for all intelligent folks looking at the world through thoughtful eyes and an open heart. And your IMs are wonderful. If this wasn't your blog, I probably wouldn't bother to respond to Warrior's comments regarding the NY Times article. (I don’t actually read other blogs – only so many minutes in the day…)
I read the Sunday NY Times article and my heart sank. It always frightens me when one group is scapegoated for the economic and social problems of a society. This issue is very much about race and our seemingly inherent racism here in the U.S. - the old, never-ending plague that will not heal or go away. It’s always with us. If these immigrants in Carpentersville were blond Amish people or French Canadians who had opened businesses and shops there, would the reaction be the same?
The Europeans who came to North America starting with Columbus in 1492 and then Cortez in 1514 did a lot more to the folks already living here than raiding the fridge and running up the phone bill (I refer to Warriors comment here). But we Americans seem to be able to live without memory, any sense of history.
The U.S. is a place where you have the freedom to come and make money. It’s what we do best (besides jazz, musical theatre, and public libraries). No loafing for us. No taking all of August for summer vacations. Not us. Work and make money. That’s what we do and that’s what the Mexicans here do in spades. Warrior’s right – they shame us home grown types with their industry. Green card? Hell, I think they should get automatic citizenship for being better Americans than I am.
There’s nothing in the Constitution about “assimilating” (which happens over time anyway), or having to speak English (which happens over time anyway). There’s nothing in the Constitution about having to like or get along with your neighbors – lots of folks do but our history is really dicey when it comes to getting along with folks. The U.S. government decimated the Indian population, enslaved Africans, incarcerated the Japanese during World War II, conducted witch hunts of “commies”, and executed the Rosenbergs.
Assimilation? It happens whether you want it to or not within a generation usually. The kids speak the language, have cell phones, ipods, play computer games, eat processed food in copious amounts, and develop diabetes and other health problems including stress and free-floating anxiety which most would not have developed back home. Hell, I was born here but I’d like to un-assimilate most of the time.
The NY Times article stated that many of the Mexican immigrants in this Illinois town, who have lived there for a generation or two, still tell their children to stay under the radar, in effect. Yes, this comes from years of living in the U.S. illegally, living in fear of being deported even though their roots are now here and their children and children's children were born and raised here. But it is a reality for them and becomes a way of life. And there are other reasons that Latinos may tell their children not to mix with whites.
In 1974 when I was a young college student, I lived with my family in Glendale, California. Glendale was then a primarily conservative middle- and upper middle-class suburb of Los Angeles and we lived in a nice house in a very nice neighborhood. My boyfriend at the time was my age and was a tall, handsome guy with the dark hair and eyes of his Chicano father and the high cheekbones of his Finish mother. He looked like a Latino. I resemble both my German-Swedish mother and my Turkish-Romanian father, favouring the olive skin and dark hair and eyes of my father.
My boyfriend and I were college students and that summer we had gone on vacation together for a week and returned home mid-afternoon in the middle of the week. We drove up to my house and got out of the car together and walked up to the front door with my large suitcase. I opened the door with my key and we went in. A few minutes later when we were in the kitchen, we heard banging at the back door. "Police! Come out with your hands up!" I was outraged. This was my house. I had no idea what was going on but I was mad. Being the hot-head that I was at that time, I was going to throw open the door and give the cops a piece of my mind. My boyfriend said to wait, calm down, slowly open the door. He knew that if I threw open the door there was a good chance we would be shot. I said evenly to the police outside the door, "OK, I'm opening the door now," and did so very slowly. Their guns were drawn and pointing at us.
They said there had been a report of a burglary taking place at this address. The neighbors, who never bothered to get to know me in the two years I had been living there, assumed that the two dark-haired, dark-skinned people walking up to the front door in the middle of the day with a suitcase must be burglarizing the place. The police asked me to show them my driver's license to prove that I really did live there. Again I was outraged but got my driver’s license and showed them.
My boyfriend liked to remind me that he was more of an "American" than I was because his father's family had been in the U.S. a couple hundred years whereas I was a second generation American on my mom's side and a first generation on my dad's side.
This was 34 years ago. So much has changed and so little has changed. I drove by the house in Glendale a couple months ago when I was visiting family in Los Angeles and it is now owned by a very attractive, prosperous, middle class Latino family. I saw the kids playing in the front yard and the parents talking with each other, standing on the sidewalk, watering the lawn. A typical Friday afternoon scene from just about any suburb in the U.S. My cousin, who is lives a very different life than I, in a tony, gated community north of L.A. thought the mother and father watering out front were the gardeners. I said no, and nodded toward the two very short, very dark skinned guys sitting on the curb, wearing old dirty t-shirts and chinos and very worn sneakers, waiting for their ride home. They were the gardeners. To her, they all look alike.
I live in San Francisco. A couple of years ago my boyfriend was a Mexican man in his 30s who is here illegally, “without papers”. He came here to make money and send it back home to his parents and siblings. He does not like being illegal. Everybody is different – some illegal folks function under the radar very well – he does not. He would very much like to be a legal resident and work and live here and be able to see his family - the most important thing in the world to him – more than once every three years. But being a typical Mexican, he does not have the prosperity necessary to get a visa to travel or study in the U.S. or start the formal procedure toward residency. I do not know all the ins and outs of every possible scenario for legal immigration to the U.S. for a Mexican but he has explored his options with a lawyer and there are no options for him. People ask, “Why don’t they come here legally?” They can’t.
People ask why my ex-boyfriend doesn’t learn more English. He works two full time jobs. One is at a factory and the other is at a bakery. He has one afternoon and every other Sunday off. When I ask him how he is, he always smiles and replies, “tired.” He’s struggling to work, make money, stay healthy, and not get too lonely or miss his family too much. He works hard. All he does is work. Is he taking work away from citizens at minimum wage in San Francisco where a studio apartment costs $1,000 a month? I doubt it.
It is very convenient to forget that most of the European ancestors of “white” Americans came here from other countries. And most of them didn’t have to apply. They just showed up. My mother’s mother came from Sweden. My father came from Canada. The family just drove across the border.
America. It’s a great country. And there is room for everyone here. Even the ignorant, fearful racists of Carpentersville who apparently only speak English and in their little xenophobic minds think that’s a good thing.
P.S. The Mexican government won’t let the U.S. close the border. Mexico would have very serious problems if they lost the billions of dollars being sent home every year by workers in the U.S. That money feeds into their economy and without it, their social and economic problems would be magnified tenfold at least. They fear that the left would come into power in a heartbeat should that money dry up.
All the best and kind regards,
Kike Adedeji
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AY, CARAMBA! ES LA MIGRA!!!
[Note: as promised, your friendly USBP/Homeland Security agent, Warrior, weighs in. I invited him to express his thoughts with no editing or fussing from me. All opinions are welcome here. By the way, I think Warrior can kill us with his bare hands.]
Redefining the Line
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” – Genesis 1:1
We need to begin by having a premise upon which all other concepts are predicated. I am a believer, and I hope you are or become one, but here we are not trying to convert you to Christianity, but giving one view which I can confidently say will sway the most ardent of disciples on both sides of this issue towards a more balanced, and what I believe to be, the only possible solution.
“…In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them…” – Genesis 5:1-2
All people - every race, whether it be Mexican, Arab, Swedish, Kenyan, or any other of the hundreds of nationalities or thousands of combinations there are in this world, God has said they have all been made in his likeness! There are many reasons why things are not equal for people, but race is not one that should be a determining factor. There are few valid reasons, but race should not be one of them, although, it is so often not the case. We must move forward agreeing that no race is superior to any other race.
“And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” – Genesis 2:15
“And the Lord took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden.” This portion of the verse is one of the first verses that should bring to light the fact that God chooses where a person is to live. In which country you are born is determined by God. It is not to say that God hasn’t also given us the freedom to move and choose another place to live, but our origins are no accident.
“Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.” – Genesis 11:9
Now, there is much to this story, but the focus for us is that it was God’s choice and purposeful intention to scatter his created peoples all over the earth, essentially giving them there own country and language that was unique from all others. Here, then, is formed the basis for each country having a unique people with a unique culture and a unique language. Again, this is no accident; it is a choice God purposefully made.
So, up to this point, we have determined that God has created all people, all people are created in God’s image - regardless of human definitions used to define race, and the Lord has chosen, and it is not by accident, that a particular person is born in a particular country, into a particular culture, speaking a particular language. This also means that God is acutely aware of the challenges and trials that will be faced by that individual or group that are unique to his country of origin. We also can deduce, fairly assuredly, that God does not resist a person moving from one country/culture to another, but we will continue…
“In the day [that] I lifted up mine hand unto them, to bring them forth of the land of Egypt into a land that I had espied for them, flowing with milk and honey, which [is] the glory of all lands:” – Ezekiel 20:6
I think, and possibly as a side note, that there are countries that are in a better condition than others. I believe that there are countries, such as the United States, where people are drawn to a better life and better opportunity. Therefore, the United States having an overwhelming number of people wanting to make it there home is a very reasonable expectation.
From the verse, God clearly wanted this land of milk and honey to be the home of His chosen people, the Jewish race; however, entrance into this land was based upon trusting God and obeying Him. This can also lead into the initial discussion about legality. God is by nature just and fair. Thus, obedience to him would include following the laws of the land for legal entry into it. Obeying the law of the land is God’s desire as spoken in Romans 13:1-7 (Please read this!) and obeying God was a requirement for the Jewish race to enter into the “Promised Land” of that day. All this being said, it should be clear that it is simply not just a “ human right” for people to enter and benefit from another country without a lawful granting of permission by the host country to be there and do so.
We must agree to the sovereignty of each nation. A person can not simply claim to be a “citizen of the world” (which I have heard used as a reason for the belief that they have a right to enter any country they choose) and make themselves at home wherever they please, using the services and reaping the benefits of that country no matter how hard they may work. Simply working does not make up for the other ways the system is undermined by these thought processes and subsequent actions.
So, we add to everyone being equal in God’s eyes regardless of race, and that your country of origin not being a mistake, the fact that we are to obey God’s law which would include the laws of the particular land in which you are residing or choosing to reside.
Regarding the United States in particular, it is my deepest belief that we need to acknowledge that only the American Indians, decedents of the original settlers of Genesis 11:9, should have a much greater say over what happens in this land. I think life, technology, government, etc. has evolved quite a bit since we stole the land we now call home from its indigenous people, therefore, I believe that America is the best of what is available in the world as it is right now. However, I feel that American Indians should be entitled to some type of benefit for being the indigenous people. This is a good topic to develop on its own and I am not sure I have the answer to what this benefit should be, but I must state that American Indians are the only group of people that should not be subject to any type of Immigration law and should have a greater stake in property ownership or something along those lines, simply for being American Indian. Far different from what is in place today. The rest of us have our roots in another country, but Biblical law and subsequently American law has provided for those that are born here, or born elsewhere of American parents. I believe that these laws are valid, based upon God’s word, and thus are a legitimate basis for determining what rights to citizenship a person has outside of being an American Indian.
There are two concepts in American immigration and naturalization law that determine citizenship. It is more complex than this example, but this should form a basis of understanding:
Jus Soli – Is the concept of law that states that if a person is physically born in a country, like the United States, that citizenship is automatically conferred upon that person from birth.
Jus Sanguinis – Is the concept of law that states a person not physically born in a country, derives citizenship from the citizenship of the natural parents.
The United States has both of these laws in effect with certain provisions that must be met for the latter. By definition then, all others are aliens and intending immigrants as viewed by the law.
Being a sovereign country, if a person is not born here or of American Citizen parents (who have met the requirements), they must, by default, be under the jurisdiction of the laws of our country that regulate visitation and immigration.
“And if a stranger shall sojourn among you, and will keep the Passover unto the LORD; according to the ordinance of the Passover, and according to the manner thereof, so shall he do: ye shall have one ordinance, both for the stranger, and for him that was born in the land.” – Numbers 9:14
“One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you.” – Exodus 12:49
“Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit [any] of these abominations; [neither] any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you:” – Leviticus 18:26
The importance of the previous verses with regards to this subject are as follows:
1. God has made it clear that there is one law in the land that applies to all. This does not disregard cultural identity or language differences. It does not appear to me that God has anything negative to say about cultural differences or language differences except when it would cause a person to fail to follow the prescribed law. Therefore, we can glean that God expects everyone, regardless of their status of immigrant, visitor or citizen to follow the same laws!
2. The first verse, Numbers 9:14, and many others in the Bible, show God’s serious concern for assimilation to the culture one is entering. This does not mean one has to follow the sinful or negative habits of the culture or the current fashion of the day, but what it does indicate is that the law, the language, the customs, the ability to function without special consideration, etc. needs to be attended to by the immigrant/visitor. A non-citizen that wants to benefit from this country must assimilate into this country after following the laws prescribed to enter legally.
“[But] the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I [am] the LORD your God.” – Leviticus 19:34
“Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” – Exodus 22:21
“Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” – Exodus 23:9
With the exception of American Indians, we are all “strangers” here. Our laws provide for citizenship, but God wants us to remember where we came from so we don’t treat others with disdain for something we once were and now do not have to worry about.
“And it shall come to pass, [that] ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel.” – Ezekiel 47:22
The above verses, with the last one being the most notable, prove that God wants those that follow the law and assimilate into the culture to be treated with the same respect and concern as a fellow citizen. Even up to and including receiving an inheritance!
Much has been put forth here, however, I believe I have made the case, based on Biblical principles, that we are to have an immigration and naturalization policy in the United States. That the United States must expect to be a home to immigrants and will be sought out as home by many others for the remainder of its existence. It is the “Land of the free” and has many of God’s blessings still alive and well for those who live here.
I believe that I have made the case that God expects us to treat immigrants and visitors with respect and consideration, and with some conditions met, as our own family.
I believe that I have established the fact that nations are sovereign and that the laws of that land (that are in accord with God’s laws) need to be followed by citizen and stranger alike. That it is the right of a nation to determine who and how many non-citizens can enter and benefit from the opportunities this country has to offer. On the flip side of the coin, it would be obvious that the necessity also exists to provide for the deterrence, detection, apprehension, removal, or punishment of those that try to circumvent the laws of our land with regards to entry and exploitation.
I do believe that those of us that handle this challenge must strive to maintain the dignity and humanity of those that come to the United States seeking a better life, but I think it is also incumbent upon us to enforce the laws and develop serious consequences for those that break them or aid and abet those who will or do. I also think that we should try our best to streamline our processes as an incentive for those that have needs that would drive them to enter illegally, but still follow the proper procedures. Not that we should have to, but it may make it more valuable to do what is right.
Mexico, being essentially a third-world country bordering a Super Power, presents special challenges, however, it is my experience that Mexico is far from the worst and clearly not the only source of problems that America faces with regards to illegal immigration. So, I would like to put forth that people should not solely focus upon just what is obvious. This picture is far bigger than just Mexico and “terrorism.”
We need to seal our borders and treat it as if we are protecting the very sovereignty of our nation. We need to enforce the laws that are currently on the books, focusing on deportation, specifically of illegal aliens that have committed crimes. We also need to put teeth into the laws that are violated by persons who aid and abet (hire) illegal aliens. There must be stiff penalties for those who use fraud to enter, stay or obtain benefits illegally. We need to strip any government benefits from anyone that is not lawfully here.
In spite of all that was said, we must also realize that America is the modern land of milk and honey. We need to develop a plan that is fair and equitable to help people that are willing to legally pursue their entrance into this country, will assimilate and contribute to the positive growth of the nation. Blanket amnesties are a tragedy and don’t work to defend the structure of the United States, but on the contrary, do much to undermine it.
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See ya, same time, same channel, next week. Adios, amigos!
The Return of ... Immigration Monday!!!
COMMENTS and DISPATCHES:
Somebody wrote me and asked what my immigration policy is, in simple terms. It was a nice note, and I am grateful for that. And my response, in simple terms, is this: I don’t know. That’s what “Immigration Monday” is all about. Someone trying to swim through the mung, looking for clear water. I’m looking at it and hoping we, together, can work something out. Then, when I’m the president’s Immigration Czar, I can plagiarize all of your thoughts and look wise beyond my (considerable) years.
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It’s happening again. I told people about the recent vanishing of workers in the American West. How the strawberry crop was endangered because Mexicans didn’t show up; how the maid services in motels from Idaho to Illinois were desperate for domestic crews because Mexicans didn’t show up. Later, how the apple crop in Michigan last year was facing trouble because the Mexican crews didn’t show up. Where did they go? Abducted by UFOs? No. They stayed home. That’s right! Immigration is already on its way to becoming yesterday’s news. (Wait—don’t send me hate mail: it has always been yesterday’s news. I can show you quotes by Ben Franklin against immigration; radio broadcasts from the 20s that sound like Lou Dobbs, though they’re about Italians and Germans. I can show you newspaper pieces from the 1800’s, the 1920’s, the 1930’s, the 1950’s that sound exactly like the stuff you read now. Except that the pieces from the 19th century are about evil Asians. Then it’s those wicked Irish. Mexi-phobia is a recent historical development, at least in border terms.)
Have you read Sitting Bull’s op-eds about immigration?
Yeah, my amigos—always look at page 5 or 6 to find the juicy immigration stories that allow you to draw your own conclusions, away from propaganda on either side. Today’s story is about the Western Work Force VANISHING. Perhaps the Rapture happened after all, it just took burger chefs, bus boys, motel maids, tomato pickers. The story isn’t obviously about Mexicans, but I guarantee you the smaller numbers of immigrants affects this data.
Check it out:
They offered $10 an hour to make cheeseburgers, but nobody would take it. (You will recall the strawberry fields rotting because the Raza de Bronce did not come, and the American workers would not pick.) Google apple crops—you will find that this year, again, the Michigan apple crops might be at risk because we are heading for A Day Without A Mexican, just like that maligned movie said.
It would seem to me that out-sourcing jobs is the same process as in-sourcing workers. It also seems to me that our efforts at border control are taking effect. Fear and dread are strong deterrents. What is interesting, in a social science sense, is whether we have anything in place to make the Moloch-machine of human sacrifice and slave labor function after we get what we want. Close the borders, sure. I dig it. But…apples? Strawberries? Burger King? Chicken pickin’? My suburban lawn crew? Maids? Toilet scrubbers? Painters? Who will do these jobs? Will the car builder dying on emphysema in Lansing do it? Not right now. Maybe later, when the Beaners are gone.
Is there some way to make Big Macs (The Royale With Cheese) in Delhi and have them teleported here?
I am watching and noting. I’m a nature writer. This is the interesting new flight pattern. I am wondering what its portents are.
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Is it funny, or is it tragic? The freight railroad running from Central America through Mexico is a Wyoming rail line. They pulled out of Mexico. Now, hundreds of “illegals” from Guatemala and Honduras have spent two and a half weeks on the rails, waiting for trains that will never come. They’re walking around Mexico, looking for help. The Mexicans don’t want them. Funny thing—Mexicans seem to think they use social services they are not entitled to; Mexicans think they are trying to become Mexican citizens illegally; they think the illegals take jobs for lower wages, raise crime, steal, sully the language, horn in on education, overburden the ship of state. You know a refugee is in trouble when the slums in Chiapas are a real step up. And, apparently, nobody in the Mexican government is gifted with an ironic world view. The only thing lacking is a Mexican Rush Limbaugh.
Mexico—the new Kansas?
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I’m sick of it all. But I was sick of it in 1993.
It’s my birthday week.
I have things to write that don’t make me want to jump off bridges.
Here are two guest writers because I don’t want to think about it anymore. Sometimes, you have to take a rest from the wars and watch Mr. Bean with your daughter. I offer you an eloquent reader of the blog, and our Border Patrol friend, Warrior.
Redefine The Line!
Lucius Immigrinus Tijuanensis
A LETTER:
Luis, I find your online journal wonderful for us fellow writers and artists and for all intelligent folks looking at the world through thoughtful eyes and an open heart. And your IMs are wonderful. If this wasn't your blog, I probably wouldn't bother to respond to Warrior's comments regarding the NY Times article. (I don’t actually read other blogs – only so many minutes in the day…)
I read the Sunday NY Times article and my heart sank. It always frightens me when one group is scapegoated for the economic and social problems of a society. This issue is very much about race and our seemingly inherent racism here in the U.S. - the old, never-ending plague that will not heal or go away. It’s always with us. If these immigrants in Carpentersville were blond Amish people or French Canadians who had opened businesses and shops there, would the reaction be the same?
The Europeans who came to North America starting with Columbus in 1492 and then Cortez in 1514 did a lot more to the folks already living here than raiding the fridge and running up the phone bill (I refer to Warriors comment here). But we Americans seem to be able to live without memory, any sense of history.
The U.S. is a place where you have the freedom to come and make money. It’s what we do best (besides jazz, musical theatre, and public libraries). No loafing for us. No taking all of August for summer vacations. Not us. Work and make money. That’s what we do and that’s what the Mexicans here do in spades. Warrior’s right – they shame us home grown types with their industry. Green card? Hell, I think they should get automatic citizenship for being better Americans than I am.
There’s nothing in the Constitution about “assimilating” (which happens over time anyway), or having to speak English (which happens over time anyway). There’s nothing in the Constitution about having to like or get along with your neighbors – lots of folks do but our history is really dicey when it comes to getting along with folks. The U.S. government decimated the Indian population, enslaved Africans, incarcerated the Japanese during World War II, conducted witch hunts of “commies”, and executed the Rosenbergs.
Assimilation? It happens whether you want it to or not within a generation usually. The kids speak the language, have cell phones, ipods, play computer games, eat processed food in copious amounts, and develop diabetes and other health problems including stress and free-floating anxiety which most would not have developed back home. Hell, I was born here but I’d like to un-assimilate most of the time.
The NY Times article stated that many of the Mexican immigrants in this Illinois town, who have lived there for a generation or two, still tell their children to stay under the radar, in effect. Yes, this comes from years of living in the U.S. illegally, living in fear of being deported even though their roots are now here and their children and children's children were born and raised here. But it is a reality for them and becomes a way of life. And there are other reasons that Latinos may tell their children not to mix with whites.
In 1974 when I was a young college student, I lived with my family in Glendale, California. Glendale was then a primarily conservative middle- and upper middle-class suburb of Los Angeles and we lived in a nice house in a very nice neighborhood. My boyfriend at the time was my age and was a tall, handsome guy with the dark hair and eyes of his Chicano father and the high cheekbones of his Finish mother. He looked like a Latino. I resemble both my German-Swedish mother and my Turkish-Romanian father, favouring the olive skin and dark hair and eyes of my father.
My boyfriend and I were college students and that summer we had gone on vacation together for a week and returned home mid-afternoon in the middle of the week. We drove up to my house and got out of the car together and walked up to the front door with my large suitcase. I opened the door with my key and we went in. A few minutes later when we were in the kitchen, we heard banging at the back door. "Police! Come out with your hands up!" I was outraged. This was my house. I had no idea what was going on but I was mad. Being the hot-head that I was at that time, I was going to throw open the door and give the cops a piece of my mind. My boyfriend said to wait, calm down, slowly open the door. He knew that if I threw open the door there was a good chance we would be shot. I said evenly to the police outside the door, "OK, I'm opening the door now," and did so very slowly. Their guns were drawn and pointing at us.
They said there had been a report of a burglary taking place at this address. The neighbors, who never bothered to get to know me in the two years I had been living there, assumed that the two dark-haired, dark-skinned people walking up to the front door in the middle of the day with a suitcase must be burglarizing the place. The police asked me to show them my driver's license to prove that I really did live there. Again I was outraged but got my driver’s license and showed them.
My boyfriend liked to remind me that he was more of an "American" than I was because his father's family had been in the U.S. a couple hundred years whereas I was a second generation American on my mom's side and a first generation on my dad's side.
This was 34 years ago. So much has changed and so little has changed. I drove by the house in Glendale a couple months ago when I was visiting family in Los Angeles and it is now owned by a very attractive, prosperous, middle class Latino family. I saw the kids playing in the front yard and the parents talking with each other, standing on the sidewalk, watering the lawn. A typical Friday afternoon scene from just about any suburb in the U.S. My cousin, who is lives a very different life than I, in a tony, gated community north of L.A. thought the mother and father watering out front were the gardeners. I said no, and nodded toward the two very short, very dark skinned guys sitting on the curb, wearing old dirty t-shirts and chinos and very worn sneakers, waiting for their ride home. They were the gardeners. To her, they all look alike.
I live in San Francisco. A couple of years ago my boyfriend was a Mexican man in his 30s who is here illegally, “without papers”. He came here to make money and send it back home to his parents and siblings. He does not like being illegal. Everybody is different – some illegal folks function under the radar very well – he does not. He would very much like to be a legal resident and work and live here and be able to see his family - the most important thing in the world to him – more than once every three years. But being a typical Mexican, he does not have the prosperity necessary to get a visa to travel or study in the U.S. or start the formal procedure toward residency. I do not know all the ins and outs of every possible scenario for legal immigration to the U.S. for a Mexican but he has explored his options with a lawyer and there are no options for him. People ask, “Why don’t they come here legally?” They can’t.
People ask why my ex-boyfriend doesn’t learn more English. He works two full time jobs. One is at a factory and the other is at a bakery. He has one afternoon and every other Sunday off. When I ask him how he is, he always smiles and replies, “tired.” He’s struggling to work, make money, stay healthy, and not get too lonely or miss his family too much. He works hard. All he does is work. Is he taking work away from citizens at minimum wage in San Francisco where a studio apartment costs $1,000 a month? I doubt it.
It is very convenient to forget that most of the European ancestors of “white” Americans came here from other countries. And most of them didn’t have to apply. They just showed up. My mother’s mother came from Sweden. My father came from Canada. The family just drove across the border.
America. It’s a great country. And there is room for everyone here. Even the ignorant, fearful racists of Carpentersville who apparently only speak English and in their little xenophobic minds think that’s a good thing.
P.S. The Mexican government won’t let the U.S. close the border. Mexico would have very serious problems if they lost the billions of dollars being sent home every year by workers in the U.S. That money feeds into their economy and without it, their social and economic problems would be magnified tenfold at least. They fear that the left would come into power in a heartbeat should that money dry up.
All the best and kind regards,
Kike Adedeji
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AY, CARAMBA! ES LA MIGRA!!!
[Note: as promised, your friendly USBP/Homeland Security agent, Warrior, weighs in. I invited him to express his thoughts with no editing or fussing from me. All opinions are welcome here. By the way, I think Warrior can kill us with his bare hands.]
Redefining the Line
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” – Genesis 1:1
We need to begin by having a premise upon which all other concepts are predicated. I am a believer, and I hope you are or become one, but here we are not trying to convert you to Christianity, but giving one view which I can confidently say will sway the most ardent of disciples on both sides of this issue towards a more balanced, and what I believe to be, the only possible solution.
“…In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them…” – Genesis 5:1-2
All people - every race, whether it be Mexican, Arab, Swedish, Kenyan, or any other of the hundreds of nationalities or thousands of combinations there are in this world, God has said they have all been made in his likeness! There are many reasons why things are not equal for people, but race is not one that should be a determining factor. There are few valid reasons, but race should not be one of them, although, it is so often not the case. We must move forward agreeing that no race is superior to any other race.
“And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” – Genesis 2:15
“And the Lord took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden.” This portion of the verse is one of the first verses that should bring to light the fact that God chooses where a person is to live. In which country you are born is determined by God. It is not to say that God hasn’t also given us the freedom to move and choose another place to live, but our origins are no accident.
“Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.” – Genesis 11:9
Now, there is much to this story, but the focus for us is that it was God’s choice and purposeful intention to scatter his created peoples all over the earth, essentially giving them there own country and language that was unique from all others. Here, then, is formed the basis for each country having a unique people with a unique culture and a unique language. Again, this is no accident; it is a choice God purposefully made.
So, up to this point, we have determined that God has created all people, all people are created in God’s image - regardless of human definitions used to define race, and the Lord has chosen, and it is not by accident, that a particular person is born in a particular country, into a particular culture, speaking a particular language. This also means that God is acutely aware of the challenges and trials that will be faced by that individual or group that are unique to his country of origin. We also can deduce, fairly assuredly, that God does not resist a person moving from one country/culture to another, but we will continue…
“In the day [that] I lifted up mine hand unto them, to bring them forth of the land of Egypt into a land that I had espied for them, flowing with milk and honey, which [is] the glory of all lands:” – Ezekiel 20:6
I think, and possibly as a side note, that there are countries that are in a better condition than others. I believe that there are countries, such as the United States, where people are drawn to a better life and better opportunity. Therefore, the United States having an overwhelming number of people wanting to make it there home is a very reasonable expectation.
From the verse, God clearly wanted this land of milk and honey to be the home of His chosen people, the Jewish race; however, entrance into this land was based upon trusting God and obeying Him. This can also lead into the initial discussion about legality. God is by nature just and fair. Thus, obedience to him would include following the laws of the land for legal entry into it. Obeying the law of the land is God’s desire as spoken in Romans 13:1-7 (Please read this!) and obeying God was a requirement for the Jewish race to enter into the “Promised Land” of that day. All this being said, it should be clear that it is simply not just a “ human right” for people to enter and benefit from another country without a lawful granting of permission by the host country to be there and do so.
We must agree to the sovereignty of each nation. A person can not simply claim to be a “citizen of the world” (which I have heard used as a reason for the belief that they have a right to enter any country they choose) and make themselves at home wherever they please, using the services and reaping the benefits of that country no matter how hard they may work. Simply working does not make up for the other ways the system is undermined by these thought processes and subsequent actions.
So, we add to everyone being equal in God’s eyes regardless of race, and that your country of origin not being a mistake, the fact that we are to obey God’s law which would include the laws of the particular land in which you are residing or choosing to reside.
Regarding the United States in particular, it is my deepest belief that we need to acknowledge that only the American Indians, decedents of the original settlers of Genesis 11:9, should have a much greater say over what happens in this land. I think life, technology, government, etc. has evolved quite a bit since we stole the land we now call home from its indigenous people, therefore, I believe that America is the best of what is available in the world as it is right now. However, I feel that American Indians should be entitled to some type of benefit for being the indigenous people. This is a good topic to develop on its own and I am not sure I have the answer to what this benefit should be, but I must state that American Indians are the only group of people that should not be subject to any type of Immigration law and should have a greater stake in property ownership or something along those lines, simply for being American Indian. Far different from what is in place today. The rest of us have our roots in another country, but Biblical law and subsequently American law has provided for those that are born here, or born elsewhere of American parents. I believe that these laws are valid, based upon God’s word, and thus are a legitimate basis for determining what rights to citizenship a person has outside of being an American Indian.
There are two concepts in American immigration and naturalization law that determine citizenship. It is more complex than this example, but this should form a basis of understanding:
Jus Soli – Is the concept of law that states that if a person is physically born in a country, like the United States, that citizenship is automatically conferred upon that person from birth.
Jus Sanguinis – Is the concept of law that states a person not physically born in a country, derives citizenship from the citizenship of the natural parents.
The United States has both of these laws in effect with certain provisions that must be met for the latter. By definition then, all others are aliens and intending immigrants as viewed by the law.
Being a sovereign country, if a person is not born here or of American Citizen parents (who have met the requirements), they must, by default, be under the jurisdiction of the laws of our country that regulate visitation and immigration.
“And if a stranger shall sojourn among you, and will keep the Passover unto the LORD; according to the ordinance of the Passover, and according to the manner thereof, so shall he do: ye shall have one ordinance, both for the stranger, and for him that was born in the land.” – Numbers 9:14
“One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you.” – Exodus 12:49
“Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit [any] of these abominations; [neither] any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you:” – Leviticus 18:26
The importance of the previous verses with regards to this subject are as follows:
1. God has made it clear that there is one law in the land that applies to all. This does not disregard cultural identity or language differences. It does not appear to me that God has anything negative to say about cultural differences or language differences except when it would cause a person to fail to follow the prescribed law. Therefore, we can glean that God expects everyone, regardless of their status of immigrant, visitor or citizen to follow the same laws!
2. The first verse, Numbers 9:14, and many others in the Bible, show God’s serious concern for assimilation to the culture one is entering. This does not mean one has to follow the sinful or negative habits of the culture or the current fashion of the day, but what it does indicate is that the law, the language, the customs, the ability to function without special consideration, etc. needs to be attended to by the immigrant/visitor. A non-citizen that wants to benefit from this country must assimilate into this country after following the laws prescribed to enter legally.
“[But] the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I [am] the LORD your God.” – Leviticus 19:34
“Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” – Exodus 22:21
“Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” – Exodus 23:9
With the exception of American Indians, we are all “strangers” here. Our laws provide for citizenship, but God wants us to remember where we came from so we don’t treat others with disdain for something we once were and now do not have to worry about.
“And it shall come to pass, [that] ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel.” – Ezekiel 47:22
The above verses, with the last one being the most notable, prove that God wants those that follow the law and assimilate into the culture to be treated with the same respect and concern as a fellow citizen. Even up to and including receiving an inheritance!
Much has been put forth here, however, I believe I have made the case, based on Biblical principles, that we are to have an immigration and naturalization policy in the United States. That the United States must expect to be a home to immigrants and will be sought out as home by many others for the remainder of its existence. It is the “Land of the free” and has many of God’s blessings still alive and well for those who live here.
I believe that I have made the case that God expects us to treat immigrants and visitors with respect and consideration, and with some conditions met, as our own family.
I believe that I have established the fact that nations are sovereign and that the laws of that land (that are in accord with God’s laws) need to be followed by citizen and stranger alike. That it is the right of a nation to determine who and how many non-citizens can enter and benefit from the opportunities this country has to offer. On the flip side of the coin, it would be obvious that the necessity also exists to provide for the deterrence, detection, apprehension, removal, or punishment of those that try to circumvent the laws of our land with regards to entry and exploitation.
I do believe that those of us that handle this challenge must strive to maintain the dignity and humanity of those that come to the United States seeking a better life, but I think it is also incumbent upon us to enforce the laws and develop serious consequences for those that break them or aid and abet those who will or do. I also think that we should try our best to streamline our processes as an incentive for those that have needs that would drive them to enter illegally, but still follow the proper procedures. Not that we should have to, but it may make it more valuable to do what is right.
Mexico, being essentially a third-world country bordering a Super Power, presents special challenges, however, it is my experience that Mexico is far from the worst and clearly not the only source of problems that America faces with regards to illegal immigration. So, I would like to put forth that people should not solely focus upon just what is obvious. This picture is far bigger than just Mexico and “terrorism.”
We need to seal our borders and treat it as if we are protecting the very sovereignty of our nation. We need to enforce the laws that are currently on the books, focusing on deportation, specifically of illegal aliens that have committed crimes. We also need to put teeth into the laws that are violated by persons who aid and abet (hire) illegal aliens. There must be stiff penalties for those who use fraud to enter, stay or obtain benefits illegally. We need to strip any government benefits from anyone that is not lawfully here.
In spite of all that was said, we must also realize that America is the modern land of milk and honey. We need to develop a plan that is fair and equitable to help people that are willing to legally pursue their entrance into this country, will assimilate and contribute to the positive growth of the nation. Blanket amnesties are a tragedy and don’t work to defend the structure of the United States, but on the contrary, do much to undermine it.
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See ya, same time, same channel, next week. Adios, amigos!
8/12/2007
Volume 2.5, August 13, 2007.
The foolish distrust what they see, the wise distrust what they think. –Zen Saying
REDEFINE THE LINE.
Comment:
Mary Jo Johnston has died. You probably don’t know Mary Jo. Most heroes, in my opinion, are unknown. They change the world in their own quiet ways. Who could have imagined that a librarian in Kankakee, Illinois might be a saint? I don’t mean “perfect.” (Though, in her own way, she was.) But I mean it in the old way: she made miracles happen, and she lifted the poor and the lost and the refugees as well as her neighbors and friends, and she gave them comfort and direction, books and instruction. Who could have known that a librarian in Kankakee, Illinois, was a warrior in the great American immigration battle?
For anyone who has given up hope for solutions to this quagmire we call immigration, look to Kankakee. I have posted my New York Times article about the city and its amazing story, below.
It was Mary Jo who brought us into Kankakee. She asked us to come to the library and speak about THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY to readers. She warned us, “When you get off the highway and make your way to Kankakee, watch out for deer and turkeys on the road.” Turkeys! We thought this was charming, and we thought Kankakee would have a little old library with seven retired ladies and a paper plate of cookies.
We got there, and we kept driving up and down the street, looking for this sad little brick building. But we kept ending up in the parking lot of a gleaming high tech tower. Where was the library? It took me quite a while to realize the tower was the library.
Inside, Mary Jo and her staff had managed to seat 300+ people. The mayor came and presented me with the key to the city. It was one of the most remarkable reading nights I ever had. And when I was done, a young Mexican paisano stood up and, in his tortured English, said: “I am so proud you wrote this book, because now these people can see what we suffered so they could eat salads.” There was a ripple in all the public, like wind hitting wheat.
After the talk, they flocked to him. Hey! Leave that bastard alone and come see me! But Kankakee knew what was important.
Read the piece. Thank Mary Jo Johnson. Think of Mary Jo Johnson. Say a prayer for her. She was your superhero, you just didn’t know her.
I dedicate this edition to her.
(You can read more about Mary Jo in a previous posting on this blog, entitled, “Time to Write.”)
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NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE ABOUT KANKAKEE AND IMMIGRATION:
TRENDS and DISPATCHES:
I have written elsewhere about the ways in which you can analyze immigration data and trends for yourself—don’t rely on propaganda machines and self-serving pundits. If someone wants your vote, or your advertising dollars, you would be wise to ignore that (un)happy crappy you’re hearing and look around for yourself.
Most of us don’t have the luxury of talking to coyotes or Border Patrol agents or consuls. I do. My USBP pals on the line have been telling me numbers are DOWN. In one sector, an agent confided to me that the numbers of “illegals” had DROPPED by 16%.
A year ago, I was teaching workshops at Oregon’s wonderful Fishtrap. We noticed that the strawberry crop in Oregon and Washington was going to waste. There had been a record crop, perhaps the biggest ever. But the berries were rotting on the plants because the Mexican pickers DID NOT APPEAR. And, not to beat a clichéd horse, no Americans would show up to do the stoop-labor.
As we made our way across the country, in our traditional restless American drive, we noticed that domestic service in the motels was DOWN. Albeit my survey was informal at best, every single motel we passed had Help Wanted signs in the windows, because the maids and scut-workers, again, did not show up. Once we were back in Illinois, I noticed that the apple crop in Michigan was in danger. Guess why. The pickers NEVER SHOWED UP.
What!? No Mexicans?? Right. No Mexicans. Where did they go? They can’t all be in New Orleans, doing cheap construction.
Watch the seventh or ninth pages of your newspaper—you will see what we’ve been noticing: workers are not showing up again this year. There is a small pattern emerging that bears some study. It’s a small whisper of a story, but if you track rural papers around the country, you might get your Pulitzer for discovering this hidden news phenomenon.
You will not hear about it when people are running for president and your main anti-Beaner candidate is again suggesting we bomb Mecca. Think for yourself, baby. Nobody wants you to THINK.
What is this trend?
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MONEY REMITTANCES GOING DOWN: another interesting development was reported in the New York Times (by the excellent Julia Preston, Thursday August 9, 2007; p. A7): fewer Mexican immigrants are sending money home from the US. She quotes a report from the Inter-American Development Bank that states that “500,000 homes” and families in Mexico will be affected by this slowdown, as the numbers of Mexicans sending money home drops to 64%. The reasons cited are fear, basically—insecurity about their future in the US. So they are SAVING instead of sending. Money in the bank, against the day they FLEE the US and go home. Wot??? Egad, man—they plan to GO HOME??? Lou Dobbs didn’t tell me that!
It’s interesting to ponder this. The remittance money in 2006 was around $20 billion a year. If 36% of this money is now going into American banks, how much money is that on a yearly basis? That money is splashing into the big American fiscal pool, swimming around with all the other money that helps keep the economy afloat. What I really wonder is what kind of damage that might cause our economy when the money is suddenly pulled out. I can guarantee that many American working men and women will say, “Hey, I’ll take the hit, as long as they go home.” Unfortunately, the big bosses who hire international slave labor cannot be sent anywhere. Though I’d put them in Gitmo. So pray I’m not made King.
And, of course, we ought to look at what it means to have 500,000 Mexican households in worse straights than they were in before. More undocumented? Or is the fear seeping into Mexico, and will they hold steady and wait for their explorers to return from the New-New World?
Two further trends bear your attention—one makes front pages, one does not. (The really good immigration stuff, I’m tellin’ ya, comes after page five or six). The front page story is the new drug war we are launching in Mexico. The new Mexican president has taken
the position of anti-drug warrior, and President Bush has decided to negotiate a massive new “drug assistance” program, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since we spent a fortune in Colombia to eradicate drugs. And, uh, that one went well! The last trend worth watching this week is the election in Baja California. The former mayor of Tijuana, a true conservative, has won a heated contest. Baja was the first state in Mexico to break away in a substantial way from the “revolutionary” PRI government, and here they go again. Law and order? Pro-American? Pro-business? Anti-drug? Maybe. US Territory? 51st state? Folklore…and creeping fear in Mexico City.
IMMIGRATION TIMELINE, VOLUME TWO:
Prepared for IMMIGRATION MONDAY by Luis Alberto Urrea.
A Brief History of North American Immigration and the Mexican Border
Part Two: From the American Civil War to the Present.
[Note: the last edition contains part one of this timeline. This one, being more modern, is no doubt more controversial than ancient history. Though I mentioned the Bering Land Bridge in that one, I don’t really buy the theory. I think some people may have come over the bridge, but there is a deeper, more mysterious indigenous presence here. More ancient. More profound. Do I sound like an LDS historian, seeking Lamanites? At least I’m not looking for alien starship pilots doing genetic research and spawning the Nephilim. Or wait. Maybe I am.]
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1861 AD The Civil War begins.
1862 AD CINCO DE MAYO. A Texan-born Chicano general of the Mexican army defeats Napoleon III’s French army in Mexico. Napoleon’s ultimate destination: the United States, where Napoleon’s troops were going to support the Rebels in the American Civil War. That’s right—you ought to eat some Mexican food on Cinco de Mayo, because if not for Mexico, you might be be named Johnny Reb.
1863 AD Emancipation Proclamation.
1865 AD The North wins the Civil War.
1866 AD Ku Klux Klan founded in Pulaski, Tennessee.
1870 AD British immigration peaks at 103,677.
1873 AD Saint of Cabora (Teresita Urrea) born in Sinaloa, Mexico. Foments Indian and religious revolt. Has no idea I’m going to write a novel about her. Or maybe she does.
Slavery abolished in Puerto Rico.
1877 AD Anti-Chinese race riots in San Francisco.
299, 087 Jews living in the United States—1 ½ % of total population.
1880 AD United States signs treaty with China to limit and control number of immigrant workers allowed entry.
250,000 Jews in Unites States—numbers will swell to 2.5 million by the early 20th century.
Indigenous messianic movements ignite in Mexico.
Saint of Cabora, Niño Fidencio, etc. Echo the messianic movements that will sweep the North American tribes.
1882 AD ANTI-CHINESE EXCLUSIONARY ACT signed into law.
Immigration peaks:
Chinese—39, 579;
English and German-- 350,000;
Italian-- 32,000
Russian-- 17,000;
Scandinavian—105,326.
87% from northern and western Europe.
Anti-Immigration Act bars criminals, the mentally ill, and the poor.
1885 AD Importation of contract workers banned.
1887 AD American Protective Association, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic party is formed. 2.5 million members.
1889 AD Tomóchic Massacre. Mexican forces annihilate followers of Saint of Cabora in Tomóchic, Chihuahua. (Among the soldiers is the writer, Heriberto Frías—later known as “the Mexican Zola.” He writes the controversial novel about nthe massacre and the Saint of Cabora, Tomochic.)
CHICAGO: Jane Addams forms Hull House (on the present campus of University of Illinois at Chicago) to help immigrants.
1890 AD Japanese immigration begins. 25,000 Japanese workers immigrate.
First exposé of harsh conditions in immigrant slums is published: How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis.
MEXICANS RECRUITED FROM MEXICO TO REPLACE LOST CHINESE CHEAP LABOR.
1892 AD ELLIS ISLAND opens. Over 12 million immigrants will pass through in the next decades.
1893 AD U.S. and Canada sign pact to catch illegal immigrants crossing the Canadian border.
1894 AD Boston’s Immigration Restriction League forms; proposes literacy tests to stop “undesirables” from entering the country
1898 AD Hawaii annexed: .154,000 new Americans added.
1900 AD U.S, population: 75.9 million. 3.6 million are immigrants who have entered since 1890.
9,000,000 immigrants come from Europe.
Border Corridos, or ballads, become the most popular musical hits in Mexico, and the outlaw myth and romance of the border/”norte” begins.
1904 AD United States Border Patrol formed. 75 agents. Anti-Chinese patrols.
1905 AD Go, CHICAGO! The first anti-racist newspaper, The Chicago Defender, is founded.
Asiatic Exclusion League forms in San Francisco.
1906 AD The League Has Its Way: San Francisco school district announces there is a “Yellow Peril” to good Americans, orders that Japanese, Chinese and Korean students be forced to attend segregated schools.
The Saint of Cabora dies in Clifton, Arizona.
1907 AD 81% of all immigrants come from southern and eastern Europe.
Theodore Roosevelt steps in and reverses San Francisco’s race-based segregation policies regarding Asian students.
Japan agrees to stop the flow of immigrant laborers.
30, 226 Japanese enter.
1910 AD U.S. population: 91.9 million. 8.8 million are immigrants arrived since 1900; 14.7% of population is foreign-born.
1910-20 AD Mexican Revolution.
Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans flee northward.
1913 AD California: Alien Land Law forbids Japanese from owning land.
1914 AD Wars and Rumors of Wars: 1,218,480 immigrants enter the United States.
75% are from Europe.
1915 AD US Congress formalizes border patrol: Us Border Mounted Guard.
Anti-Chinese patrols.
First official Border Patrol Agent is named Jeff Milton.
1917 AD Immigration literacy acts passed requiring immigrants to pas written exams. President Wilson vetoes bills twice, but they still pass.
1919 AD 25 major race riots break out all over the U.S.
1920 AD Ku Klux Klan shifts its focus from American Blacks to immigrants and Jews.
California, up to its old racial tricks, passes a law that prohibits Japanese from even renting land.
¼ of New York City’s population is Jewish.
Immigrants form 50% of the population of American industrial cities.
1921, ’24 AD Immigration Acts (US).
IMMIGRATION EMERGENCY QUOTA ACT (The Dillingham Bill) establishes quotas as the basis of immigration policy. Only 3% of any foreign group currently living in the U.S. can enter each year.
MEXICANS EXEMPTED.
1924 AD Labor Appropriation Act (US).
Johnson-Reed Immigration Act: quota reduced to 2%.
1925 AD US Border Patrol expands to coasts. 450 officers. Provide their own horses. Pay: $1,680 a year.
1927 AD Jewish immigrants constitute 3.6% of American population.
1928 AD First Border Patrol uniforms are created.
New Mexico’s Octaviano Larrazolo (born in Mexico) is first Hispanic senator.
1929 AD National Origin Immigration Quota goes into effect.
The Great Depression cuts Mexican population in the U.S. by one third.
1931 AD Lemon Grove, CA—Mexican-American parents sue to stop segregation of schools that won’t allow Mexican/Chicano children to attend better schools.
1933 AD FIRST MEXICAN “ILLEGAL ALIENS” DEPORTED.
16,000 Mexicans working in the U.S. illegally are sent to Mexico.
1935 AD Dennis Chavez is the first American-born Latino (Mexican) elected as U.S. Senator. Yes, he was a Democrat!
1938 AD Mexico nationalizes all petroleum production in Mexico, confiscating all American operations and creating Pemex. One of the most brazen thefts in Mexico’s history, worth untold millions.
1939 AD 937 Jewish refugees denied entry to the U.S. and are returned to Germany.
Food Stamps appear.
WORLD WAR II begins in Europe.
1941 AD U.S. enters war.
LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) takes on Union Pacific Railroad, which has maintained a policy of not allowing Mexican/Chicano employees to enter into the apprenticeship program so they can advance in their careers.
1942 AD President Roosevelt signs legislation allowing the U.S. to remove Japanese Americans from their homes and land in the Pacific States.
United States/ Mexico Bracero Migrant Worker Program. Begins with sugar beets in CA; soon goes national. Railroad Bracero Program follows.
Agriculture quota: 50,000+. Agriculture program ends 1945. Railroad: 1964.
Like the Mexican migrations of the 19th century lured north to alleviate the labor shortage due to anti-Chinese legislation, Mexicans are recruited to replace the incarcerated Japanese work force.
1943 AD Chinese Exclusion Act repealed.
Over 250 race riots break out in the U.S.
Anti-Mexican race riots, known as the “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles.
1945 AD “Displaced persons” acts put in effect: 400,000 European refuges rush to the U.S.
1948 AD Organization of American States forms in Colombia, South America. 21 members, including U.S.
Texan WWII veterans form the American G.I. Forum to combat anti-Hispanic racism and to promote Mexican-American welfare.
1949 AD Fair Labor Standards Act raises minimum wage from 40 cents to 75 cents.
1950 AD Internal Security Act: American .Communists must register with the government.
Korean War.
1952 AD Puerto Rico become a commonwealth under the U.S. government on July 25.
Immigration and Nationality Act, called the McCarran-Walter Act. Removes the ban on Asian immigration.
1953 AD Refugee Relief Act: refugees fleeing communist countries allowed to enter; 200,000 emigrate.
OPERATION WETBACK: the U.S. deports 3.8 million Mexicans.
1954 AD U.S. sponsored coup topples government of Guatemala.
1955 AD Watch out, you bastards, I am born.
1956 AD 6,000 Japanese Americans who renounced citizenship when they were incarcerated in the camps are reinstated.
1959 AD Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution: 20,000 Cubans flee to the U.S.
1960 AD John F. Kennedy elected U.S. President: first Catholic in history to hold the office.
1961 AD Alliance for Progress forms in Uruguay; U.S. and Latin American nations sign charter assuring mutual developmental support.
1962 AD César Chávez begins union that will become UFW (United Farm Workers).
JFK signs legislation that will ban racial preference and discrimination in housing.
1963 AD Chamizal Treaty: U.S. returns a portion of El Paso, TX, to Mexico.
1964 AD First maquiladoras; Border Industrialization Program.
1965 AD The Watts riots in Los Angeles.
Immigration act ends quotas. Limit of 120,000 visas a year for Western Hemisphere countries; 170,000 for other nations.
Medicare draws 45,000 foreign doctors to U.S.
Voting Rights Act to stop racial control and oppression in American voting.
1966 AD Chicago and New York race riots.
Kwanza created.
Black Panthers formed.
Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, Chicano poet and human rights activist, founds the Crusade for Justice to work toward equality for Mexican-Americans.
1967 AD “The Long Hot Summer”: race riots ignite the U.S.
1970’s More that 4 million immigrants enter the U.S.
Europe: 1.6 million;
Latin America and Asia: 1.3 million;
Mexico: 60,000.
1970 AD Maquila Decree goes into effect, establishing regulations for maquiladora development on border.
Number of “foreigners” in U.S. hits its century low: 4.8%.
1975 AD Congress broadens Voting Rights Act to protect “language minorities”—or Spanish speakers.
1977 AD United Farm workers sign a pact with Teamsters Union.
15,000 Indochinese refugees authorized to enter U.S.
Korean immigration strong: 4,500 Korean-owned small businesses in
Los Angeles.
1978 AD 47,000 “Boat People” from Indochina are allowed into the U.S.
8.2 million “illegal aliens” are in the U.S. 90% are Hispanic.
1979 AD President Carter gives up the Panama Canal.
Philippine immigration: 41,300.
1980’s 1,000,000 “illegal aliens” are sent home each year.
1980 AD For you SCARFACE fans: U.S. allows Cuban asylum seekers to enter; Castro launches the Mariel Boat Lift; 125,000 Cubans flee for the U.S.
1981 AD Civil War in El Salvador. Regan backs the Contras; U.S. opposes left wing rebels and gives aid to conservative government. Thousands flee.
1982 AD U.S. Supreme Court rules that all children in the U.S. are entitled to public education, regardless of citizenship .
Peso plummets—devaluation by Mexican government—twice in the year. Foreign debt at $82 million. Leads to huge spike in maquiladora activity with foreign investment
.
Both result in massive movement out of Mexico toward the border, drawn by illegal immigration, but more significantly, for work in Mexicn border cities..
1986 AD Congress approves bill that will levy fines on employers who hire undocumented workers.
Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Control and Reform Act. Undocumented workers who can prove they have been in the U.S. since 1982 can remain legally.
1988 AD AMNESTY.
1.4 million apply for illegal immigration amnesty.
U.S. apologizes to Japanese citizens for the detention camps during WWII.
U.S. awards each former Japanese inmate $20,000.
6.5 million Asian Americans in U.S.
1989 AD 12,000 U.S. soldiers invade Panama.
Miami has a Latino majority population.
1990 AD 14% of Americans speak another language (than English). 90% are Latinos.
11% of NYC is Puerto Rican (900,000).
Los Angeles is the second largest Mexican City (population) after Mexico City.
1991 AD Thousands of Haitian refugees interdicted by U.S. Coast Guard and sent back to Haiti.
1992 AD August 12—NAFTA signed.
1993 AD Cesar Chavez dies. April 23.
Ciudad Juarez women-killings begin.
1994 AD Mexican Presidential candidate Luis Colosio assassinated in Tijuana, March 23.
NAFTA goes into effect: thousands of Mexican and Central American immigrants flood the border.
Operation Gatekeeper border control strategy goes into effect—Sep. 17.
1995 AD Mexican Banking Crisis.
California’s Proposition 187—prohibits welfare, education, health assistance to undocumented immigrants. Later, struck down as unconstitutional.
1996 AD President Clinton “decriminalizes” the border—40 miles of new border fence; upgrades of law enforcement and large financial appropriations.
Crime drops in borderlands: according to FBI statistics, there is a 30% drop in San Diego, CA; 5% drop in Nogales, AZ; 14% drop in El Paso, TX.
1998 AD Clinton and Mexican president Zedillo sign a pact to fight drug trafficking.
2000 AD Presidents Bush and Fox (Mexico) begin comprehensive talks on border reform based on investment, trade, and economic development.
Coffee prices plummet—Mexican small-plot coffee farmers join the exodus to the U.S.
2001 AD The Yuma 14 catastrophe in Arizona.
September 11.
Talks between Fox and Bush collapse.
2001-04 NAFTA begins to pull factories out of Mexican borderlands. Maquiladoras relocate to India and China, seeking a cheaper workforce.
Between 2001 and 2002, 500 maquiladoras close in Mexico.
U.S. Border Patrol is absorbed by Homeland Security.
The Minuteman Project is launched—citizen patrols of border.
Tom Tancredo rides a wave of anti-immigrant rage to political power in Colorado.
12-14 million “illegal aliens” residing in the U.S.
2006 AD Hundreds of thousands of immigrants march all over the U.S. in the “Day Without and Immigrant” human rights protests.
U.S. Border patrol augmented by National Guard trrops. Illegal immigration numbers drop by 16%.
Immigrant farmworkers fail to appear—U.S. crops begin to show strain. The strawberry harvest in Washington, Oregon and Idaho states is virtually ruined; the apple crops in Michigan are in danger.
Mexican presidential election melt-down: Felipe Calderón, the conservative candidate, wins a tight election. However, cried of election fraud disrupt the process: Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, the liberal candidate, claims victory. In a strange echo of the Gore/Bush debacle in the U.S., votes are recounted and political chaos threatens. For a time, both men inaugurate themselves, and claim that they are each president.
2007 AD Bank of America announces proposed illegal alien credit card.
Frost annihilates U.S. orange crops—effect of immigrant workers not yet measured.
As of this date, numbers of Juarez murders in dispute—offical numbers are low; activists suggest over 500 women have been raped, tortured and killed, and 500 are missing.
CHICAGO: undocumented workers pushing the 500,000 mark in the six urban counties around the city. Form 5% of total Chicagoland population—90% of these immigrants are Latin American or Mexican.
“Tortilla crisis” in Mexico—corn, due to NAFTA agricultural policies and to the spike in prices due to ethanol demand, suddenly spirals in cost and is unavailable to the poor and working classes. Maize forms the basis of the daily diet.
Founder of Minuteman Project under investigation for misappropriating funds sent by supporters.
New Mexican governor, Bill Richardson, first Mexican-American to run for President of the United States.
Oops—President Bush’s controversial Immigration Bill (Kennedy/McCain) is defeated, and immigration reform is put on the shelf till 2008.
Archeological evidence is discovered in Chile that suggests indigenous peoples lived in the Americas thousands of years earlier than previously believed.
#
DON’T YELL AT ME—SEND HATE MAIL TO THE WHITE STRIPES!
“”White Americans, what?
Nothing better to do?
Why don’t you kick yourself out
You’re an immigrant too.
Who’s using who?
What should we do?
Well, you can’t be a pimp
And a prostitute too.”
--The White Stripes, “Icky Thump.”
#
Due to the recent computer melt-downs, we’re behind schedule. But we have the USBP perspective ready for next week, and for a piquant bit of friction, we also have the Mexican Consul General’s essay, part one.
Also, I’ll post my recent Washington Post immigration essay.
Adios, Amigos!
Sunday
The foolish distrust what they see, the wise distrust what they think. –Zen Saying
REDEFINE THE LINE.
Comment:
Mary Jo Johnston has died. You probably don’t know Mary Jo. Most heroes, in my opinion, are unknown. They change the world in their own quiet ways. Who could have imagined that a librarian in Kankakee, Illinois might be a saint? I don’t mean “perfect.” (Though, in her own way, she was.) But I mean it in the old way: she made miracles happen, and she lifted the poor and the lost and the refugees as well as her neighbors and friends, and she gave them comfort and direction, books and instruction. Who could have known that a librarian in Kankakee, Illinois, was a warrior in the great American immigration battle?
For anyone who has given up hope for solutions to this quagmire we call immigration, look to Kankakee. I have posted my New York Times article about the city and its amazing story, below.
It was Mary Jo who brought us into Kankakee. She asked us to come to the library and speak about THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY to readers. She warned us, “When you get off the highway and make your way to Kankakee, watch out for deer and turkeys on the road.” Turkeys! We thought this was charming, and we thought Kankakee would have a little old library with seven retired ladies and a paper plate of cookies.
We got there, and we kept driving up and down the street, looking for this sad little brick building. But we kept ending up in the parking lot of a gleaming high tech tower. Where was the library? It took me quite a while to realize the tower was the library.
Inside, Mary Jo and her staff had managed to seat 300+ people. The mayor came and presented me with the key to the city. It was one of the most remarkable reading nights I ever had. And when I was done, a young Mexican paisano stood up and, in his tortured English, said: “I am so proud you wrote this book, because now these people can see what we suffered so they could eat salads.” There was a ripple in all the public, like wind hitting wheat.
After the talk, they flocked to him. Hey! Leave that bastard alone and come see me! But Kankakee knew what was important.
Read the piece. Thank Mary Jo Johnson. Think of Mary Jo Johnson. Say a prayer for her. She was your superhero, you just didn’t know her.
I dedicate this edition to her.
(You can read more about Mary Jo in a previous posting on this blog, entitled, “Time to Write.”)
#
NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE ABOUT KANKAKEE AND IMMIGRATION:
TRENDS and DISPATCHES:
I have written elsewhere about the ways in which you can analyze immigration data and trends for yourself—don’t rely on propaganda machines and self-serving pundits. If someone wants your vote, or your advertising dollars, you would be wise to ignore that (un)happy crappy you’re hearing and look around for yourself.
Most of us don’t have the luxury of talking to coyotes or Border Patrol agents or consuls. I do. My USBP pals on the line have been telling me numbers are DOWN. In one sector, an agent confided to me that the numbers of “illegals” had DROPPED by 16%.
A year ago, I was teaching workshops at Oregon’s wonderful Fishtrap. We noticed that the strawberry crop in Oregon and Washington was going to waste. There had been a record crop, perhaps the biggest ever. But the berries were rotting on the plants because the Mexican pickers DID NOT APPEAR. And, not to beat a clichéd horse, no Americans would show up to do the stoop-labor.
As we made our way across the country, in our traditional restless American drive, we noticed that domestic service in the motels was DOWN. Albeit my survey was informal at best, every single motel we passed had Help Wanted signs in the windows, because the maids and scut-workers, again, did not show up. Once we were back in Illinois, I noticed that the apple crop in Michigan was in danger. Guess why. The pickers NEVER SHOWED UP.
What!? No Mexicans?? Right. No Mexicans. Where did they go? They can’t all be in New Orleans, doing cheap construction.
Watch the seventh or ninth pages of your newspaper—you will see what we’ve been noticing: workers are not showing up again this year. There is a small pattern emerging that bears some study. It’s a small whisper of a story, but if you track rural papers around the country, you might get your Pulitzer for discovering this hidden news phenomenon.
You will not hear about it when people are running for president and your main anti-Beaner candidate is again suggesting we bomb Mecca. Think for yourself, baby. Nobody wants you to THINK.
What is this trend?
#
MONEY REMITTANCES GOING DOWN: another interesting development was reported in the New York Times (by the excellent Julia Preston, Thursday August 9, 2007; p. A7): fewer Mexican immigrants are sending money home from the US. She quotes a report from the Inter-American Development Bank that states that “500,000 homes” and families in Mexico will be affected by this slowdown, as the numbers of Mexicans sending money home drops to 64%. The reasons cited are fear, basically—insecurity about their future in the US. So they are SAVING instead of sending. Money in the bank, against the day they FLEE the US and go home. Wot??? Egad, man—they plan to GO HOME??? Lou Dobbs didn’t tell me that!
It’s interesting to ponder this. The remittance money in 2006 was around $20 billion a year. If 36% of this money is now going into American banks, how much money is that on a yearly basis? That money is splashing into the big American fiscal pool, swimming around with all the other money that helps keep the economy afloat. What I really wonder is what kind of damage that might cause our economy when the money is suddenly pulled out. I can guarantee that many American working men and women will say, “Hey, I’ll take the hit, as long as they go home.” Unfortunately, the big bosses who hire international slave labor cannot be sent anywhere. Though I’d put them in Gitmo. So pray I’m not made King.
And, of course, we ought to look at what it means to have 500,000 Mexican households in worse straights than they were in before. More undocumented? Or is the fear seeping into Mexico, and will they hold steady and wait for their explorers to return from the New-New World?
Two further trends bear your attention—one makes front pages, one does not. (The really good immigration stuff, I’m tellin’ ya, comes after page five or six). The front page story is the new drug war we are launching in Mexico. The new Mexican president has taken
the position of anti-drug warrior, and President Bush has decided to negotiate a massive new “drug assistance” program, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since we spent a fortune in Colombia to eradicate drugs. And, uh, that one went well! The last trend worth watching this week is the election in Baja California. The former mayor of Tijuana, a true conservative, has won a heated contest. Baja was the first state in Mexico to break away in a substantial way from the “revolutionary” PRI government, and here they go again. Law and order? Pro-American? Pro-business? Anti-drug? Maybe. US Territory? 51st state? Folklore…and creeping fear in Mexico City.
IMMIGRATION TIMELINE, VOLUME TWO:
Prepared for IMMIGRATION MONDAY by Luis Alberto Urrea.
A Brief History of North American Immigration and the Mexican Border
Part Two: From the American Civil War to the Present.
[Note: the last edition contains part one of this timeline. This one, being more modern, is no doubt more controversial than ancient history. Though I mentioned the Bering Land Bridge in that one, I don’t really buy the theory. I think some people may have come over the bridge, but there is a deeper, more mysterious indigenous presence here. More ancient. More profound. Do I sound like an LDS historian, seeking Lamanites? At least I’m not looking for alien starship pilots doing genetic research and spawning the Nephilim. Or wait. Maybe I am.]
#
1861 AD The Civil War begins.
1862 AD CINCO DE MAYO. A Texan-born Chicano general of the Mexican army defeats Napoleon III’s French army in Mexico. Napoleon’s ultimate destination: the United States, where Napoleon’s troops were going to support the Rebels in the American Civil War. That’s right—you ought to eat some Mexican food on Cinco de Mayo, because if not for Mexico, you might be be named Johnny Reb.
1863 AD Emancipation Proclamation.
1865 AD The North wins the Civil War.
1866 AD Ku Klux Klan founded in Pulaski, Tennessee.
1870 AD British immigration peaks at 103,677.
1873 AD Saint of Cabora (Teresita Urrea) born in Sinaloa, Mexico. Foments Indian and religious revolt. Has no idea I’m going to write a novel about her. Or maybe she does.
Slavery abolished in Puerto Rico.
1877 AD Anti-Chinese race riots in San Francisco.
299, 087 Jews living in the United States—1 ½ % of total population.
1880 AD United States signs treaty with China to limit and control number of immigrant workers allowed entry.
250,000 Jews in Unites States—numbers will swell to 2.5 million by the early 20th century.
Indigenous messianic movements ignite in Mexico.
Saint of Cabora, Niño Fidencio, etc. Echo the messianic movements that will sweep the North American tribes.
1882 AD ANTI-CHINESE EXCLUSIONARY ACT signed into law.
Immigration peaks:
Chinese—39, 579;
English and German-- 350,000;
Italian-- 32,000
Russian-- 17,000;
Scandinavian—105,326.
87% from northern and western Europe.
Anti-Immigration Act bars criminals, the mentally ill, and the poor.
1885 AD Importation of contract workers banned.
1887 AD American Protective Association, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic party is formed. 2.5 million members.
1889 AD Tomóchic Massacre. Mexican forces annihilate followers of Saint of Cabora in Tomóchic, Chihuahua. (Among the soldiers is the writer, Heriberto Frías—later known as “the Mexican Zola.” He writes the controversial novel about nthe massacre and the Saint of Cabora, Tomochic.)
CHICAGO: Jane Addams forms Hull House (on the present campus of University of Illinois at Chicago) to help immigrants.
1890 AD Japanese immigration begins. 25,000 Japanese workers immigrate.
First exposé of harsh conditions in immigrant slums is published: How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis.
MEXICANS RECRUITED FROM MEXICO TO REPLACE LOST CHINESE CHEAP LABOR.
1892 AD ELLIS ISLAND opens. Over 12 million immigrants will pass through in the next decades.
1893 AD U.S. and Canada sign pact to catch illegal immigrants crossing the Canadian border.
1894 AD Boston’s Immigration Restriction League forms; proposes literacy tests to stop “undesirables” from entering the country
1898 AD Hawaii annexed: .154,000 new Americans added.
1900 AD U.S, population: 75.9 million. 3.6 million are immigrants who have entered since 1890.
9,000,000 immigrants come from Europe.
Border Corridos, or ballads, become the most popular musical hits in Mexico, and the outlaw myth and romance of the border/”norte” begins.
1904 AD United States Border Patrol formed. 75 agents. Anti-Chinese patrols.
1905 AD Go, CHICAGO! The first anti-racist newspaper, The Chicago Defender, is founded.
Asiatic Exclusion League forms in San Francisco.
1906 AD The League Has Its Way: San Francisco school district announces there is a “Yellow Peril” to good Americans, orders that Japanese, Chinese and Korean students be forced to attend segregated schools.
The Saint of Cabora dies in Clifton, Arizona.
1907 AD 81% of all immigrants come from southern and eastern Europe.
Theodore Roosevelt steps in and reverses San Francisco’s race-based segregation policies regarding Asian students.
Japan agrees to stop the flow of immigrant laborers.
30, 226 Japanese enter.
1910 AD U.S. population: 91.9 million. 8.8 million are immigrants arrived since 1900; 14.7% of population is foreign-born.
1910-20 AD Mexican Revolution.
Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans flee northward.
1913 AD California: Alien Land Law forbids Japanese from owning land.
1914 AD Wars and Rumors of Wars: 1,218,480 immigrants enter the United States.
75% are from Europe.
1915 AD US Congress formalizes border patrol: Us Border Mounted Guard.
Anti-Chinese patrols.
First official Border Patrol Agent is named Jeff Milton.
1917 AD Immigration literacy acts passed requiring immigrants to pas written exams. President Wilson vetoes bills twice, but they still pass.
1919 AD 25 major race riots break out all over the U.S.
1920 AD Ku Klux Klan shifts its focus from American Blacks to immigrants and Jews.
California, up to its old racial tricks, passes a law that prohibits Japanese from even renting land.
¼ of New York City’s population is Jewish.
Immigrants form 50% of the population of American industrial cities.
1921, ’24 AD Immigration Acts (US).
IMMIGRATION EMERGENCY QUOTA ACT (The Dillingham Bill) establishes quotas as the basis of immigration policy. Only 3% of any foreign group currently living in the U.S. can enter each year.
MEXICANS EXEMPTED.
1924 AD Labor Appropriation Act (US).
Johnson-Reed Immigration Act: quota reduced to 2%.
1925 AD US Border Patrol expands to coasts. 450 officers. Provide their own horses. Pay: $1,680 a year.
1927 AD Jewish immigrants constitute 3.6% of American population.
1928 AD First Border Patrol uniforms are created.
New Mexico’s Octaviano Larrazolo (born in Mexico) is first Hispanic senator.
1929 AD National Origin Immigration Quota goes into effect.
The Great Depression cuts Mexican population in the U.S. by one third.
1931 AD Lemon Grove, CA—Mexican-American parents sue to stop segregation of schools that won’t allow Mexican/Chicano children to attend better schools.
1933 AD FIRST MEXICAN “ILLEGAL ALIENS” DEPORTED.
16,000 Mexicans working in the U.S. illegally are sent to Mexico.
1935 AD Dennis Chavez is the first American-born Latino (Mexican) elected as U.S. Senator. Yes, he was a Democrat!
1938 AD Mexico nationalizes all petroleum production in Mexico, confiscating all American operations and creating Pemex. One of the most brazen thefts in Mexico’s history, worth untold millions.
1939 AD 937 Jewish refugees denied entry to the U.S. and are returned to Germany.
Food Stamps appear.
WORLD WAR II begins in Europe.
1941 AD U.S. enters war.
LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) takes on Union Pacific Railroad, which has maintained a policy of not allowing Mexican/Chicano employees to enter into the apprenticeship program so they can advance in their careers.
1942 AD President Roosevelt signs legislation allowing the U.S. to remove Japanese Americans from their homes and land in the Pacific States.
United States/ Mexico Bracero Migrant Worker Program. Begins with sugar beets in CA; soon goes national. Railroad Bracero Program follows.
Agriculture quota: 50,000+. Agriculture program ends 1945. Railroad: 1964.
Like the Mexican migrations of the 19th century lured north to alleviate the labor shortage due to anti-Chinese legislation, Mexicans are recruited to replace the incarcerated Japanese work force.
1943 AD Chinese Exclusion Act repealed.
Over 250 race riots break out in the U.S.
Anti-Mexican race riots, known as the “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles.
1945 AD “Displaced persons” acts put in effect: 400,000 European refuges rush to the U.S.
1948 AD Organization of American States forms in Colombia, South America. 21 members, including U.S.
Texan WWII veterans form the American G.I. Forum to combat anti-Hispanic racism and to promote Mexican-American welfare.
1949 AD Fair Labor Standards Act raises minimum wage from 40 cents to 75 cents.
1950 AD Internal Security Act: American .Communists must register with the government.
Korean War.
1952 AD Puerto Rico become a commonwealth under the U.S. government on July 25.
Immigration and Nationality Act, called the McCarran-Walter Act. Removes the ban on Asian immigration.
1953 AD Refugee Relief Act: refugees fleeing communist countries allowed to enter; 200,000 emigrate.
OPERATION WETBACK: the U.S. deports 3.8 million Mexicans.
1954 AD U.S. sponsored coup topples government of Guatemala.
1955 AD Watch out, you bastards, I am born.
1956 AD 6,000 Japanese Americans who renounced citizenship when they were incarcerated in the camps are reinstated.
1959 AD Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution: 20,000 Cubans flee to the U.S.
1960 AD John F. Kennedy elected U.S. President: first Catholic in history to hold the office.
1961 AD Alliance for Progress forms in Uruguay; U.S. and Latin American nations sign charter assuring mutual developmental support.
1962 AD César Chávez begins union that will become UFW (United Farm Workers).
JFK signs legislation that will ban racial preference and discrimination in housing.
1963 AD Chamizal Treaty: U.S. returns a portion of El Paso, TX, to Mexico.
1964 AD First maquiladoras; Border Industrialization Program.
1965 AD The Watts riots in Los Angeles.
Immigration act ends quotas. Limit of 120,000 visas a year for Western Hemisphere countries; 170,000 for other nations.
Medicare draws 45,000 foreign doctors to U.S.
Voting Rights Act to stop racial control and oppression in American voting.
1966 AD Chicago and New York race riots.
Kwanza created.
Black Panthers formed.
Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, Chicano poet and human rights activist, founds the Crusade for Justice to work toward equality for Mexican-Americans.
1967 AD “The Long Hot Summer”: race riots ignite the U.S.
1970’s More that 4 million immigrants enter the U.S.
Europe: 1.6 million;
Latin America and Asia: 1.3 million;
Mexico: 60,000.
1970 AD Maquila Decree goes into effect, establishing regulations for maquiladora development on border.
Number of “foreigners” in U.S. hits its century low: 4.8%.
1975 AD Congress broadens Voting Rights Act to protect “language minorities”—or Spanish speakers.
1977 AD United Farm workers sign a pact with Teamsters Union.
15,000 Indochinese refugees authorized to enter U.S.
Korean immigration strong: 4,500 Korean-owned small businesses in
Los Angeles.
1978 AD 47,000 “Boat People” from Indochina are allowed into the U.S.
8.2 million “illegal aliens” are in the U.S. 90% are Hispanic.
1979 AD President Carter gives up the Panama Canal.
Philippine immigration: 41,300.
1980’s 1,000,000 “illegal aliens” are sent home each year.
1980 AD For you SCARFACE fans: U.S. allows Cuban asylum seekers to enter; Castro launches the Mariel Boat Lift; 125,000 Cubans flee for the U.S.
1981 AD Civil War in El Salvador. Regan backs the Contras; U.S. opposes left wing rebels and gives aid to conservative government. Thousands flee.
1982 AD U.S. Supreme Court rules that all children in the U.S. are entitled to public education, regardless of citizenship .
Peso plummets—devaluation by Mexican government—twice in the year. Foreign debt at $82 million. Leads to huge spike in maquiladora activity with foreign investment
.
Both result in massive movement out of Mexico toward the border, drawn by illegal immigration, but more significantly, for work in Mexicn border cities..
1986 AD Congress approves bill that will levy fines on employers who hire undocumented workers.
Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Control and Reform Act. Undocumented workers who can prove they have been in the U.S. since 1982 can remain legally.
1988 AD AMNESTY.
1.4 million apply for illegal immigration amnesty.
U.S. apologizes to Japanese citizens for the detention camps during WWII.
U.S. awards each former Japanese inmate $20,000.
6.5 million Asian Americans in U.S.
1989 AD 12,000 U.S. soldiers invade Panama.
Miami has a Latino majority population.
1990 AD 14% of Americans speak another language (than English). 90% are Latinos.
11% of NYC is Puerto Rican (900,000).
Los Angeles is the second largest Mexican City (population) after Mexico City.
1991 AD Thousands of Haitian refugees interdicted by U.S. Coast Guard and sent back to Haiti.
1992 AD August 12—NAFTA signed.
1993 AD Cesar Chavez dies. April 23.
Ciudad Juarez women-killings begin.
1994 AD Mexican Presidential candidate Luis Colosio assassinated in Tijuana, March 23.
NAFTA goes into effect: thousands of Mexican and Central American immigrants flood the border.
Operation Gatekeeper border control strategy goes into effect—Sep. 17.
1995 AD Mexican Banking Crisis.
California’s Proposition 187—prohibits welfare, education, health assistance to undocumented immigrants. Later, struck down as unconstitutional.
1996 AD President Clinton “decriminalizes” the border—40 miles of new border fence; upgrades of law enforcement and large financial appropriations.
Crime drops in borderlands: according to FBI statistics, there is a 30% drop in San Diego, CA; 5% drop in Nogales, AZ; 14% drop in El Paso, TX.
1998 AD Clinton and Mexican president Zedillo sign a pact to fight drug trafficking.
2000 AD Presidents Bush and Fox (Mexico) begin comprehensive talks on border reform based on investment, trade, and economic development.
Coffee prices plummet—Mexican small-plot coffee farmers join the exodus to the U.S.
2001 AD The Yuma 14 catastrophe in Arizona.
September 11.
Talks between Fox and Bush collapse.
2001-04 NAFTA begins to pull factories out of Mexican borderlands. Maquiladoras relocate to India and China, seeking a cheaper workforce.
Between 2001 and 2002, 500 maquiladoras close in Mexico.
U.S. Border Patrol is absorbed by Homeland Security.
The Minuteman Project is launched—citizen patrols of border.
Tom Tancredo rides a wave of anti-immigrant rage to political power in Colorado.
12-14 million “illegal aliens” residing in the U.S.
2006 AD Hundreds of thousands of immigrants march all over the U.S. in the “Day Without and Immigrant” human rights protests.
U.S. Border patrol augmented by National Guard trrops. Illegal immigration numbers drop by 16%.
Immigrant farmworkers fail to appear—U.S. crops begin to show strain. The strawberry harvest in Washington, Oregon and Idaho states is virtually ruined; the apple crops in Michigan are in danger.
Mexican presidential election melt-down: Felipe Calderón, the conservative candidate, wins a tight election. However, cried of election fraud disrupt the process: Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, the liberal candidate, claims victory. In a strange echo of the Gore/Bush debacle in the U.S., votes are recounted and political chaos threatens. For a time, both men inaugurate themselves, and claim that they are each president.
2007 AD Bank of America announces proposed illegal alien credit card.
Frost annihilates U.S. orange crops—effect of immigrant workers not yet measured.
As of this date, numbers of Juarez murders in dispute—offical numbers are low; activists suggest over 500 women have been raped, tortured and killed, and 500 are missing.
CHICAGO: undocumented workers pushing the 500,000 mark in the six urban counties around the city. Form 5% of total Chicagoland population—90% of these immigrants are Latin American or Mexican.
“Tortilla crisis” in Mexico—corn, due to NAFTA agricultural policies and to the spike in prices due to ethanol demand, suddenly spirals in cost and is unavailable to the poor and working classes. Maize forms the basis of the daily diet.
Founder of Minuteman Project under investigation for misappropriating funds sent by supporters.
New Mexican governor, Bill Richardson, first Mexican-American to run for President of the United States.
Oops—President Bush’s controversial Immigration Bill (Kennedy/McCain) is defeated, and immigration reform is put on the shelf till 2008.
Archeological evidence is discovered in Chile that suggests indigenous peoples lived in the Americas thousands of years earlier than previously believed.
#
DON’T YELL AT ME—SEND HATE MAIL TO THE WHITE STRIPES!
“”White Americans, what?
Nothing better to do?
Why don’t you kick yourself out
You’re an immigrant too.
Who’s using who?
What should we do?
Well, you can’t be a pimp
And a prostitute too.”
--The White Stripes, “Icky Thump.”
#
Due to the recent computer melt-downs, we’re behind schedule. But we have the USBP perspective ready for next week, and for a piquant bit of friction, we also have the Mexican Consul General’s essay, part one.
Also, I’ll post my recent Washington Post immigration essay.
Adios, Amigos!
It's two weeks now, and the main computer is still in the incompetant clutches of Best Buys. Never again! Boycott the Geek Squad!
I have Immigration Monday cobbled together. I have a new writing for you. When the computer returns, and we can access our picture files again, I have the final entry in "Wastelander UK" for you. So check here for sporadic outbursts.
The garden is rich and wild out there. One sunflower survived the depredations of the rabbits, and it's taller than my daughter. The shasta daisies and columbines have come and gone. But it's a riot of butterfly bushes and snapdragons and geraniumns and alyssum and nasturtiums and weird obscure fancy plants and a tomato vine that is roughly the size of our Honda. They like the hot humid weatehr. I don't. I hide from it, and don't even go out to observe my mad meadow in bloom.
Chayo, however, does. She is rewarded with repeated hummingbird visits. They love the blue morning glories. She is intimately involved with all the breeds of butterflies that now crowd the yard. And just today a small mystical dragonfly followed her around. The spirits are whispering to my wild-girl.
We'll be putting up some pictures when I don't have the time or energy to write.
I had to miss the funeral of a dear friend this weekend, but Immigration Monday will talk about her.
Check it out late tonight.
L
The Return of Writing Meditations
I have Immigration Monday cobbled together. I have a new writing for you. When the computer returns, and we can access our picture files again, I have the final entry in "Wastelander UK" for you. So check here for sporadic outbursts.
The garden is rich and wild out there. One sunflower survived the depredations of the rabbits, and it's taller than my daughter. The shasta daisies and columbines have come and gone. But it's a riot of butterfly bushes and snapdragons and geraniumns and alyssum and nasturtiums and weird obscure fancy plants and a tomato vine that is roughly the size of our Honda. They like the hot humid weatehr. I don't. I hide from it, and don't even go out to observe my mad meadow in bloom.
Chayo, however, does. She is rewarded with repeated hummingbird visits. They love the blue morning glories. She is intimately involved with all the breeds of butterflies that now crowd the yard. And just today a small mystical dragonfly followed her around. The spirits are whispering to my wild-girl.
We'll be putting up some pictures when I don't have the time or energy to write.
I had to miss the funeral of a dear friend this weekend, but Immigration Monday will talk about her.
Check it out late tonight.
L
8/07/2007
A good writer is like a wind over meadow grass. --Charles Wright
Immigration Monday Update
Good ol' Clarke and Grace have sent us the actual link to the story I recommended you read whil we wait for the main computer to return from Hades, where it is being tormented by demons and Aldermen.
Here 'tis:
www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05Immigration-t.html?_r=1&ref-magazine&oref=slogan
While We Wait for Immigration Monday
Here 'tis:
www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05Immigration-t.html?_r=1&ref-magazine&oref=slogan
8/06/2007
The main computer is till down; this one just isn't goog for all the techie whizbangs we put into Immigration Monday. So there is still a forced hiatus while the powers of evil mess with my machine.
I can't even post our excellent Border Patrol or Mexican Consul entries, because tyey're on the other memory disk! Sorry, Warrior. Don't deport me, brother.
However, to tide you over, there's a fascinating piece from the NY Times magazine you will find illuminating. It ran this weekend. Check it out as a juicy immigration morsel until we're up and running again. Find it at clinicsf@aol.com. Titled "Our Town." Check it out!
PS--I will post a new writing tonight, though. It's on yet another computer. Easier than Imm Monday!
Our Starboard Engine's Out, and the Port is Burning
I can't even post our excellent Border Patrol or Mexican Consul entries, because tyey're on the other memory disk! Sorry, Warrior. Don't deport me, brother.
However, to tide you over, there's a fascinating piece from the NY Times magazine you will find illuminating. It ran this weekend. Check it out as a juicy immigration morsel until we're up and running again. Find it at clinicsf@aol.com. Titled "Our Town." Check it out!
PS--I will post a new writing tonight, though. It's on yet another computer. Easier than Imm Monday!
8/05/2007
Computer's still whacked. Those thieving lying crooked sons of bitches at Best Buys still have it. Bad mojo at the Geek Squad. I'm still sending this out on the kids' computer. All my emails are gone for a few days.
Will try to post an Immigration Monday of some sort tomorrow.
We'll be back in service soon. I think.
Will try to post an Immigration Monday of some sort tomorrow.
We'll be back in service soon. I think.
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