Immigration: An Irony Sandwich

Less than a thousand years ago the European forbears of this state came to an ‘empty’ hemisphere with 100 million people in it. These people, themselves immigrants, likely from Northern Asia, had authored thousands of individual cultures with impressive complexity and diversity of beliefs and practices. Over the centuries, Europeans sought to extinguish these ‘wrong-minded’ cultures and replace it with their own white-washed American civilization. Much damage was done to the cultural legacy of Native Peoples.

Now, and for the last 20-30 years, the progeny of these immigrants are worried – seemingly about everything. Near the top of the list for many is the fear that immigrants, mostly from Mexico and South America, threaten to extinguish the American cultural heritage. I suspect, as many do, that their fears are rooted in the same racism, now tacit, driven underground, that compelled the whitewashing of the hemisphere in the first place.

Nonetheless, the claim is that the issue is one of culture. Language has become a symbol of the threat as many conservatives fight the spread of the Spanish language – itself a legacy of our colonial past. It is believed that within the next 50 years more than half of our country will be of Hispanic extraction. The irony of the descendants of so many waves of immigration sweating the most recent is obvious.

Lost to many, however, is the deeper irony of the situation. Amidst governmental efforts to limit immigration – without which the U.S. would have a net negative population growth rate – to the educated upper classes of foreign nations, the mass of immigrants from South of the border are of poor and working-class extraction. This is doubly so of the all-too-controversial illegal immigrants.

And, there in lies the irony – for the lower economic classes in Latin America are heavily of Native and mixed origin. The blood in their veins is little different from that of the Native Peoples we slaughtered, infected, and expelled. The new demographic trend, then, is in the direction of a Native resurgence.

America is becoming more American, as the bloodlines of the Natives from whom the hemisphere was taken flows North once more and the cultures of the various colonial lineages, merged with their native counterparts and those of the slaves brought here to drive the colonial economies merge, fusing to create a bilingual, multicultural landscape truly reflective of the country’s turbulent past.

Conservatives run from their own reflection. They run from the truth of their heritage and the true complexion of the hemisphere. These ‘American patriots’ are terrified of America itself, but they can no more resist than turn back time itself as they are bred and worked into parity with the progeny of those they once conquered.

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