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January 14, 2022
Joe Biden’s 2020 bid for the presidency, the campaign issued a statement on his immigration plan, titled “The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants,” asserting that “unless your ancestors were native to these shores, or forcibly enslaved and brought here as part of our original sin as a nation, most Americans can trace their family history back to a choice—a choice to leave behind everything that was familiar in search of new opportunities and a new life.”3 Unlike
As Osha Gray Davidson, who has collected dozens of examples of how the phrase is used, points out, “nation of immigrants” is generally used to counter xenophobic fears.8 But the ideology behind the phrase also
works to erase the scourge of settler colonialism and the lives of Indigenous peoples.
“Operation Wetback” began during Kennedy’s first year as senator and continued beyond his senatorial career through his presidency. “Operation Wetback” began in 1954 to round up and deport more than a million Mexican migrant workers, mainly in California and Texas, in the process subjecting millions—many who were actually US citizens—to illegal search and detention and deportation, forcing them to forfeit their property. Workers were deported by air and trains and ships far from the border, leaving those who were US citizens stranded and without the documents enabling them to return to their
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Tellingly, the first federal immigration law, which created the foundation for US immigration, was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It is crucial to recognize that when and how “immigration” as such began, it was based on overt, blatant racism and a policy of exclusion, and
it has never lost that taint.
What about mid 60's family (chain migration) practices?
Yet, those who defend immigrants and immigration, mostly metropolitan liberals, often immigrants or children of immigrants themselves, employ the idea of a nation of immigrants naively without acknowledging the settler-colonial history of the United States and the white nationalist ideology it reproduces.
They are the latter-day carriers of the United States’ national origin myth, a matrix of stories that attempts to justify conquest and settlement, transforming the white frontier settler into an “indigenous people,” believing that they are the true natives of the continent, much as the South African Boers regarded themselves as the “true” children of Israel, powered by Calvinism; the Calvinist Scots settlers did in Ulster, Ireland; or Jewish settlers in Palestine—all established by an imaginary God-given covenant making them the chosen peoples.
Palestine question is specious. Ignores UN intervention and military actions. Spirit of the point has merit.
traces the history of the English colonization of Ireland that led to the 1840s
in sex work. How subsequent generations of Irish Americans became settlers,
“The thrust of American struggles has been to deracialize but not to decolonize. A deracialized America still remains a settler society and a settler state.”21
Of course, the United States did not yet exist in 1781 when the Yorktown engagement took place, and neither of the men were immigrants by any definition. Lafayette was a wealthy Frenchman militarist who threw his lot into the gunplay, then returned home to France without a thought of remaining in North America, while Hamilton was a citizen of Great Britain, as were all the secessionists who created the United States out of the thirteen British colonies.
Picky portents od how tendentious this going to ger
The Federalists had conjured an ideology of United States citizenship that celebrated its presumably revolutionary birth and that was unrestrained by traditional provincialism, but in an attempt to define and legislate a unique nationality, they envisioned the US as a bulwark against the threat of world revolution.
Hence a restrictive immigrant policy
Reed also condemns Miranda for casting Black and Latino actors for the roles of Hamilton and the other “founding fathers,” most of them slavers, yet having no actual enslaved Africans appear in the musical.16
Enslaved actors?
Hamilton believed that the right to vote should be based on property ownership, and the more property one owned, the greater the power of representation. The musical and the book use a version of the historical character Hamilton to promote a classic US “bootstrap” narrative, as in the rap stanza that attributes success to working hard and being smart and a self-starter. As Monteiro points out, the musical is “insidiously invested in trumpeting the deeds of wealthy white men, . . .
By 1840, the United States was the leading economic powerhouse in the world, having expanded its claimed territory beyond the Mississippi and establishing the Cotton Kingdom.
In short, the Constitution created a national state that was simultaneously weak and strong. . . . This was precisely what the expansionist states and Anglo-American settlers wanted. Their libertarian streak ran only as far as self-interest, for they welcomed a strengthened federal state as long as it was an imperialist one, focused on projecting power against the Indians rather than against its citizens. The Hamiltonians would solve the problem of Indian affairs by committing the federal state to empowering, not
restraining, the inexorable westward tide.40
Native nations were the first subjects of US empire, but not the last.
As Hogeland told an interviewer, “They just aren’t getting what was important about him. It was the intertwining of military force and wealth concentration as almost the definition of nationhood.”44 That’s the fiscal-military state, a capitalist state created for war. A hundred years’ war followed, and hardly a day passed without counterinsurgent war against one Native nation or another, or many at once.
Strong ultra leftist pov??
Historian David Reynolds writes that Jefferson believed the US empire was destined to assume the responsibility to spread freedom around the world, starting with the North American continent and intervening abroad. US foreign policy was stamped with this concept and has provided the ideological motivation for all US wars and interventions.
Author presenting a stasrk new reality to ponder.
In order to comprehend the apparently irrational genocidal policy of the US government toward the presence of Native nations on the land, the centrality of land sales in building the economic base of the US capitalist system must be the frame of reference.
Take note
This policy was embedded in the design of the fiscal-military state. As Wolfe summed up the issue, “Tribal land was tribally owned—tribes and private property did not mix. Indians were the original communist menace. . .
the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”4
Klp!!
The US tribal homeland was the prototype not only for the South African reserve but also the Nazi concentration camp.”8
Bold
Congress, at Lincoln’s behest, passed the Homestead Act in 1862, as well as the Morrill Act, the latter transferring large tracts of Indigenous land to the states to establish land grant universities. The Pacific Railroad Act provided private companies with nearly two hundred million acres of Indigenous land.9 With these massive land grabs, the US government broke multiple treaties with Indigenous nations whose people were still living there. It would take genocidal military force to evict them. Most of the western territories, including Colorado, North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington,
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Take note
The 1863–1864 federal banking acts mandated a national currency, chartered banks, and permitted the government to guarantee bonds.
To qualify as genocide, a case does not require governmental acts of mass murder simply worse than anything else but rather it requires a specific kind of act. The Genocide Convention is not a war crimes convention, rather a human rights convention, approved by the United Nations in the same session as the Declaration of Human Rights, which refers to individual, not
Most important, genocide does not
have to be complete to be considered genocide, nor does it have to include actual death. Forced assimilation is genocidal, forcibly removing children from their families is genocidal, creating conditions that make it impossible for the group to maintain its integrity is genocidal, all of which can be carried out without death.
!
By the time of the War of Independence that created the United States, British settlers and armed white citizen militias had 170 years of experience in ethnically cleansing and dominating the thirteen original colonies.
It is essential to understand that aggressive white nationalism and settler colonialism form the bedrock of US institutions and historical and continuing white nationalism—a culture of violence, a gun culture, a militaristic culture—and that genocidal policy toward Indigenous nations and descendants of enslaved Africans always looms inside the US and has been extended globally by genocidal US policies and wars in the Pacific and the Caribbean, including Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and increasingly in Africa.
Summrizes our origin story
The shadow of genocide lies in the Doctrine of Discovery,
New to me
It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa and enslave the inhabitants, the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.
Indigenous peoples could continue to live on the land, but title resided with the discovering power, the United States. The decision concluded that Native nations were “domestic, dependent nations,” which means captive colonies.22 The Doctrine of Discovery was a one-sided assumption of dominion that gave the discovering European entity first rights over other European entities to land and resources of the Native nations.
“The American right to buy always superseded the Indian right not to sell.”24
N.B.
It is a troubling reality that most citizens of the United States have never heard of the Doctrine of Discovery, although it is honored annually on Columbus Day, which became a federal holiday only in 1937, the same year the Buffalo or Indian Head nickel was introduced, apparently as implicit war trophies in those dark days of the Depression.
Celebrating Columbus is a celebration of the Doctr...
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Beginning in the early 1600s, the British decided to force Protestantism on the Catholic Irish.
being of the original people
Phrasingike that resonates
“The West” is a site of massive white self-indigenizing, as also reflected in the wildly popular Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. The self-indigenizing as first settlers is inherently genocidal with guns a central metaphor. As Simpson said in an earlier interview, “How steady you hold your rifle, that’s gun control in Wyoming.”70
How steady you hold yiur rifle -- thsts gun control in Wyoming.
Furthermore, Mamdani argues, regarding the conflation of immigration and settlement: immigrants join existing polities whereas settlers create new ones. “If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.” The nation of immigrants rhetoric that avoids the dynamics of settler colonialism plays a role that “is essential to settler-colonial nation-state projects such as the United States and Israel. The political project of
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Debate
Historian Lorenzo Veracini also distinguishes between settlers and immigrants, asserting that settlers are unique migrants made by conquest not by immigration.
As to Israel: better ethnic cleansing than genocide (Benny Morris).
Settlers are founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them, whereas immigrants face a political order that is already constituted. Immigrants can certainly be individually co-opted within settler-colonial societies, and often are, but they do not enjoy inherent rights and are characterized by a defining lack of sovereign entitlement.74
Immigrants and refugees to the United States do have the option to resist becoming settlers, although in most cases they do not know the history of the United States or the political reality. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service policies based on exclusion make the new immigrant’s life precarious, particularly for immigrants of color entering a racial order that renders them suspect already, so they may not want to know the reality or that they have a choice and that by default they become settlers.
WTF? Bring up for discussion.
European colonialism in Africa forms the context for the presence of two hundred million
descendants of Africans in the Western Hemisphere in the twenty-first century. The second largest population is in the United States with forty-one million descendants, while Brazil ranks first with sixty-five million African descendants. The island states in the Caribbean that had been the European sugar colonies have majority African-descendant populations.
In 1444, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to sail south to West Africa to enslave 240 Africans to sell at the Lisbon slave market, initiating the transatlantic slave trade.
Britain began its transatlantic slave trade in the Caribbean in 1562, and in 1619 a merchant brought twenty enslaved Africans to the fledgling British Virginia colony of Jamestown.
The 1619 Project.
Virginia tobacco planters eagerly purchased the enslaved Africans and soon many more.
Came looking for gold . TOBACCO came firdt in VA.
