The Civic Conscience
The Dreamers didn’t break any laws. Adults brought them here. Isn’t “intent” an issue when convicting a person of a crime? Children who were brought here by adults could not be shown to have intent. They were being obedient to their parents. They are maligned when they are called “illegals.”
Some of them know no other country and may not even speak Spanish, in the case of Latin Americans. I had a great Grandfather who only spoke German. But we did not erect an obstacle course for German immigrants in the nineteenth century. We have always had a tinge of racism in immigration policy. If you study the matter, you will find that we weren’t all that crazy about Italians, who were labeled as “swarthy” by some of the descendents of the earlier arrivals.
Later, it was the Irish who “need not apply” for a job. Speculating, but I suspect this last attitude came from the English, who had a spotty history with the Irish. Of course, there has always been anti-Semitism.
There was “Kearnyism” and Chinese Exclusion, and later the rounding up of Japanese Americans during WWII, and locking them up in makeshift concentration camps at race tracks and other facilities. They did not look like the “rest” of “us.” By the way, my uncle Frank and uncle Joe, the sons of my great Grandfather, spoke English with a thick German accent. On Saturday nights during WWII, they would go up town and sit on the stones enclosing the county courthouse and speak in an undisguised German accent, and nobody bothered them. Of course, they looked like the “rest” of “us” and were white.
We cannot forget slavery and Jim Crow segregation. We collectively are guilty of a good deal of racism. Our current sin is the blatantly racist attitudes toward Hispanics. I hate it. We need to wipe our snotty noses.
Donald Trump has resurrected these habits. Is he trying to be the spokesman for original sin? If we are going to employ racism to make immigration policy, consider that many Hispanics are at least partly Native American. They were here long before the “rest” of “us.”