Immigration In America Quotes

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high!

The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.

Dat's what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: 'America, the land of milk and honey.' Bot they never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen.

Trump didn't divide America. He just doused us with gasoline and fanned the flames.

Our country, our people, and our laws have to be our top priority.

A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.

Unofficially, we understood. There was a ceiling. Always had been, always would be. Even for him. Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.

Christian nationalism—the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians.

America is big enough to accommodate all their dreams.

She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.

Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave

Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.

History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.

When Europeans arrived on this continent, they blew it with the Native Americans. They plowed over them, taking as much as they could of their land and valuables, and respecting almost nothing about the native cultures. They lost the wisdom of the indigenous peoples-wisdom about the land and connectedness to the great web of life…We have another chance with all these refugees. People come here penniless but not cultureless. They bring us gifts. We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs. We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America…

Building bridges takes us further than building walls.

The interaction of disparate cultures, the vehemence of the ideals that led the immigrants here, the opportunity offered by a new life, all gave America a flavor and a character that make it as unmistakable and as remarkable to people today as it was to Alexis de Tocqueville in the early part of the nineteenth century.

You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness.

I personally subscribe to Dr. King’s definition of an unjust law as being ‘out of harmony with the moral law.’ And the higher moral law here is that people have a human right to move, to change location, if they experience hunger, poverty, violence, or lack of opportunity, especially if that climate in their home countries is created by the United States, as is the case with most third world countries from which people migrate. Ain’t that ’bout a bitch.

Those who benefit from unearned privilege are too often quick to discount those who don't.

Now, where are [Mexican illegal immigrants] fleeing from? Mostly from Central America, where they’re fleeing from the results of our policies.

Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities. 4

My mother did not want to go to America: this much I knew. I knew it by the way she became distracted and impatient with my sister, by the way she stopped tucking us into bed at night. I knew it from watching her feet, which began to shuffle after my father announced the move, as though they threw down invisible roots that needed to be pulled out with each step.

Bigotry hurts the economy, so the next time you want to blame minorities for your problems, first take a look in the mirror.

DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.

American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany's persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression.

Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady.

Home is not something I should have to earn.

There is no such thing as an insignificant life, only the insignificance of mind that refuses to grasp the implications.

They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little.

We will make America safe again. We will make America strong again. We will put America first again. We will make America secure again. We will make America prosperous again. We will make America pure again.”  

Remember that when you say ‘I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange,’ you have denied America with that word.

To be American is to long for whatever our parents fled.

America is so rich and fat, because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.

Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are "evolving" past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly.

I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact.

Proposing an immigration policy that serves America’s interests should not require an apology.

Maybe that's what living in America does to you: it spreads you into far distances until you're just little bits rolling apart.

We're not meant to be, Daniel. I'm an undocumented immigrant. I'm being deported. Today is my last day in America. Tomorrow I'll be gone.

Another way of indicating the importance of immigration to America is to point out that every American who ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants. The

As I write this, we are in an especially divisive era in American politics. There are questions about who holds power, who abuses it, who profits from it, and at what cost to our democracy. It is a time of questions about what makes us American, of shifting identities, inclusion and exclusion, protest, civil and human rights, the strength of our compassion versus the weakness of our fears, and the seductive lure of a mythic "great" past that never was versus the need for the consciousness and responsibility necessary if we are truly to live up to the rich promise of "We the People." We are a country built by immigrants, dreams, daring, and opportunity. We are a country built by the horrors of slavery and genocide, the injustice of racism and exclusion. These realities exist side by side. It is our past and present. The future is unwritten. This is a book about ghosts. For we live in a haunted house.

I want good people to come here from all over the world, but I want them to do so legally. We can expedite the process, we can reward achievement and excellemce, but we have to respect the legal process. And those people who take advantage of the system and come here illegally should never enjoy the benefits of being a resident--or citizen--of this nation. So I am against any path to citizenship for undocumented workers or anyone else who is in this country illegaly. They should--and need to--go home and get in line.

I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what's going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father's father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.

Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic. Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery.

Immigrant parents, when they first move to North America, push towards whiteness, towards assimilation, to survive and thrive. Naturally, their children do too for the first half of their lives. This usually tips the other way, but before we're taught anything, we're taught to hide.

When we came to America, though, we didn't know what the right thing was. Here we lived with no map. We became invisible, the people who swam in between other people's lives, bussing dishes, delivering groceries. What was wrong? We didn't know. The most important thing, Abba said, was not to stick out. Don't let them see you. But I think it hurt him, to hide so much.

Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.

No one saw it coming,” but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one. The category of “no one” includes the people smeared by Trump in his propaganda: immigrants, black Americans, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, LGBT Americans, disabled Americans, and others long maligned and marginalized—groups for whom legally sanctioned American autocracy was not an unfathomable horror, but a personal backstory.

As I would learn later on, developed countries will always welcome the Einsteins of this world -- those individuals whose talents are already recognized and deemed to have value. This welcome doesn't usually extend to the poor and uneducated people seeking to enter the country. But the truth, supported by the facts of history and the richness of immigrant contribution to America's distinction in the world, is that the most entrepreneurial, innovative, motivated citizen is the one who has been given an opportunity and wants to repay the debt.

there may be thunder in Europe but it is in America the lightning will fall

The illegal immigrants who have taken jobs that should go to people here legally, while over 20 percent of Americans are currently unemployed or underemployed.

Humanity is not some box I should have to check.

America is not a country of immigrants, we are a country of pioneers.

If you have laws that you don't enforce, then you don't have laws. This leads to lawlessness.

He had come to America, haven of peace and liberty, and it, too, was joining the slaughter, fighting for the big capitalists. There was no peace for men, only murder, cruelty, brutality.

America is on its way into Europe. You can be as isolationist as you want to be, but there is a fact. Our armies are on their way in. Just as truly as Europe once invaded us, with wave after wave of immigrants, now we are invading Europe, with wave after wave of sons of immigrants.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think border security is important. And I have no doubt that the Republican plan for turning our southern border into The Hunger Games will put a stop to the #1 threat facing America today — illegal cleaning ladies.

Some Americans can be persuaded to live shorter and worse lives, provided that they are under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that blacks (or perhaps immigrants or Muslims) suffer still more.

Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes - because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient culture and home.

Even now, an immigrant is an extreme person. No matter how bad circumstances are in your native country, regardless of the death threat, complacency and entropy means most people will stay put amid famine and genocide. Anyone who crosses deserts and mountains and oceans and borders because life means more to him than stillness is brave. Never disrespect an immigrant. The brilliance of America is the constant regeneration of this daring population. And it is how this country started. And keeps renewing.

Fitting in, it turns out, is a very physical process. I have spent years in a battle with my body, trying to make it compliant to the needs of others. I have tried to shrink it as though that could shrink my difference. Am I more welcome if I take up less space?

In Sri Lanka, when two strangers meet, they ask a series of questions that reveal family, ancestral village, and blood ties until they arrive at a common friend or relative. Then they say, "Those are our people, so you are our people." It's a small place. Everyone knows everyone. "But in America, there are no such namings; it is possible to slip and slide here. It is possible to get lost in the nameless multitudes. There are no ropes binding one, holding one to the earth. Unbound by place or name, one is aware that it is possible to drift out into the atmosphere and beyond that, into the solitary darkness where there is no oxygen.

When the immigrants came to America, they thought the streets would be paved with gold. But when they got here, they realized three things: 1.  The streets were not paved with gold. 2.  The streets were not paved at all. 3.  They were the ones expected to do the paving.

Perhaps our brightest hope for the future lies in the lessons of the past. The people who have come to this country have made America, in the words of one perceptive writer, 'a heterogeneous race but a homogeneous nation.

In the midst of all of this local peace and harmony, a man named Ronald John was now the President-elect of the United States. He campaigned on a platform that promised to “rid America of the Muslim scourge.” What does this mean? Arya pondered. Does this man seriously intend to engage in the process of deporting all Muslims, whether here legally or illegally, whether citizens or non-citizens? Isn’t that unconstitutional? Arya Khan was inspirited and . . . terrified.

Here in the U.S., the language we use to discuss immigration does not recognize the realities of our lives based on conditions that we did not create and cannot control. For the most part, why are white people called “expats” while people of color are called “immigrants”? Why are some people called “expats” while others are called “immigrants”? What’s the difference between a “settler” and a “refugee”? Language itself is a barrier to information, a fortress against understanding the inalienable instinct of human beings to move.

I would also like to acknowledge all the immigrants who have risked their lives to come to this country, and the children of those immigrants. You are what make America great.

respect to the Indians, because the very idea of America belongs to immigrants.

Would Jesus build a wall? Would Mother Teresa? No, of course not. They would welcome the refugees and give them free universal healthcare.

I don't know if I can continue suffering like this just because I want to live in America.

I learned to be who I am by approximating who others are.

We must learn about each other and the power of our diversity.

There appeared to be an overarching phenomenon that sociologists call a “migrant advantage.” It is some internal resolve that perhaps exists in any immigrant compelled to leave one place for another. It made them “especially goal oriented, leading them to persist in their work and not be easily discouraged,

Benjamin Blaine,” he muttered. Glad that asshole is locked up for the rest of his miserable life. But Jack was not naïve; he knew that there were thousands like Blaine, across America, spurred to action by the sinister rhetoric of a racist president. Either way, they were equally as dangerous, perhaps more so.

Zoe rubbed her forehead and grimaced. “America is one toll booth after another. In Noshahr I could park anything in front of our compound, but not in free America. I tried to buy a goat to roast. I am not going to tell you the trouble that caused.” “You can’t roast goat in America?” “You can roast,” Zoe said, “but there are certain rules about goats. And it made the neighborhood children cry. The details are too tedious for the telephone.

Half the time I want every single one of you as my kin, and half the time I want nothing to do with you. Perhaps this is the source of my loneliness: belonging and not belonging, always, to you.

Very good,” she lied. Zoe had learned not to burden loved ones with God’s unwanted children. She had come to America with her gigantic hopes, intending to save money and rescue the sisters who had once rescued her. She wasn’t trying to save the world--just them.

I wonder if my father, given the chance, would have wished to go back to the time before he made all that money, when he just had one store and we rented a tiny apartment in Queens. He worked hard and had worries but he had a joy then that he never seemed to regain once the money started coming in. He might turn on the radio and dance cheek to cheek with my mother. He worked on his car himself, a used green Impala with carburetor trouble. They had lots of Korean friends that they met in church and then even in the street, and when they talked in public there was a shared sense of how lucky they were, to be in America but still have countrymen near.

[I] would argue that native-born blacks are so vastly less "African" than actual Africans that calling ourselves 'African American' is not only illogical but almost disrespectful to African immigrants. Here are people who were born in Africa, speak African languages, eat African food, dance in African ways, remember African stories, and will spiritually always be a part of Africa -and we stand up and insist that we, too, are 'African' because Jesse Jackson said so?

One could only wish there were more who understood the love of family, of history, and of ancient, sacred bonds that grow deep within us all. If family is not worthy of our time and attention, who or what is?

With over a millennia of heritage behind them, each with their own glimpse of empire and some pinnacle of human expression (a Sistine Chapel or Götterdämmerung), now they were satisfied to express their individuality through which Rogers they preferred at the Saturday matinee: Ginger or Roy or Buck. America may be the land of opportunity, but in New York it's the shot at conformity that pulls them through the door.

Now that the book is out in the world, I’m amazed all over again at what my friend did for me in prompting me to ditch realism for a more magical approach. In some ways, the Golem and the Jinni are the ultimate immigrants. They aren’t just new to New York or America; they’re new to people. Like those around them, they wrestle with issues of religion versus doubt and duty versus self-determination—but as inescapable aspects of their own otherworldly natures. For seven years I’ve lived with their questions, arguments, and adventures, and it’s been one of the greatest gifts of my life.

The American nuclear family made America great, but few are now defending it against forces determined to destroy it. If America continues to have many immigrants with different family types, we are less likely to maintain American values of personal freedom, individualism, and limited government.

He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by journey. Ohio was the first place he loved, for there at last he had been able to acquire poise --

My chances of returning to America were small, and I thought with regret about all the things I would miss about America: the TV dinner; air-conditioning; a well-regulated traffic system that people actually followed; a relatively low rate of death by gunfire, at least compared with our homeland; the modernist novel; freedom of speech, which, if not as absolute as Americans liked to believe, was still greater in degree than in our homeland; sexual liberation; and, perhaps most of all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious. There were also many things about America with which I was less enchanted, but why be negative?

Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.

As bell hooks wrote in a 1998 essay, "Naked Without Shame," about black women's bodies and politics, "Marked by shame, projected as inherent and therefore precluding any possibility of innocence, the black female body was beyond redemption." She points out that since the time of U.S. slavery, men have benefited from positioning black women as naturally promiscuous because it absolves them of guilt when they sexually assault and rape women of color. "[I]t was impossible to ruin that which was received as inherently unworthy, tainted, and soiled," hooks wrote. Women of color, low-income women, immigrant women- these are the women who are not seen as worthy of being placed on a pedestal. It's only our perfect virgins who are valuable, worthy of discourse and worship.

Nearly every African who has given the issue thought knows that America is not only not racist, it is the best place for an African to immigrate to. That is why more black Africans have come to America voluntarily than came to America as slaves — a statistic that virtually no college student is allowed to know.

One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands. Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Norwegian-Americans the nisser, Greek-Americans the vrykólakas, but only in relation to events remembered in the Old Country. When I once asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and said “They’re scared to pass the ocean, it’s too far,” pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America. —Richard Dorson, “A Theory for American Folklore,

Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate willpower to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions—just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are.

This would suggest that the people of the Great Migration who ultimately made lives for themselves in the North and West were among the most determined of those in the South, among the most resilient of those who left, and among the most resourceful of blacks in the North, not unlike immigrant groups from other parts of the world who made a way for themselves in the big cities of the North and West.

Automobile in America, Chromium steel in America, Wire-spoke wheel in America, Very big deal in America! Immigrant goes to America, Many hellos in America, Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico's in America! I like the shores of America! Comfort is yours in America! Knobs on the doors in America! Wall-to-wall floors in America!

Americans are under no moral obligation to grant amnesty to people who have broken our laws. “The moral thing to do” is usually defined as “following the law.” The fact that Democrats want 30 million new voters is not a good enough reason to ignore the law and screw over American workers, as well as legal immigrants already here.

He was home. In an environment where he felt loved and comfortable in a way not possible in the United States. And yet, he no longer fit in. He loved living in America, but knew that there, too, he didn't quite fit. It was the classic immigrant dilemma.

All the way, Zoe kept her chin up and pretended she wasn’t mortified, but his sour expression stayed with her. She wasn’t good at making American friends. She changed her language, conduct, and clothing, but it didn’t seem to matter. Whether she wore modest Middle-Eastern clothing or cute Western fashions, everyone knew she didn’t belong.

But now, we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated - free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down.

When the address was over, Blackwell stood at attention, saluted, and shouted aloud at the television. “God bless you, Mr. President!” The John victory was a victory for all white nationalists. “Make America pure again? Hell yeah!” he and his friends cheered.

Faced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their "Don't treat on me" T-shirts and sneer, "The peasants are revolting." You oppose illegal immigration? You're a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamaphobe. If that's the choice, I'd rather be damned as a racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization of dissent: the Conformicrats simply declare your position as a form of mental illness.

Unless US citizens acknowledge and understand their country's imperial past, they will not be able to understand its present or future. Much of the recent and current Hispanic resettlement of parts of the United States is a consequence of empire.... Countercolonization follows colonization, and the waves of migrants always flow back like returning tides.

Mr. Wu, is it true that you have an internalized sense of inferiority? That because on the one hand you, for obvious reasons, have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream, i.e., White America— And on the other hand neither do you feel fully justified in claiming solidarity with other historically and currently oppressed groups. That while your community’s experience in the United States has included racism on the personal and the institutional levels, including but not limited to: immigration quotas, actual federal legislation expressly excluding people who look like you from entering the country. Legislation that was in effect for almost a century. Antimiscegenation laws. Discriminatory housing policies. Alien land laws and restrictive covenants. Violation of civil liberties including internment. That despite all of that, you somehow feel that your oppression, because it does not include the original American sin—of slavery—that it will never add up to something equivalent. That the wrongs committed against your ancestors are incommensurate in magnitude with those committed against Black people in America. And whether or not that quantification, whether accurate or not, because of all of this you feel on some level that you maybe can’t even quite verbalize, out of shame or embarrassment, that the validity and volume of your complaints must be calibrated appropriately, must be in proportion to the aggregate suffering of your people. Your oppression is second-class.

It seems to me that America is constantly reinventing what "America" means.

Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.

You must really like curry” is the kind of lazy, unimaginative racism I’d naively assumed people outgrew.

Immigrants are seen as mere labor, our physical bodies judged by perceptions of what we contribute, or what we take. Our existence is as broadly criminalized as it is commodified.

All immigrants walk around with a scar left behind by their crossing into a new country, an invisible mark of the exile that became their condition when they were uprooted.

Ironically, the very brokest people in America, Hispanic immigrants, are one of America’s last great cash crops.

He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people's shirts, just above the heart.

One can never be 100% certain when it comes to family lineage. One must always keep an open mind, willing to go wherever the facts may lead.

Dear America, is this what you really want? Do you even know what is happening in your name?

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

Our identities as people of color should not be defined solely by our struggles. But, as we are perpetually made to feel like others in this country, that’s how we are taught to understand ourselves. There’s so much love in my race. I’ve been trying to think of my race as a site of joy. The feeling I get when I see a South Asian or Muslim person succeeding, like I’ve swallowed a handful of fireflies, lighting up my stomach. I glow into the night. When an older South Asian woman I’ve never met calls me bayti and she transforms into my auntie.

Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.

My mother's mother came to this country in the usual way--she got on a boat with other immigrants and sailed from Sicily. She wasn't one of them, however: neither tired nor poor or part of any huddled mass. Instead, she traveled alone, with her money in one sock and a knife in the other, coming to the new world with an old world motive--to murder the man that had left her for America.

The way the kids of immigrants heard about America, you would think it was not down the stairs and out the door but still across the ocean, a distant place where everything is promised and, for hard work, everything is given. From the day he left his parents' house, Abe [Reles] had to know his father was right, that America promises everything, but he also had to know his father was wrong--America gives nothing. Those things that are promised, they cannot be worked for but must be taken, conned away with good looks, obsequiousness, mimicry; or traded for with bit of your soul or the morals of the stories your parents told; or tricked away with lies; or wrested away with brute force.

Whether our families come from Guatemala, Afghanistan, or South Korea, the immigrants since 1965 have shared histories that extend beyond this nation, to our countries of origin, where our lineage has been decimated by Western imperialism, war, and dictatorships orchestrated or supported by the United States. In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we’ve been given a second chance at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this.

Aunt Fostalina says when she first came to America she went to school during the day and worked nights at Eliot’s hotels, cleaning hotel rooms together with people from countries like Senegal, Cameroon, Tibet, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and so on. It was like the damn United Nations there, she likes to say.

In America my mother has eyes as strong as boulders, never once skittering off a face, but she has not learned to place decorations and phonograph needles, nor has she stopped seeing land on the other side of the oceans. Now her eyes include the relatives in China, as they once included my father smiling and smiling in his many western outfits, a different one for each photograph that he sent from America. (1983: 59)

Do you see it? Do you get it? Are you clear on What's going on? White women are subjugated (as human beings) even when elevated (as muses and objects of desire). Black men are infantilized intellectually (to diminish power) and aged-up physically (to increase threat). Black women are subjugated, infantilized, and aged-up, expected to selflessly carry everyone else. Immigrants and people of color are supposed to dedicate their lives to the illusion--the lottery-- of the American Dream, by actually feeding the American Machine.

The country was a dreamland; and perhaps it even reminded my wife's grandfather of the night he woke up drunk in his friend's house, beside his friend's wife, everything similar but new, different, better. The United States of America was like an eternity of those first disorientating seconds of not knowing and not wanting to.

Where are you from?” usually bothers me, but tonight I note his brown skin, and I know it’s not the same thing as a white American asking me the same question. I note his Muslim name. His question is not an attack but an invitation, a cup of tea, from someone who also feels lonely in this country and is looking for a bit of home.

This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like me find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home. After twenty-five years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.

Luz cleared her throat. “I’ve always said, ‘Getting a foothold in a country that doesn’t want you is daunting, but determination and good manners can go a long way.’ So, be careful. Gays are outsiders too . . . just like us.” Luz smiled. “But, life in the shadows isn’t so bad.” “You don’t have a Green Card?” Zoe asked. “No. And I’m not attracted to men. But I’ll never be Mexican again. I’m a child of free enterprise, wandering through an international marketplace. I may only work in a nail salon, but at least I’m part of America’s circus of self-invention.

As this story will show, reactionary populism in the United States has historically defined itself against the same enemies–urban elites, immigrants, liberals, progressives and organised labour; and for the same beliefs–evangelical Protestantism, traditional ‘family values’ and white supremacy. Trump has once again brought Americans face-to-face with a deeply rooted populist conservatism, one that defines itself in opposition to groups of people it constructs as ‘alien’ or ‘un-American’. And that populism is consistently drawn to demagogues and authoritarians.

Over the course of the millennia, all these multitudes of ancestors, generation upon generation, have come down to this moment in time—to give birth to you. There has never been, nor will ever be, another like you. You have been given a tremendous responsibility. You carry the hopes and dreams of all those who have gone before. Hopes and dreams for a better world. What will you do with your time on this Earth? How will you contribute to the ongoing story of humankind?

I once heard of a class teacher who’d punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever a student wearing blue shirt had committed a mistake. I thought that was pretty bad. I then heard of a class teacher who’d punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever someone in blue shirt committed a mistake somewhere else. Clearly, the worst is not a reality.

Hitler fantasized that the United States so fully shared his racist views that it would ultimately side with the Third Reich. Nazi writers regularly pointed to America’s anti-Asian immigration quotas and bigoted Jim Crow laws to deflect foreign criticism of their own discriminatory statutes. Even the German quest for Lebensraum found its model in America’s westward expansion, during which, as Hitler noted, U.S. soldiers and frontiersmen “gunned down . . . millions of Redskins.

Because they saw themselves as intellectuals rather than refugees, they were concerned less about preserving their Chinese heritage than with casting their lot with modern America, and eventual American citizenship. It is in connection with these immigrants, not surprisingly, that the term “model minority” first appeared. The term refers to an image of the Chinese as working hard, asking for little, and never complaining. It is a term that many Chinese now have mixed feelings about.

Long before Emma Lazarus welcomed the tired and poor, Washington declared that the 'bosom of America [was] open to receive, the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions, whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges.

And that damned man in the White House doesn’t help things any. He represents the type of political hatred I’m talking about. Guys like him play to the worst fears of white men. Are you having a bad time of it right now? Lost your job? Having difficulty making ends meet? It’s not my fault or your fault. It’s the black man’s fault. It’s the Muslims’ fault. Blame a Mexican immigrant. Man’s got everyone lining up, taking sides, white people versus people of color, different religions arguing their way is the right way. This is a bad time in America. It’s an especially terrible time for a black woman to be taking on a white cop or the white establishment.

They are an American Delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologize for the crusades', said Arafat. Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.

American capitalism needs a steady supply of immigrant labor, but it needs it cheap. By criminalizing the workers, the state helps to keep them uncertain, uneasy, disorganized, and docile. The attack on immigrants, therefore, is both “[p]olitically…an organic expression of nativist hostility and a very useful, rational system of elite-inspired class control”—“the primary product” of which “is… fear.

Not long ago I was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, with one of America’s most prominent atheists. Wearing my clerical collar, I realized that I stood out among his guests. So I decided to announce to Bill that I, too, am an atheist. He seemed taken aback, so I explained that if we were talking about the God who hates poor people, immigrants, and gay folks, I don’t believe in that God either. Sometimes it helps to clarify our language.

Christian nationalism—the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians. It is linked to opposition to gay rights and gun control, to support for harsher punishments for criminals, to justifications for the use of excessive force against black Americans in law enforcement situations, and to traditionalist gender ideology.

I don’t want to stop legal immigration to this country. In fact, I would like to reform and increase immigration in some important ways. Our current immigration laws are upside down—they make it tough on the people we need to have here, and easy for the people we don’t want here. This country is a magnet for many of the smartest, hardest-working people born in other countries, yet we make it difficult for these bright people who follow the laws to settle here.

The ability of Britain to invade almost the entire planet and then for a significant portion of the country to proclaim themselves victims of some kind of invasion or colonisation may well not seem directly ‘racial’, but it certainly echoes quite clearly the way white America, with its long-term history of racist pogroms, lynching, slavery and segregation, has somehow emerged believing itself to be the victim of racial discrimination. Britain entered the EU freely, it has voted leave freely, the only blood that was shed around this issue was when a white-supremacist ultra¬ nationalist lunatic assassinated an MP perceived to be too kind to ‘immigrants’ during the campaign - hardly a country under siege like so many of those on the receiving end of Britain’s imperial conquests.

[T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-American' let alone a 'British-American,' and one can only boggle at the idea of what, if we did exist, our national day parade on Fifth Avenue might look like. One can, though, be an Englishman in America. There is a culture, even a literature, possibly a language, and certainly a diplomatic and military relationship, that can accurately be termed 'Anglo-American.' But something in the very landscape and mapping of America, with seven eastern seaboard states named for English monarchs or aristocrats and countless hamlets and cities replicated from counties and shires across the Atlantic, that makes hyphenation redundant. Hyphenation—if one may be blunt—is for latecomers.

And that damned man in the White House doesn’t help things any. He represents the type of political hatred I’m talking about. Guys like him play to the worst fears of white men. Are you having a bad time of it right now? Lost your job? Having difficulty making ends meet? It’s not my fault or your fault. It’s the black man’s fault. It’s the Muslims’ fault. Blame a Mexican immigrant. Man’s got everyone lining up, taking sides, white people versus people of color, different religions arguing their way is the right way. This is a bad time in America. It’s an especially terrible time for a black woman to be taking on a white cop or the white establishment.

By the time the girls’ corpses were found four days later, their bodies were so badly decomposed that dental records were required for identification. The decomposition was especially pronounced in the head, neck, and genital areas.8 Jennifer’s father, tipped off that bodies had been found, rushed to the scene, but the police held him back, as he shouted, “Does she have blond hair? Does she have blond hair?” Activist Ralph Reed tells the New York Times that Republicans should take a more “charitable” view of immigration.9 When he’s a fourteen-year-old American girl being raped and murdered by Mexicans, we’ll be more interested in his ideas on charity.

The historical irony is that European Christians coming to the Americas were escaping highly stratified and intolerant societies; in North America they encountered societies that were open and tolerant; but in response, these European immigrants simply duplicated the oppression they had known by practicing it on the Native People.

My charge, then, in putting down my pen, and giving over this work to posterity, is this: Take the time. Take the time to preserve the stories, the photographs, the small mementos that mean so much. This is your legacy to future generations. Give it the attention it deserves. Your children and your grandchildren will thank you for it.

WITH IMMIGRATION, THE MOST POWERFUL FORCES IN OUR CULTURE ARE ALL on the same page—the Democrats, the rich, Washington lobbyists, Republican consultants, and money-grubbing churches. Even stalwarts on other conservative issues, like the Wall Street Journal, are with the Left on mass immigration from the Third World. When it comes to society’s rich and powerful, immigration is the great unifier. The only ones opposed to fundamentally transforming this country into some other country are the American people.

Society was obsessed with invention, industrialization, incorporation, immigration, and, later, imperialism. It was indulgent of commercial speculation, social ostentation, and political prevarication but was indifferent to the special needs of immigrants and Indians and intolerant of African-Americans, labor unions, and political dissidents.

What we're doing - waving a "Keep Out!" flag at the Mexican border while holding up a Help Wanted sign a hundred yards in - is deliberate. Spending billions building fences and walls, locking people up like livestock, deporting people to keep the people we don't want out, tearing families apart, breaking spirits - all of that serves a purpose.

Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide. [Quoting President Lyndon B. Johnson’s remarks at the signing ceremony of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on Liberty Island in New York.]

They play, said the old man. Every week the anglos play a game to celebrate who they are. He stopped, raised his cane and fanned the air. One of them whacks it, then sets off like it was a trip around the world, to every one of the bases out there, you know the anglos have bases all over the world, right? Well the one who whacked it runs from one to the next while the others keep taking swings to distract their enemies, and if he doesn't get caught he makes it home and his people welcome him with open arms and cheering.

Those on the far right I came to know felt two things. First, they felt the deep story was true. Second, they felt that liberals were saying it was not true, and that they themselves were not feeling the right feelings. Blacks and women who were beneficiaries of affirmative action, immigrants, refugees, and public employees were not really stealing their place in line, liberals said. So don't feel resentful. Obama's help to these groups was not really a betrayal, liberals said. The success of those who cut ahead was not really at the expense of white men and their wives. In other words, the far right felt that the deep story was their real story and that there was a false PC cover-up of that story. They felt scorned. "People think we're not good people if we don't fee sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees," one man told me. "But I am a good person and I don't feel sorry for them." With the cover-up, as my new friends explained to me, came the need to manage the appearance of their real feelings and even, to some extent, the feelings themselves. They didn't have to do this with friends, neighbors, and family. But they realized that the rest of America did not agree. ("I know liberals want us to feel sorry for blacks. I know they think they are so idealistic and we aren't," one woman told me.) My friends on the right felt obliged to try to modify their feelings, and they didn't like having to do that; they felt under the watchful eye of the "PC police." In the realm of emotions, the right felt like they were being treated as the criminals, and the liberals had the guns.

The event that will light the way for immigration in North America is the talking picture. The silent film brings nothing but entertainment—a pie in the face, a fop being dragged by a bear out of a department store—all events governed by fate and timing, not language and argument. The tramp never changes the opinion of the policeman. The truncheon swings, the tramp scuttles through a corner window and disturbs the fat lady’s ablutions. These comedies are nightmares. The audience emits horrified laughter as Chaplin, blindfolded, rollerskates near the edge of the unbalconied mezzanine. No one shouts to warn him. He cannot talk or listen. North America is still without language, gestures and work and bloodlines are the only currency.

Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus--that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes. Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and--most striking of all--his beliefs were not ours. Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.

In 2016, into this tangle of worry and anger, came a showman who made big promises. A man who swore he would drain the swamp, then surrounded himself with the lobbyists and billionaires who run the swamp and feed off government favors. A man who talked the talk of populism but offered the very worst of trickle-down economics. A man who said he knew how the corrupt system worked because he had worked it for himself many times. A man who vowed to make America great again and followed up with attacks on immigrants, minorities, and women. A man who was always on the hunt for his next big con.

The “Howard” in the entry had to be Howard Phillips Lovecraft, that twentieth-century puritanic Poe from Providence, with his regrettable but undeniable loathing of the immigrant swarms he felt were threatening the traditions and monuments of his beloved New England and the whole Eastern seaboard. (And hadn’t Lovecraft done some ghost-writing for a man with a name like Castries? Caster? Carswell?)

I like it too," Angelo said. "I love this country. Much you and anybody, and you know it." "I know it," Prew said. "But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I dont love the Army. This country's Army is why I hate this country. What did this country ever do for me? Gimme a right to vote for men I cant elect? You can have it. Gimme a right to work at a job I hate? You can have that too. Then tell I'm a Citizen of the greatest richest country on earth, if I dont believe it look at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes. All carnival prizes. [..] They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little." Prew thought, a little sickly, of the little book, The Man Without A Country that his mother used to read to him so often, and how the stern patriotic judge condemned the man to live on a warship where no one could ever mention home to him the rest of his whole life, and how he had always felt that pinpoint of pleased righteous anger at seeing the traitor get what he deserved.

Somebody’s noticing the immigrant crime wave: Google illegal alien crime and you’ll get more than 2 million hits. Google immigrant crime and you’ll get 40 million. Only our government and media refuse to notice. Then they turn around and denounce anyone else’s estimate, saying: You don’t know that. So tell us! We “don’t know that” only because the people in a position to know have decided to keep it secret.

In the words of John Fonte, “The new, transformed civic morality of the progressive narrative . . . divides Americans between dominant or ‘oppressor’ groups—whites, males, native-born, Christians, heterosexuals—and victim or ‘oppressed’ groups—racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities; women; LGBT individuals, and ‘undocumented’ immigrants. Progressive politics doesn’t seek the national interest or the common good. Its purpose is to promote ‘marginalized’ or ‘oppressed’ groups against ‘dominant’ or ‘oppressor’ groups.”5 It is the old Marxist wine in new bottles, and the results are bound to be similar. Progressives

After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, “The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.” This same observation is heard from some contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentlessly materialist culture the fruit of homelessness, a rootless past. America has been called the home of second chances. For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?

We are two countries, two peoples. An older America is passing away, and a new America is coming into its own. The new Americans who grew up in the 1960s and the years since did not like the old America. They thought it a bigoted, reactionary, repressive, stodgy country. So they kicked the dust from their heels and set out to build a new America, and they have succeeded. To its acolytes the cultural revolution has been a glorious revolution. But to millions, they have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for—their country, not ours.

I think distance also helps me gain an certain critical perspective that's essential for good writing. It makes it possible to be more truthful in my writing, to speak some harsh truths. And being an immigrant in America, always having this outsider-rinsider thing going on, is such great training for being a writer. Because that's what writers are - outsiders wanting to get on the inside and insiders longing to burst out.

And I thought, y’know, I mean…this is crazy. I mean, the only thing that determines what country you belong to is where you happened to be born? What is a country, anyway? It’s not, y’know, “purple mountain’s majesty” or “fruited plains,” whatever the hell that means. I mean, America isn’t a place, it’s an ideal. It could happen in the Sahara Desert and still be America. For that matter, I’m the child of immigrants. My father’s lived and worked in this country for the past three decades. And he’s somehow more or less American than some redneck who uses Osama bin Laden for toilet paper? How the hell do you measure something like that?

In one experiment, CA would show people on online panels pictures of simple bar graphs about uncontroversial things (e.g., the usage rates of mobile phones or sales of a car type) and the majority would be able to read the graph correctly. However, unbeknownst to the respondents, the data behind these graphs had actually been derived from politically controversial topics, such as income inequality, climate change, or deaths from gun violence. When the labels of the same graphs were later switched to their actual controversial topic, respondents who were made angry by identity threats were more likely to misread the relabeled graphs that they had previously understood. What CA observed was that when respondents were angry, their need for complete and rational explanations was also significantly reduced. In particular, anger put people in a frame of mind in which they were more indiscriminately punitive, particularly to out-groups. They would also underestimate the risk of negative outcomes. This led CA to discover that even if a hypothetical trade war with China or Mexico meant the loss of American jobs and profits, people primed with anger would tolerate that domestic economic damage if it meant they could use a trade war to punish immigrant groups and urban liberals.

Most émigrés arrived at Ellis Island in New York, invariably confused and exhausted from an unpleasant and dangerous voyage. Health inspectors checked every immigrant, and while the inspections were not particularly rigid, people were routinely refused entry. Often it was a child, leaving the mother with a sort of Sophie’s choice—whether to go back to Europe with the rejected son or daughter or stay with her husband and other children.

The civil rights movement worked a major change in U.S. society in making open expressions of White supremacy culturally unacceptable. This was a far cry, however, from actually ending White racial mobilization. Instead, this mobilization, often orchestrated by White politicians, has continued over the last several decades in the form of interlinked panics about criminals, welfare cheats, illegal immigrants, and, most recently, terrorists.

I don't want people to think I mind being mistaken for African American. I don't. There are, however, many African immigrants in America who, to climb the social ladder, resist being categorized, by white people, with African Americans. Some even go so far as to claim superiority. This is not surprising. In America, the racial hierarchy has white at the top and black on the bottom. *We're not that kind of black,* I have heard a member of my own family--an uncle-- argue when a white person leveled a racism insult against him. Given this, is is also not surprising that there exists some animosity between the African immigrant and African-American communities.

Let’s call it the scarcity diversion. Here’s the playbook. First, allow elites to hoard a resource like money or land. Second, pretend that arrangement is natural, unavoidable—or better yet, ignore it altogether. Third, attempt to address social problems caused by the resource hoarding only with the scarce resources left over. So instead of making the rich pay all their taxes, for instance, design a welfare state around the paltry budget you are left with when they don’t. Fourth, fail. Fail to drive down the poverty rate. Fail to build more affordable housing. Fifth, claim this is the best we can do. Preface your comments by saying, “In a world of scarce resources…” Blame government programs. Blame capitalism. Blame the other political party. Blame immigrants. Blame anyone you can except those who most deserve it. “Gaslighting” is not too strong a phrase to describe such pretense.

No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bun-gee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it.

On coming to America I had the same hopes as have most European immigrants and the same disillusionment, though the latter affected me more keenly and more deeply. The immigrant without money and without connections is not permitted to cherish the comforting illusion that America is a benevolent uncle who assumes a tender and impartial guardianship of nephews and nieces. I soon learned that in a republic there are myriad ways by which the strong, the cunning, the rich can seize power and hold it. I saw the many work for small wages which kept them always on the borderline of want for the few who made huge profits. I saw the courts, the halls of legislation, the press, and the schools--in fact every avenue of education and protection--effectively used as an instrument for the safeguarding of a minority, while the masses were denied every right. I found that the politicians knew how to befog every issue, how to control public opinion and manipulate votes to their own advantage and to that of their financial and industrial allies. This was the picture of democracy I soon discovered on my arrival in the United States. Fundamentally there have been few changes since that time.

Never mind that she’s been hearing this soliloquy from strangers since she was born, in the Year of the Fire Horse, twin sixes after the nineteen. Never mind the order of questions invariably changes even if the questions themselves do not: 'How long have y’all lived here? Do you even speak English? Oh, well. Your English is so good. Bless your heart, you must miss your people. You stick out like a raisin in a big bowl of oatmeal. Is it true that you worship cows? . . . Have you even heard of the Bible? Don’t get all uppity on me, don’t turn away. I know you think you don’t have to listen. But this is my country. You do. When are y’all heading back? Y’all best be getting back to where you came from, you hear? No need to overstay your welcome.

Given the choice between bedlam and a dictatorship, what do you think the American people will choose? Driven by fear of another attack, in a state of terror, they'll do the terrorists' work for them. They'll destroy their own freedoms. Accept, even applaud , the the suspension of rights. Internment camps. Torture. Expulsions. The liberal agenda, women's equality, gay marriage, immigrants, will be blamed for the death of the real America. But thanks to the bold action of a patriotic few, the white Angle-Saxon Christian, God-fearing America of their grandparents will be restored. And if they have to slaughter a few thousand to achieve it, well, it is war, after all. The beacon that was America will die, by suicide. Frankly it was coughing up blood anyway.

Now I am old enough to understand to understand that we live on land that remembers. I hear the voices when I touch the brick or pavement, catch fragments of words exchanged hundreds of years before the island of Mannahatta was paved. I sometimes think about the Arabs and other immigrants who came here a century before my own family, hoping they wouldn't be devoured by the bottomless hunger of the very forces that drove them from their homelands, hoping they could survive in this place that was not built for them.

New Rule: Republicans must stop pitting the American people against the government. Last week, we heard a speech from Republican leader Bobby Jindal--and he began it with the story that every immigrant tells about going to an American grocery store for the first time and being overwhelmed with the "endless variety on the shelves." And this was just a 7-Eleven--wait till he sees a Safeway. The thing is, that "endless variety"exists only because Americans pay taxes to a government, which maintains roads, irrigates fields, oversees the electrical grid, and everything else that enables the modern American supermarket to carry forty-seven varieties of frozen breakfast pastry.Of course, it's easy to tear government down--Ronald Reagan used to say the nine most terrifying words in the Englishlanguage were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." But that was before "I'm Sarah Palin, now show me the launch codes."The stimulus package was attacked as typical "tax and spend"--like repairing bridges is left-wing stuff. "There the liberals go again, always wanting to get across the river." Folks, the people are the government--the first responders who put out fires--that's your government. The ranger who shoos pedophiles out of the park restroom, the postman who delivers your porn.How stupid is it when people say, "That's all we need: the federal government telling Detroit how to make cars or Wells Fargo how to run a bank. You want them to look like the post office?"You mean the place that takes a note that's in my hand in L.A. on Monday and gives it to my sister in New Jersey on Wednesday, for 44 cents? Let me be the first to say, I would be thrilled if America's health-care system was anywhere near as functional as the post office.Truth is, recent years have made me much more wary of government stepping aside and letting unregulated private enterprise run things it plainly is too greedy to trust with. Like Wall Street. Like rebuilding Iraq.Like the way Republicans always frame the health-care debate by saying, "Health-care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not government bureaucrats," leaving out the fact that health-care decisions aren't made by doctors, patients, or bureaucrats; they're made by insurance companies. Which are a lot like hospital gowns--chances are your gas isn't covered.

The most celebrated American author of the twentieth century, Bellow objected during the first part of his career to being designated a “Jewish writer, ” but it was he who demonstrated how a Jewish voice could speak for an integrated America. With Bellow, Jewishness moved in from the immigrant margins to become a new form of American regionalism. Yet he did not have to write about Jews in order to write as a Jew. Bellow's curious mingling of laughter and trembling is particularly manifest in his novel Henderson the Rain King, that follows an archetypal Protestant American into mythic Africa. Bellow not only influenced and paved the way for other American Jewish writers like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick, but naturalized the immigrant voice: the American novel came to seem freshly authentic when it spoke in the voice of one of its discernible minorities.

America and Greece are at different stops on the same one-way street, all too familiar to us immigrants. There's nothing new about Obama: been there, done that. Nothing could be less hopeful, or less of a change. He's the land where we grew up, with its union bullies and marginal tax rates and government automobiles and general air of decay all re-emerging Brigadoon-like from the mists entirely unspoilt by progress. it's like docking at Ellis Island in 1883, coming down the gangplank, and finding everyone excited about this pilot program they've introduced called "serfdom".

We’re fortunate in being Americans. At least we don’t step on the underdog. I wonder if that’s because there are no “Americans” – only a stew of immigrants – or if it’s because the earth from which we exist has been so kind to us and our forefathers; or if it’s because the “American” is the offspring of the logical European who hated oppression and loved freedom beyond life? Those great mountains and the tall timber; the cool deep lakes and broad rivers; the green valleys and white farmhouses; the air, the sea and wind; the plains and great cities; the smell of living – all must be the cause of it. And yet, with treasure in his hand there’s another million crying for that victory of life. And for each of us who wants to live in happiness and give happiness, there’s another different sort of person wanting to take it away… Those people always manage to have their say, and Mars is always close at hand. We know how to win wars. We must learn now to win peace… If I ever have a son, I don’t want him to go through this again, but I want him powerful enough that no one will be fool enough to touch him. He and America should be strong as hell and kind as Christ.

In the mid-thirties, a young black poet named Langston Hughes wrote a poem, "Let America Be America Again": . . . I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek- And finding only the same old stupid plan. Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. . . . O, let America be America again- The land that never has been yet- And yet must be-the land where every man is free. The land that's mine-the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's ME- Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again. Sure call me any ugly name you choose- The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America! . . .

I'm an immigrant to this great land. For fellows like me, this is where the bus terminates. There's nowhere else to go. Everywhere else tried this, and it's killed them. There's nothing new about Obama-era "hope" and "change." For some of us, it's the land where we grew up: government hospitals, government automobiles, been there, done that. This isn't a bright new future, it's a straight-to-video disco-zombie sequel: the creature rises from the grave to stagger around in rotting bell-bottoms and cheesecloth shirt terrorizing a new generation. Burn, baby, burn. It's a Seventies-statist disco-era inferno.

Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they’re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I’m interrupted. If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

Driven by fear of another attack, in a state of terror, they’ll do the terrorists’ work for them. They’ll destroy their own freedoms. Accept, even applaud, the suspension of rights. Internment camps. Torture. Expulsions. The liberal agenda, women’s equality, gay marriage, immigrants, will be blamed for the death of the real America. But thanks to the bold action of a patriotic few, the white Anglo-Saxon Christian, God-fearing America of their grandparents will be restored. And if they have to slaughter a few thousand to achieve it, well, it is war, after all. The beacon that was America will die, by suicide. Frankly it was coughing up blood anyway.

We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don't look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as subhuman or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people. Such language isn't new — it's been at the root of most human tragedy throughout history, here in America and around the world. It has no place in our politics and our public life, and it's time for the overwhelming majority of Americans of goodwill, of every race and faith and political party, to say as much — clearly and unequivocally.

Make the race proud," the elders used to say. But by then, I knew that I wasn't so much bound by a biological race as to a group of people, and these people were not black because of any uniform color or any uniform physical feature. They were bound because they suffered under the weight of the dream, and they were bound by all the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they had fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the dream. ... In other words, I was part of a world. And looking out, I had friends who too were part of other worlds. The world of Jews, or New Yorkers. The world of southerners or gay men. Of immigrants, of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though I could never myself be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us. I had read too much by then, and my eyes, my beautiful precious eyes, were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us, but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us. Intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.

This hostility has not stopped Mr. Sowell. He has shown that in 1969, while American-born blacks were making only 62 percent of the average income for all Americans, blacks from the West Indies made 94 percent. Second-generation immigrants from the West Indies made 15 percent more than the average American.46 Although they are only 10 percent of the city’s black population, foreign-born blacks—mostly from the West Indies—own half of the black-owned businesses in New York City.47 Their unemployment rate is lower than the national average, and many times lower than that of American-born blacks.48 West Indian blacks look no different from American blacks; white racists are not likely suddenly to set aside their prejudices when they meet one.

I might have been just half an Asian, but in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t. Funnily enough, I had never felt inferior because of my race during my foreign student days. I was foreign by definition and therefore was treated as a guest. But now, even though I was a card-carrying American with a driver’s license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit, Violet still considered me as foreign, and this misrecognition punctured the smooth skin of my self-confidence. Was I just being paranoid, that all-American characteristic? Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves.

As of this writing, the state of California is locked in a legal fight with the United States of America, trying to defend its right to ignore federal law. Only they’re arguing from the opposite direction. Sure, they say, the federal government has jurisdiction over immigration, but in this case, we’re going to do everything we can to make it impossible for them to enforce it! News flash: The United States Constitution’s Supremacy Clause can’t be set aside because California—or Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Illinois, Vermont, or the Queen of England—says it should be. That’s why it works. States do not get to make their own rules that fly in the face of our founding documents, so they can appease LIBERAL voters and ensure LIBERAL politicians stay in office for a few more terms.

When it first appeared, in 1943, it was called, by those critics who liked it, an honest book, and that is accurate as far as it goes. But it is more than that: It is deeply, indelibly true. Honesty is casting bright light on your own experience; truth is casting it on the experiences of all, which is why, six decades after it was published and became an instant bestseller, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn continues to be read by people from all countries and all circumstances. Early on in its explosive success it was described as a book about city life, a story about grinding poverty, a tale of the struggles of immigrants in America. But all those things are setting, really, and the themes are farther-reaching: the fabric of family, the limits of love, the loss of innocence, and the birth of knowledge

The media’s weird obsession with billing immigrant terrorists as apple-pie Americans leads to comical results, such as the panelists on MSNBC’s The Cycle puzzling over how Aafia Siddiqui, a “U.S.-trained scientist” could have become radicalized.56 Here’s a tip for MSNBC: When you can’t pronounce the terrorist’s name, the rest of America isn’t sitting in slack-jawed amazement. Siddiqui wasn’t an American by any definition. She wasn’t even an anchor baby. Rather, Siddiqui was born and raised in Pakistan and came to the United States as an adult via our seditious universities. After an arranged marriage over the phone with another Pakistani, who—luckily for America!—joined her here, she divorced and married the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Who could have seen Siddiqui’s radicalism coming?

In just a few decades, Minnesota has gone from being approximately 99 percent German, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, and Polish to 20 percent African immigrant,7 including at least one hundred thousand Somalis.8 And that’s not counting the Somalis who have recently left the country to fight with al Qaeda and ISIS. One hundred thousand is just an estimate. We don’t know precisely how many Somalis the federal government has brought in as “refugees” because the government won’t tell us. The public can’t be trusted with the truth. Since becoming more multicultural, Minnesota has turned into a hotbed of credit card skimming, human trafficking, and smash-and-grab robberies.9 Mosques have popped up all over the state—as have child prostitutes and machete attacks. Welfare consumption in Minnesota has more than doubled on account of the newcomers—only half of whom have jobs. Those Somalis who do have jobs earn an average of $21,000 a year, compared with $46,000 for the average Minnesotan. (Consider yourself lucky, Minnesota: In Sweden, only 20 percent of Somalis have jobs.) Eighty percent of Somalis in Minnesota live at or below the poverty line. Nearly 70 percent have not graduated from high school, compared with only 8.4 percent of non-Somali Minnesotans.10

Jewish immigrants like the Floms and the Borgenichts and the Janklows were not like the other immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Irish and the Italians were peasants, tenant farmers from the impoverished countryside of Europe. Not so the Jews. For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and towns, taking up urban trades and professions. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island in the thirty years or so before the First World War had some kind of occupational skill. They had owned small groceries or jewelry stores. They had been bookbinders or watchmakers. Overwhelmingly, though, their experience lay in the clothing trade. They were tailors and dressmakers, hat and cap makers, and furriers and tanners.

Everyone in America understands ObamaCare is destroying jobs. It is driving up health care costs. It is killing health benefits. It is shattering the economy. All across the country in all 50 States--it doesn't matter what State you go to, you can go to any State in the Union, it doesn't matter if you are talking to Republicans or Democrats or Independents or Libertarians--Americans understand this thing is not working.   Yet Washington is pretending not to know. Washington is pretending to have no awareness. Instead we have politicians giving speeches about how wonderful ObamaCare is. At the same time they go to the President and ask for an exemption from ObamaCare for Members of Congress.   If ObamaCare is so wonderful, why is it that its loudest advocates don't want to be subject to it? I will confess that is a very difficult one to figure out.   DC

Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking. We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry. The freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the checks and balances in our Constitution were designed to prevent the self-inflicted wounds we face today. But as our long history reveals, those written words must be applied by people charged with giving life to them in each new era. That’s how African Americans moved from being slaves to being equal under the law and how they set off on the long journey to be equal in fact, a journey we know is not over. The same story can be told of women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, the rights of the disabled, the struggle to define and protect religious liberty, and to guarantee equality to people without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

It was not "ironic" that the most liberal country in western Europe should be so eager to descend into a revoltingly illiberal servitude. It was entirely foreseeable. Justifying extraordinary levels of mass immigration first as narrowly defined economic self-interest and then as moral vanity, Europe made its principal source of new Europeans a population whose primal identity derived from a belief system that claimed total jurisdiction over every aspect of their lives. They were then amazed to discover that that same population of new "Europeans" assumed that all European social, cultural, and political life should realign itself with that belief system. Perhaps they should have considered that possibility earlier...the European establishment unwittingly eased the transition from "multicultural tolerance" to the more explicitly unicultural and intolerant regimes that followed.

People can justify a government’s controversial policies and actions for only so long until they see a pattern of abuse of power. Then, even the most devout supporters of any regime must decide if they support these extreme policies and actions or oppose them. With the current government, this point of no return was reached for some when they slowly realized the extent of the vast National Security Agency spying scandal. For others it was the release of known Islamist terrorists from the Guantanamo Bay prison without congressional knowledge. For most Americans, the flood of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from Central America purposely created by the administration to overwhelm our southern borders was the final straw. Still other supporters kept justifying one extremist act after another, justifying the president’s policies and actions with rationalizations that included saying that those who opposed them were “right-wing conspirators,” “racists,” “Obama haters,” and the like. Yet for those of us who study governments that have taken nations from freedom to fascism, the handwriting has been on the wall for many years. My question is this: Will the Obama inner circle of extremist left-wing radicals trigger an event that will provoke an American insurrection, even a civil war? Is this concern to be dismissed as a “right-wing conspiracy”? Let me explain to you what is happening.

Other countries must be laughing their heads off at us. Our “family reunification” policies mean that being related to a recent immigrant from Pakistan trumps being a surgeon from Denmark. That’s how we got gems like the “Octomom,” the unemployed single mother on welfare who had fourteen children in the United States via in vitro fertilization; Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring hundreds, a few years after slitting the throats of three American Jews; and all those “homegrown” terrorists flying from Minnesota to fight with ISIS. Family reunification isn’t about admitting the spouses and minor children of immigrants we’re dying to get. We’re bringing in grandparents, second cousins, and brothers-in-law of Afghan pushcart operators—who then bring in their grandparents, second cousins, and brothers-in-law until we have entire tribes of people, illiterate in their own language, never mind ours, collecting welfare in America. We wouldn’t want our immigrants to be illiterate, unskilled, and lonesome.

On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--

But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships. A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend's business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students, now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair. The truth if the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evils— descriminations, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitation— roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone. All of us struggle against the constraints places on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions, and our resources, even as we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering in America, its insistence that everything is still possible.

Kevin D. Williamson in a sneering screed published in March 2016 in National Review, a leading conservative journal: The problem isn’t that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they do not wish to. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. For

IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.

It should be clear by now that whatever Americans say about diversity, it is not a strength. If it were a strength, Americans would practice it spontaneously. It would not require “diversity management” or anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it require constant reminders of how wonderful it is. It takes no exhortations for us to appreciate things that are truly desirable: indoor plumbing, vacations, modern medicine, friendship, or cheaper gasoline. [W]hen they are free to do so, most people avoid diversity. The scientific evidence suggests why: Human beings appear to have deeply-rooted tribal instincts. They seem to prefer to live in homogeneous communities rather than endure the tension and conflict that arise from differences. If the goal of building a diverse society conflicts with some aspect of our nature, it will be very difficult to achieve. As Horace wrote in the Epistles, “Though you drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she will ever find her way back.” Some intellectuals and bohemians profess to enjoy diversity, but they appear to be a minority. Why do we insist that diversity is a strength when it is not? In the 1950s and 1960s, when segregation was being dismantled, many people believed full integration would be achieved within a generation. At that time, there were few Hispanics or Asians but with a population of blacks and whites, the United States could be described as “diverse.” It seemed vastly more forward-looking to think of this as an advantage to be cultivated rather than a weakness to be endured. Our country also seemed to be embarking on a morally superior course. Human history is the history of warfare—between nations, tribes, and religions —and many Americans believed that reconciliation between blacks and whites would lead to a new era of inclusiveness for all peoples of the world. After the immigration reforms of 1965 opened the United States to large numbers of non- Europeans, our country became more diverse than anyone in the 1950s would have imagined. Diversity often led to conflict, but it would have been a repudiation of the civil rights movement to conclude that diversity was a weakness. Americans are proud of their country and do not like to think it may have made a serious mistake. As examples of ethnic and racial tension continued to accumulate, and as the civil rights vision of effortless integration faded, there were strong ideological and even patriotic reasons to downplay or deny what was happening, or at least to hope that exhortations to “celebrate diversity” would turn what was proving to be a problem into an advantage. To criticize diversity raises the intolerable possibility that the United States has been acting on mistaken assumptions for half a century. To talk glowingly about diversity therefore became a form of cheerleading for America. It even became common to say that diversity was our greatest strength—something that would have astonished any American from the colonial era through the 1950s. There is so much emotional capital invested in the civil-rights-era goals of racial equality and harmony that virtually any critique of its assumptions is intolerable. To point out the obvious— that diversity brings conflict—is to question sacred assumptions about the ultimate insignificance of race. Nations are at their most sensitive and irrational where they are weakest. It is precisely because it is so easy to point out the weaknesses of diversity that any attempt to do so must be countered, not by specifying diversity’s strengths—which no one can do—but with accusations of racism.

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17

Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.