The Orange Felon Just Can’t Stop Ranting About Immigrants
I really haven’t paid much attention to the mindless rantings of the twice impeached and now indicted former president until he once again started his hate campaign against legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, his running mate’s JD Vance’s home state. It takes a certain kind of callous disregard for other people’s safety to politically attack a minority community while ignoring one basic fact of American demographics — 97% of the people in this nation came here as immigrants at one time or another. In fact, it’s probably the one thing we have in common along with speaking some regional version of American English. My family, your family and just about everyone I know, except the Native American Elders who come here to Angels Gate once a year — are all immigrants.
The kind of xenophobic white supremacy that the Orange Felon is trumping up is not only dangerous, as the people of Springfield have discovered, but it is also the pretext for the kind of genocides that we have witnessed historically. And oddly, it is a kind of self-loathing because most of us are from immigrant stock. Is he actually asking us to hate and fear ourselves?
I was recently introduced to the family narrative of an immigrant Polish family here in San Pedro. And I was very shocked when I discovered my own lack of understanding at how the Pols were treated during World War II — not by the German fascists but by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Some 40,000 Polish soldiers and professionals (such as doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc…) and even journalists were rounded up, arrested, and taken to prison camps in Russia, even though Poland never declared war on Russia. Then the Russians rounded up all of their families and transported them much the same way the Nazis did the Jews… in cattle cars — transporting them in horrific conditions to Siberian work camps. Many died of starvation, disease and frostbite. The Polish soldiers and police officers were eventually murdered at gunpoint by the Soviet secret police on orders from Stalin and buried in mass graves that were not revealed until 1991.
The harrowing true story written by Marilyn Gwizdak Greenwood, reveals the kind of tragedy that befalls mass relocations by authoritarian regimes, which is precisely what Trump and Vance are promoting to gin up hate and prejudice to get elected. What is curious about this Polish genocide is that the truth of it was hidden until the fall of the Soviet Union and only then did the remaining Polish community understand that approximately six million of them had perished — the soldiers and intellectuals at gun point and the others by starvation, disease and maltreatment as “others.”
The extent of this other WWII tragedy was kept under wraps for over 50 years and explains why the now independent democratic nation of Poland is supporting Ukraine against the Russian invasion. The history is just too fresh in their national consciousness, and they know if Trump is reelected he’d probably just give Russia’s Vladimir Putin the greenlight to finish the invasion. And then what would stop him from invading Poland next?
Here in the USA, we need to be very careful of this kind of populist revenge rhetoric because at its root this is not who we are as a free people. Furthermore, immigrant labor has always been used to do the jobs that people with better options will not do. One could easily ask the MAGA conservatives, who picks the crops, who works in the meat packing plants, who’s doing your gardening and any other sweat or stoop labor unacceptable to most Americans? Who built the railroads of the 19th century or even our nation’s capital?
We are not far away enough from the tragedies of World War II to not consider the consequences of Trump’s racist and violence-laced speech. American Jews, Armenians, Poles, Italians and Croatians who fled Europe during the war and came to this country to work in the fish canneries, ship building or other industries are just a few generations away from understanding the results of forced migration, war and famine. And let us not forget the special American tragedy of the Japanese American internment in our own country during this very same war.
All of these family stories may be different in their particular circumstances, like the history of slavery in this country which resulted in family separations and generational trauma … ills that are vaguely similar and oddly familiar … so much so that these ills as well as our diversity should unite us as a nation. And I do mean pride, rather than this loathing of some new wave of immigrants who came here for the very same things that our ancestors and families did — opportunity and freedom.
Once again we are witnessing the kind of stupid populist chaos that this neo-fascist is using to divide and separate America with white supremacist tropes that trigger fear and loathing.
Any thinking rational person would ask, “Where’s the debate on policies, on solutions or the facts?” And let us all remember that before 1965 there were no numerical limits at all on immigration from Latin America or the Caribbean, only qualitative restrictions. The 1965 amendments changed all that, imposing an annual cap of 120,000 on entries from the Western Hemisphere.
Once again the Orange Felon and his running mate are only too happy just to make it all up on the fly, hoping that there’s enough ignorant people to vote for them.
Writers note: I wish to thank the Kurzawa family for sharing their family narrative, The Whistler by Marilyn Gwizdak Greenwood. Copies are available at amazon.com