Correction: It's Not Their Country, It's Their Continent

My post last Friday about immigration garnered a teeny-tiny tsunami of response (at least compared to my previous more satirical efforts) prompting me to wonder if it might be better to cast aside the craft of a lifetime and join the rant-ocracy like everyone else. Here in no particular order are some reactions:

The assumption was repeatedly made that it was 'Mexicans' I was talking about, a word which -- although it's a straight-ahead descriptor -- seems to be getting perilously close to all those other fun epithets like 'mick', 'kraut', 'guinea', 'limey' etc. that right-thinking people don't use anymore in mixed company. Actually I wasn't particularly: the 'illegals' I know tend to be from further south, where genocide is still practiced from time to time (See below).

Beyond that a large number of the comments were depressingly close to racist, which isn't surprising given the subject matter. Racial and ethnic slurs have been a stock-in-trade of this debate since the mid-19th century when the English and Scots immigrants who had been and still were, ethnically cleansing the sub-continent of its original occupants, began screeching about the Irish immigrants fleeing the genocidal famine inflicted on Ireland in the name of free trade.

Hardly had the Irish cudgeled their way to respectability than they began dumping on the Italian and Polish and Jewish immigrants fleeing the poverty and prejudice of a Europe in the grip of the same free-trade enthusiasts. And so it went on as it always has, the last group of immigrants dumping on the next, until as Lenny Bruce put it in the late '50s: 'Everyone got together and beat up the Puerto Ricans.'

I was trying to make a straightforward first-principle point that in speaking of such notions as 'ownership' (as in 'this is our country/land') or 'legality', no party to this debate has a lock on the moral high ground, except -- possibly -- the 'illegals' we're debating. A nation that's founded in conscious genocide and then declares the inalienable right of all humankind to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' is always going to have some conflicts when this subject comes up. And as several people hinted, you can say the same about the origins of almost any nation from Labrador to Tierra del Fuego -- it's a continent-wide issue. Difference is that the US has this seminal document in the history of humankind called the Declaration of Independence. Which would seem to say that if Tomas feels like pursuing happiness in suburban Houston rather than Cuernavaca he has an inalienable right to do so.

Bottom-line: despite modern society's tendency to think that history is if not bunk, pretty close to it, there is a moral issue here. You can't erase that history. So of all those who have qualified, do qualify or will qualify, to live and work in America, no-one has a better right than the descendants of people who, the length and breadth of the continent, were here first.

Borders were mentioned a lot and their sanctity. Odd then that one issue which didn't come up, nor has been mentioned much in the debate generally, is NAFTA. The driving principle of NAFTA is the one that united the states in the first place: borders are a pretty dumb idea if you're hoping for free trade. So far though, NAFTA has been run on the principle that while capital should know no borders, labor should.

Several posts accused me of romanticizing Latinos, for which I make no apologies: these are people who deserve a little more romanticizing and a little less patronizing. Living in NY, my own first-hand knowledge of immigrants from the south -- legal and illegal -- is largely through my local Catholic church which is perhaps 60-65% Latino, almost all of them from Central America -- the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Venezuela. My kids have grown up with their kids, served Mass and been confirmed with them, fooled around in the nabe, played ball in the school-yard. Their sense of community is powerful, their spirituality electrifying in the often bleak and lifeless landscape of tri-state-area Catholicism.

It was from looking around me at church-related events that I wrote in my first post: "You can see it in their Mayan cheekbones and stolid Olmec physiques and almond Aztec eyes" which seemed to amuse several post-ers as if there was something weird in saying that illegals -- who presumably are supposed to be small and brown and ugly -- were beautiful. But I meant it; inspired by what I know and see of my legal and illegal co-parishioners, I made the hero of my current book (that blue-and-gold job over there on the right) the son of a Guatemalan mother; although I had him grow up not on 107th Street but in Bronx. He also happens to be the returned Christ.

Guatemala was a conscious choice; as many Huff-posters are aware the Central American nations my neighbors are from -- in some cases fled from -- were where the Reagan-inspired atrocities of the '80s took place; those 'crimes against humanity' as the Hague quaintly calls them, financed by our brave military through hit-men and contract-killers willing to murder their own neighbors for money and land.

Of these Guatemala was the most egregious -- a genocidal campaign against indigenous peoples which has cost the nation a quarter of a million lives, most of them Mayan. Basically the same process of cleansing the land of inconvenient people which has been going on since the 16th century. And with lavish supplies of American money and American guns, lest we should think that such crimes are in the past. The chief contract killer was a bag of human sewage called General Rios Mont, lauded to the skies by St. Ronald as a 'great democrat' and a particular darling of the Christian right because guess what? He's 'born-again'

Unfortunately the 200,000 Mayans he murdered in our name won't be. Ever.

Blame America first? (I was in effect accused of this by one poster). No -- but blame the America that did this -- and soon will be trying to again in Venezuela -- the America of the military-corporate right, the America of Bill Frist and Dick Cheney and the cretin from Crawford -- and James Dobson and Jerry Falwell and even Jerry's brand-new buddy John McCain.

The self-same party who are now getting everyone together to beat up the latest version of the Puerto Ricans.