Who Are the Aliens in this Nation of Immigrants?

Who Are the Aliens in this Nation of Immigrants?
By Gil Villagrán, MSW
January 13, 2010

The perennial controversy of who is native in this land we call America, which people are immigrants, who is native-born, who is legal, who is illegal, and who is alien is a long simmering cauldron of charges and counter-charges, name-calling, roundups and deportations, wars, denial of public benefits, inhumane exploitation and even genocide. The story of America is replete with all manner of invasion, conquest, plunder, enslavement of one people by another, theft of property and of children, and ultimately—formal strategic warfare and genocide of those deemed by official government policy as undesirable, expendable, and to be eliminated by any means necessary. This is our U.S. history, not necessarily taught in public schools, nor to most college students, and certainly not presented in the popular culture of brave pilgrims carving out settlements out of a mostly unpopulated wilderness, and later in western films creating myths of even braver cowboys on horseback and settlers in wagon trains.

Yet unless our nation’s true history is known by all, many will continue to naively ask, as I have heard for fifty years: Why are there so many immigrants in America? Why can’t Indians stay in their reservations? Why don’t Blacks go back to Africa? And why do so many Mexicans come illegally to our country?

There is a willful general public ignorance that our nation was founded upon pre-existing nations of native peoples, robbed of their land by European immigrants, sometimes enslaved, eventually forced off their lands, and millions killed by war and disease.

There is also the grotesque contradiction, initial to our nation’s founding, that in spite of all men being created equal, many immigrants soon bought kidnapped and enslaved Africans, forcing them with whip in hand to build the roads and cities, raise the crops, even to build our nation’s capital. The compromise written into our Constitution that declared enslaved humans as only 3/5ths of a white person poisoned our nation in such a manner that so-called moral, god-fearing men and women greedily profited from owning, breeding, and selling human beings, tearing families apart, raping women and then selling their children for further profit. The slavery in this nation of free men (and women—without equal rights) led to a Civil War, but not before another war—a war of conquest of Mexico fomented by slave owners determined to ensure additional slave states west of the Mississippi River. Our nation won that war—taking half of Mexico as war booty, and would have taken all of Mexico, but for Congressional concern of what to do with all the unwanted Mexicans!

Manifest Destiny—a manic delusion that God himself willed that the U.S. reach “from sea to shining sea” contributed to this war and further land grabs that transmogrified our nation to a replication of the empires of European monarchies. Thus we grabbed Hawaii, Cuba and the Philippines for a while, and Puerto Rico to this day, and we now have more than 737 military bases throughout the world. American is an empire—as was Rome, Britain, and many others empires, now fallen by bankruptcy, overstretch and hubris.

As historian Howard Zinn explains, “If our starting point for evaluating the world around us is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then we are not likely to question a president when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values -- democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise -- to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.”

We must realize that calling anyone an illegal alien indicates a willful ignorance of our nation’s complex history. It is time to understand that we are all Earth citizens, deserving of humane treatment, one and all.