Dear HCN,
Oh, come on,
Ed! Your apology for anti-immigration sentiment bespeaks loss of
nerve (HCN, 2/3/03: The son of immigrants has a change of heart).
That is not vintage Marston. Despair overwhelms me, too, sometimes,
as our grotesque problems proliferate daily. But you know very
well, or should know, that Mexican immigration is a direct result
of U.S. foreign policy, NAFTA and U.S. globalization
efforts.
I remember when I was a kid and the Italian moved
into the decrepit house down the block with his eight or so
children. Let’s call a spade a spade. His fecundity was his
Roman Catholic Church’s policy. His presence was the New York
Central Railroad’s demand for cheap track workers. Italians
were the cheapest you could get in the 1930s and ’40s. To
blame Italians, Irish, Mexicans or you name them for today’s
population is to commit cultural travesty and sociological error of
considerable proportions.
The U.S. government has been
destroying people’s agricultural base the world over. It even
targets their political efforts to remain where they are. Unable to
farm or be safe from the paramilitaries, they move to the cities,
where they starve further. The most energetic young come here. It
is perverse to blame them for U.S. policy that deliberately
marginalizes them to provide U.S. corporate agriculture with
markets — policy that also just happens to produce the
splendid side effect of destroying U.S. labor strength by diluting
it.
It doesn’t take a seer to suggest a different
policy. But as long as the present one is hugely profitable for our
corporate class system, as it certainly is, immigrants will be
forced to keep coming. As you say ” … other nationalities (are)
unable to match their economies to their fecundity” — of
course, U.S. government policies are destroying their economies.
James C. Whiteside
Danbury,
Connecticut
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline U.S. is to blame for immigration.
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