The House We Live In

Today’s topic: All this immigration bullshit.

I tried to ignore it, but it’s just not going away. My email in-box is loaded with epistles and links from all sides, everyone citing their own incendiary facts and figures to rally their base(s). Exactly the kind of talking-points "conversation" I usually avoid like the plague. But half a million people protesting - peacefully! - in LA last weekend is pretty hard to ignore. Maybe the issue deserves some serious consideration after all, even from a wise-ass nobody like ol’ Fang.

After a typically cursory glance at the facts (I am a blogger, after all, and not held to any irritating standards of accuracy or veracity), it seems both sides of the issue have some legitimate merit, even the right-wingnuts for a change.

My gripe with The Bush Plan as proposed, this whole Guest Worker Permit scheme, is it seems to want to codify into law an indentured-servant class here in America. A class with less rights than other folks; an underclass coincidentally with much darker complexions and hardscrabble lifestyles. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We tried that once, and it tore our country apart, almost irreparably.

Once you get past all the rhetoric, I think the whole immigration issue – legal or otherwise - comes down to competing ideas about what America’s about. Is America a living experiment in Democracy that’s growing, changing and evolving all the time, or is it something already in its perfect state, sacrosanct and precious that must be protected – preserved essentially as-is - at all costs? Do we throw our arms wide and take all comers, or do we build a fucking wall around the country to keep the undesirables out, except during peach-pickin’ season?

My veneer of objectivity is slipping...

We’re a nation of immigrants, folks. All the xenophobia, thinly-veiled racism and fiscal tight-fistedness in the world isn’t gonna change that. Whether your ancestors came over on the Mayflower, the hold of a slave ship or packed in like sardines in the back of a VW Microbus at midnight, we’re all in it together now.

If we want to be worthy of what some of us – even on the left – consider on the whole to be a pretty kick-ass national heritage, we need to work this immigration shit out, because the way things are now is just plain embarrassing.

Frustratingly for me, what I’m fumbling to express has already been said, and much more eloquently than I have been able to do here. Happily for you, a couple examples of that eloquence follow. Click the links below to hear Italian-American Frank Sinatra and African-American Paul Robeson make an argument for an inclusive society that’ll have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up and saluting Old Glory!

“The House I Live In” performed by Frank Sinatra
“Ballad for Americans” sung by Paul Robeson