{"id":1978,"date":"2010-05-29T15:09:22","date_gmt":"2010-05-29T20:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/?p=1978"},"modified":"2010-05-29T15:10:11","modified_gmt":"2010-05-29T20:10:11","slug":"immigrants-r-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/2010\/05\/29\/immigrants-r-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Immigrants R Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tom Turnipseed<\/strong>
\nColumbia, SC<\/p>\n

The South Carolina Legislature is considering an anti-immigrant bill much like Arizona\u2019s draconian law. It requires police to check a person\u2019s residency status when stopped or detained for any reason and makes it a crime for illegal immigrants to solicit work. \u00a0Opponents of the bill say it would lead to racial profiling, marginalize the state\u2019s Hispanic community and polarize the state.\u00a0 On May 28, people who oppose the bill dominated public comment before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee claiming it was un-American and racist.<\/p>\n

Bill Bunch, a small-business owner said \u201cIt smacks of racism and it smacks of pandering. You\u2019re using these people as pawns for your own political gain.\u201d<\/p>\n

I serve on the Board of the S.C. Hispanic Leadership Council. Our Board President, Lad Santiago, told the legislators, \u201cIt polarizes our community by allowing for overt distinction of physical attributes and a law that allows this is an affront to all that is fair and just in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exactly what is fair and just in this land of immigrants? Discrimination and injustices against the \u201cshanty Irish\u201d or the Chinese \u201cyellow peril\u201d because of their race and ethnicity was certainly not fair or just. Over 400 years ago people from Europe migrated to what is now the United States and since then immigrants have come here from every country and region of the world.\u00a0From the dawn of human history, people have constantly migrated all over the world. \u00a0But as Hegel said, \u201cWe learn from history that we do not learn from history.\u201d<\/p>\n

A consensus of historians agree that indigenous people, also known as Native Americans or Indians, were in the Americas at least 10,000 years before the European Christopher Columbus \u201cdiscovered\u201d America in 1492.\u00a0Many Native Americans are descendants of people who lived in the southwest and far western region of what is now the United States. Their forebears were there thousands of years before white Europeans came to this continent. They are now called \u201cillegal immigrants\u201d by race-baiting politicians.<\/p>\n

When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, religious fanaticism, disease and starvation. \u00a0Native Americans were generally healthy, and mostly peaceable.\u00a0Columbus sold his sponsors on the idea he would find a passage to China and the riches of the Orient, but \u201cdiscovered\u201d the Americas instead, so he decided to pay for his voyage in a commodity he found in ample supply\u2014human lives.\u00a0 He seized 1,200 Tiano Indians from the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), crammed them onto his ships, and sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495.\u00a0 Because Columbus captured more Indian slaves than he could transport to Spain in his small ships, he put them to work as slaves for his family and followers throughout the Caribbean.<\/p>\n

It was cheaper to work Indians to death and replace them than keep them alive.\u00a0 In California the native people were forced to work in the fields on a starvation diet.\u00a0They died from overwork, starvation and disease and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations.<\/p>\n

As a descendant of Choctaw Indians I despise the nationalistic and historically blind rhetoric we hear about immigration.<\/p>\n

European conquest of Mexican Native Americans exemplifies such blindness. European Americans under the flag of the United States took the land from these indigenous Americans in the Mexican Wars.\u00a0Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, and the new Mexican republic included present-day Mexico and the territory that today constitutes five southwestern states and more territory further north.<\/p>\n

In 1835 United States settlers in Texas revolted against Mexico, fought at the Alamo in 1836, and formed their own republic. In the years that followed, the United States pushed farther westward.\u00a0The imperial doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the belief that God had destined the United States to be bordered on the east and west by the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, was used to justify the United States\u2019 encroachment upon Mexican territories. It finally provoked a war in 1846 that enabled the United States to take almost half of Mexico\u2019s territory.<\/p>\n

Hard-working Mexicans in the United States had ancestors who lived in the Southwestern part of what is now the United States for thousands of years before there was a United States. Their ancestors were forcibly removed by the United States.\u00a0 Should they be treated as undocumented criminals?<\/p>\n

The best solution to the immigration question is comprehensive immigration reform legislation at the federal level that will:<\/p>\n