Immigrant hate is nothing new
Cowardly men pose as brave patriots — we've been here before.
I’m inspired today by the leadership of my wife who works with Migrant Equity Southeast (MESE). You can support them here and get the ‘Immigrants Make America Great’ shirt you see below here. If you want, you can also support my work below.
My people came here from what was then Prussia. At first, it was a man named Karl and a woman named Teresa. Karl arrived in late October, 1893 on a ship called Trave. Then more people came and kids were had. Then, they built.
For the rest of his life as well as the lives of his three sons — Maxclue, Theodore and Herman — Karl and the Glawe men in Wilkes-Barre, PA worked as coal miners and laborers. It wasn’t until my grandpa Charlie came home from the war with money from the GI bill that the first of us went to college.
When Karl left a place called Wolfshagen at the age of 25, he likely had little idea what lay ahead for him. I’m sure he could not have imagined the success and wealth his predecessors have won and accumulated in the generations since.
I was thinking of Karl this morning when another thing came to mind. A song popped into my head that I haven’t listened to in years. It’s a pro-union song but it’s also pro-immigrant, and its words ring true even though they’re mostly about the Irish in Boston.
And the boys on the docks needed John for sure
When they came to this country, he opened the door
He said man, I’ll tell ya, they don’t like our kind
Though it starts with your fist it must end with your mind.
They don’t like our kind
That hateful sentiment is on the faces and mouths of every member of the Trump administration I see on TV each day talking about immigrants. In their telling, all the immigrants are criminals — they’re only deporting all those criminals, you see. Tell that to the guys at the car wash, or the landscaper who is a father of three Marines, or the mothers whose children are being ripped from their arms by men in masks and wearing bulletproof vests and holding assault rifles like they’re off to war in a foreign land.
For me, personally, none of these men and woman — besides Stephen Miller — is as rage-inducing as Tom Homan, Trump’s “Border Czar.” You can just tell by looking at him: he hates immigrants. Doesn’t matter where they’re from — if they don’t look and talk like him, he hates them. Forget all the noise about “coming here the right way.” Men like Tom Homan don’t want anyone coming here at all. He is a barbaric thug, a version of the American man that we have seen many times before.
They’re the men who voted for George Wallace and beat up hippies. They’re the men who said we needed to go off to war in Vietnam to stave off communism at home. They’re the men who said all the prosperity would trickle down if we just kept giving the wealthiest Americans the opportunity to let us in on the game.
What these guys don’t know — because they don’t read, and they don’t pay attention to history as a result of their hubris — is that they always end up losing. Societies evolve. The only constant is change. Far-right extremists like Homan want to bring us back. They want the United States to devolve.
Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump don’t understand any of this. They labor under the delusion that they’re on the right side of history. They’re not. When an anti-ICE heckler interrupted Homan at a conservative conference over the weekend, he responded predictably. He said he was surprised the person didn’t have “purple hair” and that they probably lived “in their mother’s basement.” These are the same moronic tropes that have been going around about liberals for the entire history of this country — that liberals are weak, anti-American cowards.
People like the heckler “don’t have the balls to be an ICE officer,” Homan said.
As if it takes “balls” for Homan’s ICE goons to dress for war and pick on innocent people who are just doing their jobs. It doesn’t take bravery to beat up on vulnerable people like immigrants. Only a bully picks on someone smaller than him. It’s easy-pickins. That’s why Homan and the rest of his ilk are cowards. You know who commits the most crimes in this country? Native-born Americans like Homan. You know who the actual threats to the American way of life are? People like Homan.
Under the guise of patriotism, they have perverted American ideals just like generations of conservatives and racists before them. The more we say that — the more we make sure that people like Homan understand that we are not going to tolerate their warped view of patriotism — the better chance we have to stop our decline toward the place that all of this inevitably leads.
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