Thanks to YouTube–and its airing of an advertisement telling so-called ‘illegal aliens’ that ‘their time is up’ or some such garbage (voiceover by United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem)–I have now found the wherewithal to comment on the issue.

First of all, I’m going to echo what so many commenting on the issue of immigration have said for as long as I can remember: The Native Americans/American Indians/Indigenous people never asked the pilgrims/Puritans for their documents when they disembarked The Mayflower. I’m fairly certain my English and French ancestors didn’t have to show the Indigenous people here in North America their documents when they arrived; in fact, I’m fairly certain they didn’t even have documents–they just landed. I am sick to the back teeth of white people grumbling about ‘immigrants’ coming to ‘their land’ and ‘taking what’s theirs’–never mind that people (chiefly men) from England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands (that I know of) stole land from Indigenous peoples here and herded those they couldn’t kill into ghetto conditions–euphemistically calling such places ‘reserves’ or ‘reservations’–outlawed their traditional practices, and forced their children into residential or industrial schools to strip them of their cultures, punish them for speaking their native languages–and forcing the European languages (chiefly English) on them–and in all ways abuse and humiliate them and rob them of their humanity (‘kill the Indian to save the man’ or something to that effect ); the hypocrisy of any and all rhetoric about ‘illegal aliens’ is just boggling to me–and I don’t know if should be surprised that said hypocrisy is lost on those who spout it. For those of you who cry that immigrants–documented or not–are coming into ‘your’ country and taking everything that you claim is yours: Are they forcing you into ghettos? Outlawing your traditional practices and way of life, and forcing theirs onto you? Taking your children away from you and forcing their cultures and ways of life on them, while punishing yours and dehumanizing them? Forcing their languages onto you while forbidding you from speaking yours? No? Then do us all a favour and zip-it.com. I’d also like to take this moment to point that American–and possibly international–history’s first ‘anchor baby’ is Virginia Dare.

I get the feeling that immigration laws–here in Canada and in the United States–skew white and wealthy in terms of who’s allowed in, and under the so-called ‘right’ circumstances–and the ‘documents’ requirement is just another manifestation of white supremacy, and the moaning and wailing about “illegal aliens” has a bent of white fragility to it.

There’s also a scapegoat notion to the issue of ‘illegal aliens’ (and immigrants in general). For as long as I can remember, white people (including quite a few I’ve known) have blamed immigrants–documented or not–for all of our failures in life, instead of taking even one iota of personal responsibility (the irony being that so many in this camp are no doubt also personal-responsibility apologists…or at least buy into personal-responsibility rhetoric).

Another bit of hypocrisy and irony I would like to address is that families of immigrants who Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is ‘arresting and detaining’ are being separated. To the ‘family values’ crowd, I have to ask: What ‘family values’ are you espousing? Just because the families ICE is fracturing aren’t white doesn’t mean they’re not families and they don’t need to be kept together–especially if they’re not actually doing anything wrong.

But the cognitive dissonance of conservatives and reactionaries sometime boggles me, and always gets under my skin.

I would like to add that Kristi Noem deserves what Trey Parker and Matt Stone (also known as ‘the South Park’ guys) did to her–and she should consider herself lucky if that’s the worst thing to ever happen to her.

The moral of the story: America–hell, the world–is a place of immigrants, and has a history of immigration, human settlement, and conquest, and there’s nothing any of us can do to stop it, regardless of our individual positions in society–and no amount of demonizing people who immigrate to one country or another will change that, ergo any notion that we can prevent immigration anywhere is pure delusion. No one owns any of Planet Earth’s land, nor the nations that occupy it, so we can either accept immigration and new people coming to the places where we live and settling down, or we can whine about it and make the lives of the newcomers a living hell–or at least uncomfortable. I prefer to do the former–at the barest minimum, doing the former makes me look like at least a semi-decent person.