By: Donald V. Watkins
Copyrighted and Published on June 13, 2021
President Joe Biden's and Vice President Kamala Harris' newly announced "Do Not Come" policy for containing the surging migration by people of color from Central and South America to the U.S. southern border is racist, wrong, and possibly illegal. Migrants from any nation are entitled to apply for entry into the United States at any one of the country's scores of designated immigration centers. If these migrants meet the criteria for entry into the U.S., they are allowed by law to come into the country.
The new "Do Not Come" policy was publicly announced for the first time by Ms. Harris during her trip to Guatemala and Mexico on June 7, 2021. The fact that Harris announced the new policy does not sanitize the racist nature of it.
The United States' immigration policies have been racist throughout the history of America. Most of these policies are identified and discussed in an article titled,"The Uncomfortable Truth About America’s Immigration Laws," which was published on April 14, 2019. Click here to read the article.
The Most Glaring Examples of White Racism in U.S. Immigration Policies
The following represent some of the most glaring examples of white racism in America's immigration policies:
1. The federal government's passage and administration of the Homestead Act of 1862, which awarded 270 million acres of land that was seized from more than 500 Native American tribes through White-Indian wars and massacres of Indians by U.S. Calvary troops and local militias. These lands were subsequently awarded, at no cost, to nearly 3 million white peasants who were openly recruited to America from 1862 to 1986 via advertisements the federal government placed in European newspapers seeking white migrants to help America become a majority white country.
2. The federal government's passage and enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banned persons of Asian descent from entering the U.S. for a period of 80 years. Exceptions were made for Asians who worked for white companies as indentured servants. They were forcefully deported when their services were no longer needed.
3. "Operation Wetback", a 1950s-era racially derogatory named State Department program rounded up approximately 1.3 million persons of Hispanic descent who were living in America and deported them in railway cars to Mexico. Undocumented whites who immigrated to America through Mexico were not subject to deportation.
4. The strictly enforced and disproportionately limited immigration "quotas" the U.S. government has placed on migrants from countries where the indigenous populations are peoples of color, while openly and continuously welcoming Europe's "tired, poor, and huddled [white] masses" into America at Ellis Island have continued on an unabated basis. France thanked America for receiving white French peasants by giving the United States the Statue of Liberty.
White Racism, Even When Announced by a Black Vice President, is Still White Racism
Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the child of immigrant parents from Jamaica and India, has continued America's legacy of white racism in its immigration policies. While visiting Guatemala, Harris addressed the issue of surging numbers of migrants from Central and South America by stating loudly and plainly, "Do Not Come." Harris' announcement stunned everybody in the room.
No U.S. president or vice president has ever told white, Anglo-Saxon migrants from Europe, "Do Not Come" to America. White immigration to America has been ongoing and surging since the first European settlers arrived in America in the early 1600s. In the late 1800s and 1900s, this surge included a large influx of Italian Mafia-affiliated figures and hundreds of thousands of known criminals from Eastern European countries who entered the United States via Ellis Island, Canada, and Mexico. They, too, were welcomed to America because they were white.
If Vice President Harris needed a suitable venue to announce the Biden administration's new "Do Not Come" immigration policy, she should have done it while visiting one of the European countries that has flooded America with white migrants, both documented and undocumented. For the reasons specified below, Guatemala was absolutely the wrong venue for Ms. Harris' "Do Not Come" announcement.
Harris' "Do Not Come'" Announcement Was Made at the Wrong Place and at the Wrong Time
America has a long and ugly track record of fomenting chaos in Central and South America and other foreign countries through state-sponsored campaigns of assassinations of foreign leaders and the destabilization of duly elected national governments. More often than not, these actions furthered the interest of U.S.-based multinational corporations, rather than America's national interests.
In Guatemala, in 1944, college students, urban workers, and members of Guatemala's middle class joined to overthrow a dictator and set up a democratic government. During the next ten years, elected governments extended the vote to native Indians, to the poor (largely synonymous), and to women; ended forced labor on coffee plantations; and enacted other reforms. All of this came to an end in 1954, when America's CIA threatened the government of Jacobo Arbenz with an armed invasion. Arbenz had antagonized the U.S.-based United Fruit Company by proposing land reforms and planning a highway and railroad that might break the company's monopoly. The United States chose an obscure army colonel as the new president, and when Arbenz panicked and sought asylum in the Mexican embassy, the U.S. flew its handpicked colonel to the capital aboard the U.S. ambassador's private plane. The result was a repressive junta that treated its Indian majority brutally for another 40 years. This history is beautifully and accurately detailed in James W. Loewen's book, "Lies My History Teacher Told Me," Simon & Schuster (1995, 2007).
Guatemala was not America's first foray into the assassination of foreign leaders and destabilization of national governments. For example, the U.S. deposed Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran and installed the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi to the throne in 1953. America also rigged the 1957 election in Lebanon, which entrenched the Christians on top and led to the Muslim revolt and civil war the next year. Additionally, the U.S. coordinated and sponsored the assassination of President Patrice Lumumba in Zaire (or Congo) in 1961. Shortly thereafter, the CIA helped bring to power Joseph Mobutu, a former army sergeant.
Furthermore, America repeatedly attempted to murder Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba and bring down his government by terror and sabotage. According to testimony from government officials before various U.S. Senate committees, the U.S. government attempted to kill Castro at least 8 times by 1965.
America also brought down the elected government of President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, solely because International Telephone and Telegraph was unsuccessful in its effort to defeat Allende in Chile's 1970 elections. In Chile, the United States blocked international loans to the country, subsidized opposition newspapers, labor unions, and political parties, denied spare parts to industries, paid for and fomented a nationwide truckers' strike that paralyzed the Chilean economy, and trained and financed the military that staged the bloody coup in 1973 in which Allende was killed.
The U.S. also invaded Haiti in 1915 for the sole purpose of taking that nation's gold reserves from its central bank as an accommodation to the First National Bank of New York. This gold was never returned to Haiti.
America also invaded Russia in 1918 at the request of Standard Oil of New Jersey after Russia's new communist government nationalized all petroleum assets. Russia has never forgotten or forgiven America for this commercially-driven invasion.
In 1963, America's CIA toppled Iraq's Shiite prime minister, General Abdul Karim Qassem and installed Saddam Hussein to replace him. Hussein welcomed Western oil companies at first. A few years later, he nationalized the Iraq oil industry. Because Hussein willingly engaged in armed conflicts with Iran (an enemy of the U.S. after 1979), the U.S. removed Iraq from the list of known terrorist countries in 1982 so we could supply Hussein with military equipment, computers, scientific instruments, chemicals, and other goods for Iraq's missiles, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs during the 1980s. The CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency even supplied Iraq with the information it needed to help Iraqi forces use their chemical weapons on Iranian troops. After the Iraq-Iranian war ended, America continued to send Hussein weapons-grade anthrax, cyanide, and other chemical and biological weapons.
Why America Meddles in the Internal Domestic Affairs of Central and South American Countries
In 1931, Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler publicly and arrogantly summed up America's true reasons for meddling in the internal domestic affairs of Central and South American governments (and elsewhere) this way:
"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interest in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers... I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints."
In other words, the United States assassinated foreign leaders and destabilized duly elected national governments to further the corporate greed of America's multinational conglomerates.
Epilogue
After crippling national governments around the world and causing endless cycles of political turmoil, economic instability, and violent factionalism in them for over a century, Vice President Harris somehow allowed her white foreign affairs advisors to commandeer her position and ethnicity to perpetuate America's ongoing white racism against the people of color whose countries were victimized by the United States' relentless campaign of state-sponsored assassinations and destabilization of national governments.
I liken Harris' "Do Not Come" announcement and standard-bearer status to the situation Secretary of State Colin Powell faced when powerful white war hawks in President George W. Bush's administration lied to Powell about Iraq possessing nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction. Later, Powell found out that these claims were patently false. In fact, Bush went to war with Saddam Hussein to exact revenge after Hussein tried to arrange the assassination of former President George H.W. Bush during "Daddy" Bush's visit to Kuwait in 1993.
Powell faced worldwide embarrassment and humiliation after the public learned he had been duped by Bush's war hawks. Ms. Harris is facing the same kind of embarrassment and humiliation. Rather than bearing the political cross of a new form of white racism in U.S. immigration policies, Ms. Harris should use the imprimatur of her office to help white Americans understand this brand of white racism and overcome it.
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