Backbone Campaign deployed a banner over I-5 last week. It read "Immigrants Make America Great" a message that should be a truism that gets little reaction, but that wasn't the case. The rush hour commuters practically jumped out of their vehicles with enthusiasm. I've been doing this sort of thing for 22 years and this reaction was unprecedented. A photo taken by a driver went viral on multiple platforms.

The few negative responses online were mostly framed with the legal vs illegal dichotomy. So, this morning I thought it would be interesting to dig into that. The result was interesting.

What I learned was that for all the folks who boast about their ancestors coming legally, if they arrived prior to 1921, and were from Europe, all they had to do was get a ticket on a boat.

Starting in 1917 they'd have to show they could read or write (in any language) and pay $8. Other than that, it was more or less an "open border" for people of European descent and as far as I can tell people from Latin America. So, my ancestors - and presummedly, most of the ancestors of those bragging about getting here "legally" - didn't have to do squat compared to the convoluted, expensive and uncertain "system" in place today.

From this article on the history of US immigration:

"In the 1800s and early 1900s, laws only limited immigrants with certain individual attributes, rather than all people above a certain annual numerical threshold. An 1875 law banned those suspected of being prostitutes. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred most new Chinese immigrants. The 1891 Immigration Act barred polygamists, people with contagious diseases, people convicted of crimes “of moral turpitude,” and those likely to become a “public charge” by depending on government assistance. A 1903 law barred anarchists and others, including beggars. Still, the vast majority of Europeans who reached the United States were granted entry; the U.S. Immigration Service excluded only 1 percent of the 25 million Europeans who arrived between 1880 and World War I."

So this brings me back to the question of WTF is going on with the all this misplaced hatefulness? Was it immigrants who destroyed US manufacturing and family farms?

No, it was Wall Street and the greedy shits who have benefitted from 45 years of globalization, deregulation, privatization, and monopolistic consolidation.

The map I am including below shows how this neoliberal plan has hollowed out the rural places that once fed this country. (God forbid we allow people to come here to restore farming and rebuild a resilient food and industrial base.) I'll also include some informative graphs about the flow of investment in manufacturing, the consolidation of US agriculture into agribusiness, and trends in immigration from the article above. I would like to also note that the rail infrastructure was pruned and reshaped to serve this globalized supply chain, reduced by ~ 70k of track since 1970. This literally left communities, whole sections and sectors of the country behind, including service reductions to smaller industry and agriculture. The Solutionary Rail slidesdeck has a section on globalization that folks might want to check out.

While the oligarchs get a front row seat, the ultra rich are happy to have us turning our discontentment and anger on each other and the ultra poor. They'd prefer we ignore history and blame each other rather than the system that props them up at our expense. It's time for a populism that appeals to the best in people rather than the worst in them.

[Besides the article from MigrationPolicy.org, this impressive paper published by Farm Action on globalization, consolidation in agriculture has been a source of inspiration.]