What we call one another makes a difference.
Names allow us to love and hate while also allowing us to act morally. And we can reject a problem thanks to those same labels.
Prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus, according to an article in Business Insider magazine, 90 % of the local people who lived on this globe were killed by crime and disease. That is not a mistake, an estimated 55 million local people died. However, the native people were referred to as” savages.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote that” all men are created equal”, but he owned slaves. Brian Stevenson, the leader of the Equal Justice Initiative, says that our ancestors determined slavery, lynching, and persecution through words. A tale was created, he says, that described that Black people merely were less eligible. Our cultural narrative emphasized that Black citizens were “different.”
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 put an end to Chinese multiculturalism and prohibited Foreign nationals from becoming naturalized. In his guide,” Welcomed the Wretched,” Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez argues that in anti-immigrant demonstrations in California in the late 19th century, protest proclaimed that there was only one place for the masculine, the intelligent, and the brave. The Chinese were “different”.
When Catholic workers came to our largely Christian nation in the early 20th centuries, they were considered the “other” along with Italians, Jews, British and Blacks. Timothy Egan quotes the KKK, who ruled American politics at the time, in his book” A Fever in the Heartland,” as saying,” The only way to cure a Catholic is to kill him.” Catholic were labeled “different”.
Beginning in 1938, we experienced a refugee crisis as a result of the Nazis ‘ growing anti-Jewish policies that caused a massive migration from Europe. We turned aside tons. Most notably, in 1939, when more than 900 send people saw the lights of Miami where they hoped to find a safe bay, were denied admittance, went up, and more than a third of them died in concentration camps. The National Holocaust Museum calls our immigration policy at the time reflective of a “national climate of isolation, xenophobia, antisemitism, racism and economic insecurity”. The government denied entry to European Jews, justifying the act by calling them a “national security” risk.
We are currently in a second refuge crisis.
This new world has been an asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from all of Europe, according to Thomas Paine in his pamphlet” Common Sense” in 1776. We are still viewed as a refuge for the world almost 250 years later. And we continue to define immigration policy by labeling people as “others” and using fear to define it.
According to the Pew Research Center in December of 2023, the U. S. Border Patrol had nearly 250, 000 encounters with migrants crossing into the U. S. from Mexico, the highest monthly encounter rate on record.
Nonetheless, the majority of our elected representatives still refuse to address immigration. One in ten of those crossing the border are families. Still, our politicians call today’s migrants “aliens, killers, rapists, animals, and criminals”.
It is part of the political narrative. Immigration is a political issue, and too many people are choosing not to deal with it because of the political capital.
It is time for our country’s politicians to stop using dehumanizing labels and instead address a border crisis rather than using the crisis as political capital. The American Immigration Council reports that since 2003, we have spent$ 333 billion on immigration enforcement. If not for humanitarian reasons, politicians need to address this issue now as a matter of fiscal responsibility.
And they need to stop labeling.
