With today’s (June 18, 2020) Supreme Court ruling denying the Trump administration’s desire to dismantle the Obama-era DACA policy, I’m reposting this piece I wrote in September 2017.
Lady Liberty has beckoned for more than a century, but now it’s time to give back – or better said, time to expel. President Trump’s uncharacteristic wishy-washy revocation of DACA, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s enthusiastic endorsement of the revocation, and the House Republicans’ steady inaction on immigration reform could result in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Latino youth (and others). American society, over the centuries, has given slaves, migrants, child laborers, and foreigners the opportunity – that’s right – to build the nation through their blood, sweat, and tears. Yeah, legalized slavery is a thing of the past thanks to the stinkin’ abolition movement and that obstinate president named Lincoln. And the days of kids getting their fingers stuck in cotton-spinning looms and coal mine breaker boys permanently sooting their lungs with coal dust are over because of the stinkin’ rise of unions, child reform labor regulations, and compulsory education laws. The problem of all these horrible DACA recipients in the country couldn’t possibly be one of our own doing, could it? Two words: Cheap labor. Five more words: Oh how we love it.
Without America’s long-standing love affair with cheap labor, why would the parents of these DACA recipients have come here in the first place to do their unpatriotic duty from the bottom rungs to make America great?
Remember the foreign and migrant workers who laid rail track in the western territories and states? Lucky them! Today their vocational descendants pick fruit in the south and west and harvest wheat in the Plains, slaughter pigs and cows in the Midwest, clean up restaurants and office buildings and cut grass and trim trees all over the country. Why give them – and their children – a path to citizenship with legal rights and protections when we can continue to exploit them for what we need so dearly – unprotected and loosely regulated cheap labor? How the hell are my wife and I supposed to enjoy relatively cheap California wine ($10-15) if it becomes more expensive ($25) because some damn Mexican grape-pickers need to be paid a living wage? WTFlagon.
If you must know the specifics: DACA – Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals – was a policy put into place by the Obama administration in 2012, after a do-nothing Congress did nothing on immigration reform. Close to 800,000 applicants have been approved since that time with the majority of these living in California and Texas. And now the great American president has given a green light to AG Sessions to pull the plug on the program.
All of these horrendous “Dreamers,” who came to the USA on the backs of their parents – get the hell out! Thank God for the Texas Attorney General (currently indicted for securities fraud) doubling as a fine Christian man, standing up for the US Constitution with a threat to sue the president if DACA is not revoked. The poor, tattered Constitution is under fierce attack from Dreamers who go to school, work, and make their families stronger. Hell, some of them even go to church. It’s so entirely un-American of them – if only they would learn how to smoke weed and binge drink like a lot of white kids from the suburbs do, while cruising around in cars provided by Mommy and Daddy. That’s the American way.
A musician in Austin that I’m fond of (James McMurtry) sings, “We can’t help what came before.” These damn Dreamers, if they’re so smart, they should have known to do something about their status before their underachieving parents brought them here.
Another American musician I’m fond of (Lou Reed – RIP) sang of the aforementioned Lady Liberty: “Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor and I’ll piss on ’em. That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says.” Reed was a New Yorker. As you can tell by his lyric, he knew, just like the great American president knows, that Lady Liberty was soooo nineteenth century. It’s about time we start living up to the updated credo, championed by the really, really rich president from New York: Put America first, baby. Go home, wherever that is, you damn Dreamers, and quit ruining our – not yours, but our – country. We’ve come a long way from the dark days of the summer of 2013 when fourteen Republican senators joined fifty-four Democratic senators to approve an immigration reform bill. A bipartisan group of eight senators championed the bill, but, thank God, the House Republicans wouldn’t join in the apostasy. The bill died before the president who wasn’t even born here could sign it. The problems America faces are too many to list in a blog post designed to run 750 words. Suffice it to say, getting rid of close to a million Dreamers would set the country back on the path to greatness because expulsion would get at the very root of every single one of the problems – again, too many to mention – that beset us. And hell, once we get rid of all these stinkin’ Dreamers, we’ll feel much better about ourselves as a society. Probably, maybe.
Lou Reed was on to something, but for the moment I’m going to call Lady Liberty “The Statue of Irony.” It’s times like these that we need her torch of enlightenment (ironic, isn’t it?) to shine ever so brightly!
James McMurtry, “Iolanthe,” Where’d You Hide the Body? (1995)
Lou Reed, “Dirty Boulevard,” New York (1989)
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Community Development for Austin City Lutherans (ACL), an organization of a dozen ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) congregations in Austin, Texas. I’m the author of There is a Balm in Huntsville: A True Story of Tragedy and Restoration from the Heart of the Texas Prison System (Walnut Street Books, 2019).
I’m also the author of Just a Little Bit More (ACTA-Chicago, 2014), which traces the history of economic inequality in American society. Reviewing Just a Little Bit More, journalist Sam Pizzigati says, “Anderson, above all, writes with a purpose. He’s hoping to help Americans understand that an egalitarian ideal helped create the United States. We need that ideal, Anderson helps us see, now more than ever.”
T. Carlos Anderson 
Tim/T.Carlos,
I love sarcasm. Sarcasm is one of the most effective forms of humor, but it helps to get the facts straight first. My understanding of the labor history of the American railroad system is different. The “foreign and migrant workers who laid rail track in the western territories and states”, the vast majority at least, were Chinese and Irish. There were relatively few Hispanics, and few Black people laying track in the 18 western states. The southern railroads did use slaves to help build out their lines, men and women, for a period of time. It is not likely that the “vocational descendants” of the majority of railroad laborers are “pick(ing) fruit in the south and west and harvest(ing) wheat in the Plains, slaughter(ing) pigs and cows in the Midwest, clean(ing) up restaurants and office buildings and cut(ting) grass and trim(ing) trees all over the country.” Because of this, the sarcasm of this piece sounds a bit hollow.
Overall, I agree with the premise of your blog post. I just got hung up on this one.
Stay safe and be well.
Jud/Justin
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Hey Jud – Absolutely the train-trackers were Chinese and Irish and other, including Native Americans. I didn’t mean to imply they were black or Hispanic, which is why I modified descendants with “vocational” . . . a matter of clear writing, perhaps. Always our goal!
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