I have already lived a large percentage of the time that is typically allotted us in our temporal existence. Like most, I’d take back some of the moments that made up my life, the ones that didn’t go so well, the ones that were injurious to others, the ones that, with the passing of time, make me cringe or slink shamefully away.
I know better now, know how I should have responded or initiated, as was the case. I had good moments, though not as many. I lived, laughed, lamented, and learned.
But to show that you can never stop learning, the erudite president of the United States, the genius with the biggest brain of all US presidents, proclaimed during the 2024 presidential election campaign that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of the good people of Springfield, Ohio. The local authorities of Springfield said there were no reports, credible or otherwise, of Haitians eating dogs and cats. That denial did not stop the story from being spread by the Trump gang, including the butt puckerer VP, J. D. Vance, and estranged boyfriend, the wealthy Nazi hailer, Elon Musk.
This ludicrous statement by a notorious liar was a sop to the anti-immigration sentiment prevalent in much of his base. Unfortunately, the bias towards immigrants is not restricted to the Trump followers or to the country that once beckoned with open arms, ‘’the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. ´´ Those people are now uninvited and unwelcome.
This anti-immigrant movement, because it is nothing if not a wretched movement, to deny freedom and opportunity to the most distressed, the most desperate among us, is a global enterprise. Wherever there is a right-wing populist, there is the boisterous banging of anti-immigration drums.
For a long time, the leader of European opposition to immigration was Hungary’s recently defeated Viktor Orban. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni, head of the right-wing nationalist party, the ominous sounding Brothers of Italy, came to power, largely on the basis of opposing immigration. It’s passing ironic that a woman would lead a party called the Brothers of Italy. You’d think after winning a general election she could have pressured the boys to add ‘’and Sisters’’ to the name, but in a country where the main religion treats women like leftover ribs, it might not pass muster.
Marine Le Pen, the heir to a family’s long hostility to immigrants, readies her party, the National Rally, for the 2027 presidential elections. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (beware of political parties with National and Freedom in their titles) rails against immigration, especially the Muslim kind. In Germany and Spain, opposition politicians sole issued around anti-immigration find fertile ground in which to plant their divisive seeds.
Argentina, under current president, Milei, is adamantly anti-immigrant. He even created a Latin ICE body, modeled after the thugs of the same name in the United States, to identify, follow, and detain fucking foreigners. Most immigrants are absolutely not welcome. Milei is interested only in good immigrants, like the ones who fled there from Europe after the Second World War, and whose descendants likely form a big voting bloc in his fascist far-right party.
Even in more moderate countries where right-wing populism finds the going tougher, politicians and third party hate groups have been able to seize and control the anti-immigration narrative, blaming immigrants for everything, from rising violent crime rates, to unemployment, to the housing crisis, to too much spice in their grits. Of course, the reality is different. Despite blowhard bullshit to the contrary, violent crime rates are not rising and undocumented immigrants are far less likely to commit violent crime than those born in the country.
Immigrants often do jobs that that the native population doesn’t want to do or doesn’t do in sufficient numbers and for which they are often exploited. See Cesar Chavez, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.
Blaming immigrants for housing shortages and affordability whose real causes lie in zoning regulations, exaggerated permit costs, and baby boomers not interested in seeing their property devalued by cheap competition as they hit retirement, is like blaming fly fisherman for the depletion of the Bluefin Tuna. They just happened to have their lines in the water when the trawlers went by.
But demagogues, racists, and quislings need scapegoats. They are all around us, the ass kissers in the office too ready to offload their mistakes onto convenient colleagues, the rapacious insurance companies always looking for fraudulent excuses to deny coverage, hate groups who mask their personal failures in bellicose intolerance, and the most dangerous of all, the populist politicians who whip up support on the backs of the defenseless.
Who better to blame for policy failures or flagging poll numbers than refugees, or temporary and undocumented workers, those who can’t fight back. These people are among us largely because they do the work we won´t, for wages we won’t accept or because they are escaping the poverty, violence, and despair of their native countries.
Privileged by accident of birth, those of us already ensconced in the West are not smarter, not tougher, not kinder, not better in any way than the unfortunates that some among us seek to keep out. We don’t love our families and friends more. We don’t appreciate food, sports, or the arts more. We don’t yearn for freedom more. We are certainly not more dignified.
Those who think otherwise, those who assume a level of superiority over others, do so because of shitty education, likely starting at home where the prejudice and stereotypes of the past are deep-rooted, so much so that the limited introduction to the rest of the world that school provides doesn’t sway them.
These sightless gatekeepers are often people who don’t know, and are not interested in, the world beyond their neighborhood, or beyond the controlled environment of a beach resort, locations where potential immigrants know their places in responding to every whim of the obliviously exalted.
They live in an internet echo chamber where like-minded narcissists spew mostly race-based hatred and strategize as to how to influence government policy by couching their narrow vision in politically acceptable words and shifty misdirection.
Poor migrants don’t have the means or the money to counter the way they are depicted and these days there is no Woody Guthrie or Joan Baez to stand in their corner. They are the descendant scapegoats of the Chinese workers who built the railroads in North America and were cast aside when they were no longer needed or wanted, the Mexican-Americans, who despite the irreplaceable work they did to help build the US, were deemed an economic strain and deported during the great depression of the 1930s, and the Jews of Nazi Germany, six million innocent people targeted for horror and death by feral psychopaths seeking to establish a master race. All of them, among the many millions of lost souls who were, and are, no more than disposable punching bags for racists, bullies, opportunists, and haters of all persuasions.
Migration is not a new phenomenon. It began in earnest around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago when humans began leaving Africa, the only home they had previously known. Those who migrated to Europe in search of colder weather and lighter skin bumped into the Neanderthals. Neanderthal immigration policy was generally welcoming and although there were skirmishes between some Neanderthals and some humans as they competed for resources, there was no official anti-immigration policy.
In fact, there was considerable interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. Most modern humans, outside of Africa, have traces of Neanderthal DNA. With all of us descended from early humans of dark skin, and most of us carrying Neanderthal DNA, the pursuit of racial purity is a false and perverse quest.
By about 50,000 years ago, homo sapiens inhabited much of Europe and Asia as well as Australia. This relatively rapid expansion occurred largely because the world was a vast and empty space, one with no countries and no borders.
Another 30,000 years would pass before humans crossed the now submerged Beringia land bridge from modern day Russia into modern-day Alaska. Within 2000 years of crossing, humans appeared in Patagonia. Given the fact there were no established routes, dogs were the only domesticated animal, and demand far exceeded supply for Budget Rent a Truck, the advancement was impressive.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th and 16th centuries, and though there was lots of land and a human population of about 60 million, tribal warfare, the precursor to anti-immigration policies was widespread throughout the Americas. In South America, the Incas expanded their empires at the expense of local tribes. The people who made up the defeated team and who weren’t killed outright in battle, were integrated into the Incan empire and often forcibly relocated to its farthest reaches.
Mesoamerica was a cultural region that included what is now Central America and Mexico. Among the dominant tribes were the Olmecs and their successors, the Mayans, and the Aztecs. The Mayans and the Aztecs engaged in ritualized warfare to control trade routes, augment their territories, and capture prisoners from other tribes for human sacrifice.
As barbaric as new world human sacrifice was, Europeans were no better, engaged in endless religious wars, persecution, and land grabs. Islamic expansion at the tip of the sword and Christian crusades at the end of the spear, were followed by 500 years of Catholic Inquisition, persecution of non-Christians, including Jews and Muslims, and the femicide of the Witchcraft Trials. Bloody hands characterized both the old and new worlds.
In what would become the United States and Canada, despite a relatively small, pre-European population of 10 million Native Americans, spread across a vast, seemingly endless land, conflict was commonplace. The great Eastern Native American tribes, Iroquois, Algonquin, Huron, Cherokee, and Chippewa and the expansive Plains tribes, Sioux, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Crow and the fiercest of all, the Comanche, fought over hunting grounds, dominance, vengeance and as a way to repopulate their tribes. It was brutal and merciless warfare.
The seeds of anti-immigration – ingrained hatred, ignorance, suspicion, the dehumanizing of others, greed, vengeance, and an unshakeable belief in superiority, were planted early.
Europeans would come to exacerbate these miserable characteristics common to all humankind, but they didn’t introduce it to the Americas. In a pattern that would be repeated throughout history, and which remains true to this day, the migrants who got there first were inclined to close the door to those who would follow.
Deep in the green and endless hills and valleys of Colombia, beyond the short arm of the Colombian law, illegal mining operations are done in the midday sun by the men who moil for gold. The search for strains or specks or nuggets is carried out by the local population who wade barefoot into streams and non-regulated, chemical-filled holding pits looking for whatever traces they can find. If they do find gold, they don’t stake the area and then rush to the county clerk to register what they found. Instead, they hand their treasure to the gangs running the operation who give them a miserly portion to keep as their own.
To survive, it usually takes an entire family wading through the water and muck, from young kids to grandparents. If they’re lucky, they might make enough to keep their porous shack with the dirt floor and corrugated steel roof, running for another day or week. They are the bleakest of houses with no Latin Dickens to bear witness to the poverty and despair.
Their unpredictable wages, if they can even be called wages, are capped. They get just enough to survive so they can keep working. When one amongst them discovers a major strain, the workers don’t get to keep a greater amount. Instead, they are hustled out of the find and heavy equipment is brought in. They get no share of what machines haul away.
From time to time, the Colombian army rolls in and shuts down the illegal operations. That is no help for the locals who have no other source of income and are offered none by the government. The army doesn’t stay for long and when they leave, the gold diggers move back in.
For the young people of the village, the squalor and fear is not contained in the pit. Splinters of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) or their enemies on the right, the paramilitaries, principally the Clan de Golfo (EGC), roll into the village looking for recruits for their causes. Recruiting is misleading. The better term is press ganged. Families are left with little choice beyond violence than to offer up a son or daughter. The kids are hustled away, and the families don’t know when, or if, they will see them again and who they will be if they do.
Around immigration buildings in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador, the detritus of the failed Venezuelan revolution line up for hours hoping to get papers that will allow them to be in the county legally and to qualify for whatever financial support the new country might offer. They range in age from the very old who need support to stand to young mothers nursing their infants in the long, long lines. To get to this point, they have left most of what they owned to take interminable bus rides that are punctuated by stops so that Venezuelan police and border officials can take most of what they managed to bring with them. Somehow, they endure because those they left behind are even worse off.
They are fleeing from a country where a hotdog at an outdoor stand costs more than the average monthly wage, from a country that should be using its massive reserves of oil to increase the standard of living for its people. Instead, the government gives gas away for a fraction of its real price and now the pig Trump is taking the rest This discount comes at a huge loss to government revenues and restricts the government’s ability to run the country or save its citizens.
Eight million souls have been displaced from Venezuela, considerably more people than live in four of the five Nordic Countries. The countries attempting to absorb them are overwhelmed. They don’t have the resources to manage human migration on such a grand scale. Few countries do and those countries are increasingly hostile to immigration.
The supposed Christian virtues that these anti-immigrant adherents use to distinguish themselves from others and which they espouse so loudly, don’t apply to poor, brown people who arrive at the borders. These migrants are desperate, frightened and hungry, just looking for someone to care, to extend a helping hand, which if truth be told, we have all needed at some point in our lives.
The reasons that people leave their homes in search of a better life in another country are many. Those immigrants headhunted by rich countries struggling with labor shortages or declining birth rates can afford the money and the time to apply for residency. As nationalism and xenophobia rear their ugly heads, even these numbers are being rolled back to the detriment of both the immigrants and the host countries.
But at least economic immigrants have a chance; the ones facing poverty, corruption, kidnappings and real threats of violence and death in their home countries are increasingly lost.
The great global economic divide between North and South, the stark difference in income between countries like the US and Canada versus those from Mexico on south leaves millions of people in dire financial straits. The same situation exists between Western Europe and much of Africa.
Multinational corporations, largely based in the North, and aided by their governments, have created unequal trade conditions based on the difference between the low prices they pay for raw materials they extract and the high cost of essential goods they export to the south.
Northern-based manufacturing and mining companies take advantage of low labor costs, limited labor protection, and government corruption in the South, to make huge profits for them and their shareholders. So, while the North lives the good life in part thanks to cheap labor, millions in the south struggle to put food on the table, have a roof over their heads, or pay medical bills
Families in the southern hemisphere of the Americas, Latinos, tend to be tightly knit. Young adults live at home much longer, they celebrate special occasions with great planning and joy, and in large groups. It’s not uncommon to see three or four generations shopping for groceries together and having long group discussions about whether to buy Froot Loops or Coco Pops or how many are allowed to stand in the checkout line.
Most members of the family are working, regardless of age, often in the same subsistent business. Latinos have an innate cleverness to spot a market need and bring the skills to fulfil it. In countries where government support is minimal, if it exists at all, these characteristics are indispensable to survival. Post-secondary education is often an unattainable goal for the poorest families. Even if the government offers support, including free tuition, they can’t afford the books, and other materials needed to participate in class, and the family can´t afford the loss of income as a result of that young person studying instead of working full-time.
A part of the greater emphasis on family in the South is cultural, and in the case of Latin America, inherited from the Spanish. But the other part, including in Spain, is economic. Young people can’t strike out on their own because there are no jobs that pay enough that they could sustain themselves. It’s not uncommon, in fact it’s the norm, that young people in Latin America live with their parents into their thirties and beyond.
A medical emergency can put a family in a precarious situation. Public health care in countries of the southern hemisphere is not always available. If available, the waiting and the bureaucracy are stifling. People die while papers shuffle or because the limited resources are overwhelmed.
Government corruption in the south has historically ensured that few people prosper while many suffer. Politicians at all levels of government, most often purchased by the rich, pass legislation that favors their benefactors. The corruption doesn’t change no matter the political stripe of the party in power. The crusaders are soon overwhelmed by the system. See Venezuela.
The prevalent corruption and income inequality create fertile ground for gangs and cartels, often in league with the authorities. Corruption in Latin America is not just some cop pulling you over on a fake traffic violation and demanding money, it is endemic at all levels and departments of government, up to and including the policy makers, law enforcement, and the judiciary. Not everyone is corrupt, most are not, but there are enough to make it almost impossible for things to change, no matter how well-intentioned the newly elected.
This institutional extortion makes for a cynical and fearful population. Much crime goes unreported in the expectation that nothing will get done, or worse, that somebody won’t like that you stirred the pot and you go from victim to target in a few phone calls.
The threat of violence and death, especially in rural areas of Latin America is real. Cartels and local gangs act with impunity knowing that the chances of their being caught and prosecuted are remote. There is no culture of investigation of crime in much of Latin America. In Mexico for example, 90% of homicides go unsolved. Not much of a deterrent to the perpetrators. Especially at the local level, reporting a crime to the police means you may be speaking to an associate of the people who committed the crime.
Police chiefs and mayors often work at the pleasure of the gangs. Gang money got them elected or to be sure of the result, the gang killed their main political opponent during the campaign. Running on a platform of tackling crime or going after the gangs, however needed and noble, is a good way to get yourself killed in Mexico and Colombia.
So, what are the people to do? They are defeated at all turns, no money, no chance to study, no one in authority ready or able to help, the daily shadow of violence, of being disappeared, and death. No government support, no respite from the law, and marauding gangs rolling through town looking for new members. No matter how much you are opposed, their threatening to kill your family usually changes your mind.
Essentially fucked from birth, what are the poor people of Latin America and Africa and large swaths of Asia to do? Exacerbated by a natural disaster, targeted by gang violence, a serious medical issue or overwhelming despair, what can someone do? What would you do? Would you not at least try to survive by heading north where they may not want you, but which at least holds the flickering promise of help and hope?
I have seen these people: seen them in long lines waiting in the relentless sun and the driving rain for a chance to stay in a new country while theirs burns, seen them on the tops and open cars of beastly trains running up the spine of Mexico, seen them crying because they couldn’t afford the medicine or surgery required to save a loved one’s life, seen them weeping as they left the only home they ever knew, because as bad as it was, it was their home and there were no guarantees they would ever see it again. I have seen what the Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca described as the ‘’sad, infinite eyes of a newborn beast of burden.’’
I have seen them try and try until trying was futile and then they tried again. If there is nobility in suffering, then these people are among the noblest, but nobility is small comfort to the desperate. They were seeking solutions, not the passing commentary of writers and artists. They can be noble in death. In the here and now, they need food and medicine and hope.
I have seen all of these things, but what I did not see, even once, were migrants eating pets, a great fabricated slur made by those with an undeserved sense of superiority, a manufactured entitlement, whose lack of empathy instructs them to close the doors that were once open to them.
With their meagre belongings, and the forbearance of the indignities inflicted upon them enroute by robbers, authorities and liars, they arrive at the borders and shores of the western world with more virtue and integrity than the people determined to keep them out.
Countries of the Western world need borders. For all of their shortcoming and faults, countries in the west are where people from the south migrate or flee to. They come in search of freedom, safety and opportunity.
There is no lineup to get into Russia or Saudi Arabia or Iran. There is no queue forming to move to South Sudan or Eritrea or Chad. Many migrants come from artificially created countries, the result of European colonization and abandonment. There is a disproportionate onus on Western countries to accept migrants.
But it was the European West that spoke haughtily of the white man’s burden, implemented exploitive labor practices and made off like thieves in the night with the riches of continents. Artificial and poorly thought-out borders joined together historical enemies. The descendants that live in these hellish conditions bear the brunt of 400 years of imperialism. The least the West can do now is to be charitable to those escaping what it wrought.
We need borders so that the West never ends up like Russia, a great nation seemingly doomed to be ruled ad-infinitum by autocrats, oligarchs and kleptocrats. We need borders so that the West doesn’t emulate Iran, where an historic, educated people suffer under the suffocating yoke of Islamic fundamentalists. We need borders so the West doesn’t become like Saudi Arabia, where a ruling family has a law for and against everything, demanding that life be organized around a god that none has ever seen and who offers no proof of existence. We need borders so that immigrants are warmly welcomed in exchange for leaving their old battles behind, welcomed if they agree to keep the symbols and prejudices of their religion out of the public square, welcomed if they contribute the best of their culture to the expansive mosaic of modernity and inclusion.
We need borders but they must be generous borders. That generosity includes employment, health care, housing, and recognition of education or professional credentials. That generosity includes not just economic immigrants but undocumented workers, temporary residents, and refugees. Most come here not just for themselves, not looking to freeload, but so that they might support their families in their native countries. Helping one immigrant to a better life, helps many others to better lives.
Migration is not a one-way street. Over 10 million Americans and Canadians live abroad. Retirement, employment, education, climate and a different lifestyle, motivate North Americans to move elsewhere. They may prefer the name ex-pat to avoid the stigma of being called an immigrant, but immigrants they are and they count on the generosity of foreign governments to let them in. They are going to countries where it is hard for the average local to have a decent life, but where, if you have a little money, life can be pretty good, maybe warmer, and certainly less expensive than whence they came. In each case, for those going north and for those heading south, they are doing so in search of a better life. Their reasons for migration are different, the financial conditions are different, getting to the desired destination is different and what happens once they arrive is different. One journey is borne of desperation, the other of change. One is critical to survival, the other important to happiness.
The right to freedom of movement and the right to asylum are human rights but there is no recognized right for anyone to live in a country other than the one in which they are born or for which they have citizenship. It seems too random, even cruel that your place of birth should so largely determine the way your life unfolds, worse still that to do something about it can be dependent on the goodwill of people who don’t have any.
When emotions are stirred up and boiling over and immigrants are the scapegoats, it’s important to take on the demagogues, the populist nationalists, and the witch burners. With their weasel words and coded messages, they poison the forum, spreading fiction and calling it fact. We can’t let them win.
Since forever, the people on the farther right have been louder, more aggressive, more prepared to intimidate and take action, violent or otherwise. The moderates among us tend to make theoretical arguments but are not so ready to battle. But a lifetime has shown that you can only take so many hits, that you´ve got to fight back.
Mona Charon, conservative commentator, but no fan of the modern Republican party and less so of the cancerous clown currently occupying the White House, said years ago on the McLaughlin Group, that ‘’the lesson of the 20th century is that weakness invites aggression.’’
She was talking about geopolitics, but that truth extends into national politics and beyond, including how you conduct your own life. At some point ostrich-like responses have to be replaced by stiffened spines no matter how much your nature and learning argue for reason. The fact that you’re right means little if you can’t stand up and battle for it.
So many of the people we in the west watch and admire today were yesterday’s immigrants, Dua Lipa, Kylian Mbappe, Idris Elba, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Drake, The Weeknd, Salma Hayek, Trevor Noah, to name a few among thousands. Where would major league baseball be today if they barred the Latino players? Where would the NFL and the NBA be if African Americans weren’t allowed to play? What about the NHL if Europeans were sent home?
Those whom we would reject in one generation become our co-workers or entertainment idols in the next. Those we considered pariahs when they first knocked on our doors, are now our neighbors.
The Chicago Children’s Choir, the Young People’s Choir of New York City, the American Indian Choirs are inspiring examples of singers from diverse backgrounds, backgrounds that at one time were proscribed by authorities or tormented by here-firsters.
The Toronto Chinese Youth Choir is a beautiful contribution to the Canadian mosaic, but it wasn’t 200 years ago with the Canadian Pacific Railroad completed, that the Canadian government refused citizenship to the thousands of Chinese workers essential to the railroad’s construction and banned further Chinese immigration. The same policies were repeated, and the same attitudes prevailed in the United States.
Sports fans admire Shohei Ohtani, as they previously admired Ichiro Suzuki, Paul Kariya and Kristi Yamaguchi. Yet within the last 150 years, Japanese immigrants were subject to many of the same prejudicial laws that the Chinese had faced earlier, with the added bonus of being shunted off to interment camps during the Second World War.
Where would the sciences, the law, comedy, music, and the movies be without the contributions of the Jewish people? Yet, as Jews attempted to escape the ascent of the Nazis in Germany, they arrived on the shores of the US and Canada only to be turned away, forced back to Europe where many perished in the death camps, a loss of intellect and talent that can never be measured.
Today’s laughs, sports, medicines, and infrastructure exist largely because of the efforts of immigrants and their ancestors. If we go back far enough, that would be all of us. At one time or another most immigrant groups were subjected to unfair, often race-based immigration laws, or the slings and arrows of outrageous loudmouths who should be opposed not suffered.
In the US, the government is rounding up immigrants, when they don’t shoot them, and putting them in cages until they can be shipped off to the sad, often dangerous conditions they left behind in their home countries. There seems little sympathy. Branded as criminals, these desperate people, trying only to survive and help others to survive, are appraised and derided as sub-human, a backdrop for a dog-killing Botox queen, shorn of humility, pretending she is better than the props she mocks.
Familiarity and education go a long way in overcoming our fears and prejudices. Stereotypes do not speak to who anyone is.
Maybe not everyone makes it in but, like the Stoics who espoused generosity not as optional but as moral duty, it’s important to ignore the noise and accommodate as many as we can. Our first instinct should be kindness, not hostility. Our lives, our nations, are better when they include others, people who, on the surface and in their training, are different yet, whose ways and ideas are as valid as the received wisdom we formerly accepted.
If we step outside our comfortable but slender lives and see the larger world with fresh eyes, eyes unencumbered by what we thought we knew, we will find that there is much more that unites than divides humankind.
I Am Australian co-written by Bruce Woodley of the Seekers and Dobe Newton of The Bushwackers could lay claim to being Australia’s second national anthem, though the traditional Waltzing Matilda and Eric Bogle´s haunting And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda might dispute the title.
The chorus of I Am Australian, maybe sentimental and idealistic outside the music, nonetheless noble in an increasingly cynical world,reads like this:
We are one
But we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We’ll share a dream
And sing with one voice
I am, you are, we are Australian.
If not everyone can be Australian or American or Swedish or French or English or Canadian, we could at least start with empathy. We could begin the conversation towards inclusion by eliminating the vitriol and by realizing that we are one and we all share a dream.
Paul Heno July 2026
Leave a Reply