We're All Immigrants

This short post is about all the racists in western Europe as well as America who feel empowered and justified in their scapegoating since we now have the perfect circumstances for them to enlist new allies. It's how it has worked: when there's a crisis of any kind people look for someone to blame, and more often than not, it's the foreigners and immigrants who get the short end of this ugly stick.

Most of the time it's the economy that moves people to look for that scapegoat. Germany during the Great Depression is the go-to example; we all know what happened when Hitler used the economic hardship among "his" people to direct their hate against the Jews. Here in The Netherlands far right populist Geert Wilders and his "Party For Freedom" became very popular in the aftermath of the financial crises in 2000 and 2008. The same happened in many other Western European Countries and it always are far right political parties and politicians who play on latent xenophobia among the population to garner more support. This is tragic, because it causes people to punch down instead of up where the real culprits can be found; it's not the immigrants who are responsible for your stagnating wages, it's the people who benefit from paying as little as possible for your labor and the politicians they've bought. Those right wing voters are often the same ones who advocate for capitalism and the free market, but in times of economic hardship they suddenly want to close borders and vote for clowns who promise to build walls; kind of hypocritical to want a free market and at the same time vote against the free movement of labor, isn't it?

Not only a bad economy, but also a global pandemic is the far right's best friend. A deadly virus just gives these racists another excuse to want to close borders and restrict immigration. And what about global warming? I believe Naomi Klein said it best when she stated: "The only thing scarier than a far right racist movement that denies the reality of climate change, is a far right racist movement that doesn't deny the reality of climate change, that actually says this is happening, there's gonna be many millions of people on the move, and we are going to use this abhorrent ideology that ranks the relative value of human live that puts white Christians at the top of the hierarchy, that animalizes and otherizes everyone else, as the justification for allowing those people to die."

You can hear her saying that in the below linked video that also digs a bit deeper in to how racists and fascists use crises of any type to justify their racism and to lure in more ignorant souls into their ranks. Especially in the case of America and Americans I find it both hilarious and troubling that racism and hate towards immigrants is so persistent; for Pete's sake, unless you're a native American or descendant from Africans who were kidnapped, imported and enslaved, you're ALL immigrants! It's funny how people just draw an arbitrary line in history to determine who is and who isn't an immigrant. Go back far enough and, unless you live in a small region on the African continent, the rest of us, including the aforementioned native Americans, are immigrants too. So get with the program son, and stop hating immigrants unless you want to hate yourself as well. The truth is that we're all human and that this planet is the only one we have; this planet and each other, that's our treasure and we should be thankful for that.

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