Chinese Exclusion Act 2

I should be angry, instead I'm just sort of sad. Because this thing's really going to pass, I think. If we look at history, it'll tell us as much. The economy's bad, jobs are scarce. And rather than blame the corrupt, incompetent government who's responsible, we blame the swarthy folk, who are "taking our jobs" and doing them, I might add, better than us as well. but I don't know, American immigration has become ore and more weighted towards highly educated professionals, and the HB1 Visa, which looks and smells like a guest worker program to me.

Perhaps the whole "not allowed to bring families" part of the "reform" stings, since my family actually was subject to this over one hundred years ago. And it did split up our family. And we were lucky, because we were Japanese, most other people, Chinese and Filipinos particularly, had it even worse. And you know, I'm not a really big believer in America. In fact, most days, I really hate America. But I guess deep down, I never thought we would do something like this again. Well, I'm clearly a sucker. And America has never been very kind to the suckers of the world.

But then the cynical part of me says, well, America was built as a plantation. America has become powerful, not by being dedicated to freedom as we say, but on the backs of those swarthier than they. And perhaps it is only through a hell of a lot of luck that some of the descendants of those swarthier than they have managed to get some goddamned rights.

Maybe we've never left the plantation.

And the whiny American in me says well that's not fair. My grandfathers worked for the MIS (Military Intelligence) translating for the American army, so that the army could kill their cousins better and more efficiently, and all that stuff in the Japanese American History museum tells me that they did this to prove that they were American. They fought, and the boys and men of the 442nd died so that this would be better for us.

But it isn't better, and it's more than a hundred years since they passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and we're at this door again. Begging to keep the right for immigrants to unite with their own fucking families. When the first solider who died in Iraq wasn't even a goddamn citizen.

I'm just waiting for them to institute the quotas again, just watch them do it too.