[It has been some time since I have felt compelled to write a diary. There are so many great writers here to read. Please excuse my rust.]
Every GOP Presidential contender seems to think that the "solution" to the "problem" of undocumented immigrants is (in addition to "securing the border") to give them "legal status"Â without citizenship. This "solution" only repeats and compounds the stain from the founding of America that we have never fully eradicated. It's echoes haunt our society to this day and in typical fashion, the GOP seems to have learned nothing.
Follow this rusty writer beyond the rusty curlicue while I expand . . .
In famous 2008 speech on race, President Obama discussed the drafting of the Constitution and observed:
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Ultimately, the solution a future generation exercised involved a horrific Civil War that, while it ended the institution of slavery, never eradicated the stain. A system that defined some people as 3/5's of a person (and property!) ensures that those enumerated as "whole" persons would feel superior. The system of white supremacy that provided cultural justification for slavery also effected the (eventually) freed blacks, who were perceived as an inferior race. As one South Carolina judge opined (State v. Harden, Court of Appeals of South Carolina (1832)):
Free negroes belong to a degraded caste of society; they are in no respect on an equality with a white man. According to their condition they ought by law to be compelled to demean themselves as inferiors, from whom submission and respect to the whites, in all their intercourse in society, is demanded; I have always thought and while on the circuit ruled that words of impertinence and insolence addressed by a free negro to a white man, would justify an assault and battery.
And sadly, this attitude has not changed a great deal among some Americans. Whether in hiring or in the disproportionate incarcerations and deaths at the hands of police (so ably documented here by DKos staffer, Shaun King). This attitude is also reflected in attempts to delegitimize our first black President and in the acts of Dylann Roof.
But what about immigration?
A system that gives "legal status" but no citizenship is a thinly disguised system whereby immigrants may be exploited as a cheap labor source (sounds a bit like slavery) without having a voice in the government that establishes rules about working conditions, wages, benefits, etc. It provides for taxation without representation. And most egregiously, it establishes a lower tier of person whom whites may feel superior to - with all the long-term societal ramifications that we have still not addressed.
How on earth could anyone, from either party, support any immigration fix that does not include a full path to citizenship?
As Frederick Douglass noted in his Dred Scott speech:
The Constitution, as well as the Declaration of Independence, and the sentiments of the founders of the Republic, give us a plat-form broad enough, and strong enough, to support the most comprehensive plans for the freedom and elevation of all the people of this country, without regard to color, class, or clime.