Thoughts occasioned by an email from the past

I got an email from someone from my high school class yesterday, just as the class is preparing for the 55th reunion. He suggested that the federal government should enact legislation dealing with migration following the lead of Arizona. That provides a useful reminder of why I avoid high school reunions.

Of course, the message fits in a long U.S. tradition:

• We refused entry to all but a very few Jews during the holocaust. Fortunately the anti-Jewish bias did not keep Louis Brandeis from serving on the Supreme Court, not did it keep out Irving Berlin nor Albert Einstein.
• The Asian Exclusion Act did what it was intended to do for decades. Fortunately it was repealed in time to allow Asian immigrants to play key roles in American industry relating to the Information Revolution and Asian-Americans are now intellectual leaders in many fields.
• There was a history of prejudice against Irish, Southern European and Eastern European immigrants for a century. Fortunately they were allowed to build the railroads and canals, man the mines and foundries, and serve as the industrial wage slaves that helped build the American economy during the Industrial Revolution.
• Leaders such as Lincoln and Jefferson thought that Blacks and Whites could not live peacefully together in a condition of equality, and thought that anyone with a drop of African blood might best be returned to Africa, even though Africans had been brought to this continent in slavery. They of course did not realize that since our species developed in Africa we all have basically African genomes, with the exception of a few mutations that allow us to live in a situation of low sunlight, a few admixtures from Neanderthals, and some mutations that cause genetic diseases found only in Europeans.
• Benjamin Franklin even worried about the German immigrants in the 18th century who he believed were undermining the quality of the English immigrant population.

It would be better to focus on our foreign policy with respect to Hispanic America. That began with the theft of Texas from Mexico and the Mexican American War in which we fought with a weak neighbor to take other territories that we coveted. Other adventures in foreign policy contributed to the dictatorships of Batista in Cuba, Duvalier in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Guatemala and Pinochet in Chile, as well as the overthrow of the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala.

Mexico is now in the grips of an economic crisis which is likely to be prolonged as its oil reserves are expected to be exhausted in the coming decade. It is involved in a war with drug gangs which are fueled by the drug market in the United States and the flow of guns and drug profits south over the U.S.-Mexican border. Its border cities are facing huge problems due to the behavior of maquiadoras exploiting Mexican laborers to produce for U.S. corporations.

Perhaps we should try to live up to what President Roosevelt termed (ironically) a good neighbor policy with our Hispanic neighbors. Of course I don't approve of illegal immigration although I sympathize with the people who feel forced to immigrate illegally. But it is a minor problem compared with the huge problems that our Hispanic neighbors face. Perhaps we would have fewer illegal Hispanic immigrants if our foreign policy did more to encourage development in the rest of the hemisphere.