All of US are Immigrants

All of US are Immigrants

As the world’s longest current surviving constitutional charter in the history of humankind, America is having a birthday. 

Looking back over two centuries, we are citizens from someplace else which makes us all immigrants. Yes, even the Native Americans came over the Bering Straits many centuries before most of our European accentors crossed the Atlantic Ocean. 

Uninvited and unwelcome, the Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock to form the first English colony. Some can interpret this as an invasion on Native American soil. Soon thereafter, immigrants from African were forcibly brought to the new land as slaves. So, on both fronts, coming to the new land and bringing people who did not want to be here, we showed a propensity for imperialism as invaders from Europe. So how is that different from those crossing the southern border? At least they are not bringing slaves with them. Ironically, our neighbors to the south are some of the hardest workers in the world. 

We migrated to North America, because this new land had promise, freedoms and wide-open spaces. Promise for a better life for our children and grandchildren; freedom from persecution to worship who we wanted, live with who we wanted, love who we wanted and be who we wanted; a less authoritarian regime, vacant of monarchies, fascists, empires, and no Kings; a free-er society, based upon our unalienable rights, or life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 

Who exactly have we become? Throughout the two and half centuries, we are a melting pot of cultures, traditions, music, art, and food, fused together to form US. We are hardworking, determined, and salt of the Earth citizens. We have created a culture complied from other cultures around the world to call our own like no other civilization before. No other country in the history of humankind has ever tried to bring together all peoples from around the world to reside together. We come to this country to live together, work together, play together, govern together and ultimate love together. We are the United Nations in action, and it has worked for 249 years and counting.

If you look at your neighbor to the right and your neighbor to the left, even if you look in the mirror, we are all immigrants. We are Mexican, Venezuelan and Haitians of today where we were the Irish, Scottish and Japanese of a century ago. The way we treat today’s immigrants, we were treated. The internment camps that once held Japanese Americans echo the detention centers confining immigrant detainees today. Hypocrisy laced with nationalism gives us justification for doing what America did to us when we came to the new world for what we are doing to our brown brothers and sisters today. If this is the way we treat our own kind, get ready for AI to treat us the same way or perhaps lessor.

So, Happy Birthday America and when you hear someone disparage an immigrant remember they are talking about every single one of US.

Farmer Banks Helfrich teaches gardening monthly at Florida Blue Clermont and on his seven-acre farm with 15 different gardens in north Clermont. Farm tours are every 2^nd Sunday. Call Banks for more information. (407) 616-9720