Convict labor in colonial Virginia

Quote from Friday, October 25, 2024 [Austin, Texas]

“We’re like a garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people that they don’t want.”

Donald Trump, in an attempt to stir up anti-immigrant hatred, has continued to push a lie – claiming that foreign governments are actively sending criminals to the USA.

If fascism wasn’t a matter of life and death, the irony here would be tastier than macadamia nut ice cream.

Of course anyone with two brain cells already knows that the USA is a land of immigrants.

But what many do NOT know, is that in the decades leading up to the American War for Independence [1718-1775], over 52,000 convicts were transported from the British Isles to America, mainly to Maryland and Virginia.

This means that transported convicts made up A QUARTER of the British immigrants to colonial America in the 18th century.

If MAGA supporters mean it when they call the USA “the greatest nation in the history of the world”, then they have to accept that “the greatest nation in the history of the world” was built in large part by criminal “white” people who were once seen as unwanted “garbage”…

*****

Let’s be clear.  “Immigrants” and “Immigration” are not interchangeable words.

Voters in the USA are being encouraged to hate immigrants, rather than a broken immigration system.

In a politically polarized country, those on neither the “Left” nor “Right” frame this issue with dispassionate facts and honesty.

Immigration is either extolled as an unarguable “Good Thing”, or described as an unmitigated disaster.

Every single reputable study shows that immigration, both legal and illegal, has a net benefit to the overall economy of the USA.

But this overall benefit does not apply to that part of the economy or workforce largely lacking in higher skills and education.

Unskilled immigrants are the people most likely to take jobs in the agricultural, construction, and services industries, where they compete directly with native-born Americans of similarly low skill or educational attainment.

Many Trump supporters (but by no means all) are blue collar workers without college degrees.

Many are lacking even a basic high school education.

By every metric, these are the people most likely to experience wage suppression caused by the unfettered (legal and illegal) immigration of unskilled workers and their families.

Guess who loves this kind of immigration the most?

Big Business, of course.  A large labor pool keeps national wage costs down.

Who hates this kind of immigration the most?

People at the lowest end of the scale in terms of skills and education, of course.

Like every aspiring fascist in history, Trump is mobilizing his base by pointing his finger at the wrong culprits.

He is scapegoating immigrants for the failed policies of successive governments and the corporations who steer government policy.

But what makes his rhetoric truly dispicable is the open racism now being directed at specific immigrant communities – most recently Latinos and Haitians.

We have been here before.

Exactly 100 years ago, US President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924 (aka the Johnson–Reed Act) into law.

This blatantly racist piece of legislation included the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act, which was the government’s reaction to widespread “white” grievances in the face of increasing non-Anglosphere immigration.

Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Jews, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and East Indians were seen as a threat to those wanting to keep the USA a land for “white” Protestant northern European descended peoples.

Does the US immigration system need an overhaul, and the humane implementation of a newer, more fair-minded and well-thought-out immigration policy?

Absolutely.

Should the descendants of immigrants (who were often convicts and criminals) be demonizing current immigrants who are being welcomed with open arms by Big Business?

Absolutely not.

Will powerful elites in politics and business ever allow vocational training and third level education to become a right for all US citizens?

A move which would help to elevate many Americans trapped in near poverty?

Are you joking?

An under-educated, angry underclass is far easier to exploit, and far easier to manipulate at election time…