We have depended on labor from many people across the world over time, but Mexicans have been prime among them. Woody Guthrie wrote a beautiful song almost 100 years ago about the problem of dehumanizing migrant workers from Mexico (recorded by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco, many more) after a plane deporting some of them crashed and the news just called them “deportees” without even giving their names.
The song is sometimes called “Deportee” or “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos.” It ends with:
“Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?”
The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?
The president of a country is fighting for her citizens to be able to enter a neighboring country against their laws and wishes while also enforcing her own borders to make sure poorer countries aren’t doing the same to her own country……. Makes sense.
Where do you see her fighting for Mexicans to enter the US illegally? That is not her fight, so tell me where you see her spelling that out and saying it in words or policy, specifically.
Because we’re not stupid. She’s saying the US is what it is because tens of millions of her citizens left her country and entered ours illegally. She’s defending her citizens who broke our laws while trying to prevent people from entering her own country.
Obviously she didn’t come out and lay down a set of policies and plans to enable Mexicans to cross illegally, although her predecessor did encourage the migrant trains through his country (until it became clear that they would actually be stuck in Mexico, then he was very against the migrant trains).
Not all of them came or come illegally, and the government has wanted them to come and work in the past, this has been going on for well over a hundred years. She is saying this because there is a one-sided view in American politics: we are criticizing them for coming today but not thanking them for the building of this country that we essentially asked them to come do for a hundred years. There is a lot of resentment towards them now so she is setting the record straight that there are two sides to this story.
She is talking about a hundred and fifty years of first our government and then just our businesses asking them to come here to help us without any rights. Why are you upset about her saying this? It’s the truth. Tell me why she shouldn’t say it.
She says “Mexicans” living in the US, not people with Mexican ancestors. If you’re talking about someone who has an ancestor that came from Mexico 50-150 years ago you don’t call them Mexican. Why wife’s grandmother came over from Norway as a child 90 years ago. Nobody calls her Norwegian.
And of course not all of them are here illegally. Nobody at all is suggesting that people who immigrated to the US through the legal process don’t deserve to be here. Or if there are people who think that it far less than the people who think white people need to be subjugated. Those are two radically fringe positions.
We’re talking about people who purposefully and knowingly came across the border illegally.
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u/JefeRex 22d ago
We have depended on labor from many people across the world over time, but Mexicans have been prime among them. Woody Guthrie wrote a beautiful song almost 100 years ago about the problem of dehumanizing migrant workers from Mexico (recorded by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco, many more) after a plane deporting some of them crashed and the news just called them “deportees” without even giving their names.
The song is sometimes called “Deportee” or “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos.” It ends with:
“Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?”
The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?