The next wave of immigration after the Indians took 17,000 years to find the New World, America being like one of those clubs that keep out the riff-raff (that'd be the white folks) by not hanging a sign on the door. The Pilgrims, we hear ad nauseum at this time of year, came to America to escape religious persecution; in fact they came to the Netherlands to escape religious persecution by an overzealous Archbishop of Canterbury (whom I shall think of as Archie, as I do all Archbishops, and who had hoped to be an archnemesis, but got sidetracked into the much-less-cool Archbishop business); Archie was less than pleased that these recusants did not worship at (and tithe to) the official state church, the Church of England. (England being at that time more or less devoid of Jews, Irishmen and black and brown people, the English were reduced to persecuting other white people, a condition they would soon remedy in the Americas, Asia and Africa.) The Pilgrims were quite safe in cosmopolitan Leyden; in fact, they left for America because they couldn't get jobs in urban Holland, most of them being rural Nottinghamshire bumpkins.

            Just like Mexican immigrants today, the Pilgrim fathers came to this land with nothing; unlike today's immigrants, they were able to spend their first few months here digging up Indian graves for what they needed, most notably maize that had been buried with the graves' inhabitants. There were also quite a few abandoned Indian houses and villages for them to live in, on account of the fulminating smallpox that Europeans had fortuitously introduced shortly before. (Smallpox just in general sounds like kind of a nasty disease, but fulminating smallpox? Holy shit! That's like exploding herpes.) Half of the settlers died of disease and starvation their first year, and more would have, had it not been for the help of the Indians. (Well, some of the Indians; some were, quite understandably, rather peeved at the white guys, having been abducted and enslaved by them not long before the Pilgrims' arrival.) My daughter's grade-school class shortly before Thanksgiving one year made Pilgrims and Indians (and I believe there might have been a turkey too) out of clothespins, with which, every year at our Thanksgiving dinner, we would enact the following touching scene of interracial harmony and aid:

Pilgrim: Oh, my, whatever shall we do? We are starving!

Indian: My people and I shall teach you how to fish and plant maize.

Pilgrim: Oh, thank you, kind Indians. Won't you dine with us?

Indian: Thank you, we will.

Pilgrim: Not the expensive stuff. And here, have a smallpox-infected blanket.

Indian: Thanks! What's smallpox?

Pilgrim: It doesn't matter. You'll like it.

U.S. Government: Hey, you Indians, would you mind moving to Oklahoma?

Indian: Oklahoma? Dude, we live in Florida! We don't even know where Oklahoma is.

U.S. Government: It doesn't matter. You'll like it.

Indian: Well, does it get cold there? Will we need coats? All we have are these primitive 19th-century Speedos.

U.S. Government: Nope. And in 70 or 80 years there'll be something called a Dust Bowl. You'll like that too.

Of course, when the country got more crowded and we needed that land in Oklahoma for white people and to get oil out of, we took it back. Apparently the phrase "Indian giver" was invented around this time too.

            Non-English and -Scottish immigrants began immigrating to the newly-formed United States, and after only a couple of centuries and a bloody internecine war, Southerners cheerfully released those African-Americans who had so willingly come to this country in chains, at least the ones who didn't die in the Middle Passage and have their bodies unceremoniously tossed into the ocean; then, just to show there were no hard feelings, the Southerners lynched and persecuted those African-Americans for another century. No fools they, these former slaves got the fuck out of the South and moved to Northern cities, joining the waves of other immigrants who were paid so well in the colorfully-named "sweatshops" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Hi, Gramma! Don't sew too hard! You're going to die at 43 anyway! Hi, Grampa! Don't bake too much; the flour dust is going to rot your lungs out!) The United States, fearing that all of Europe would try to come here to do what its original settlers had (get a job), imposed limitations on "undesirable" immigrants, Jews, Italians, Chinese and the Irish, mostly, none of whom were considered white, but none on the good Northern European white immigrants, like Germans, Swedes and, of course, the English and Scottish. Because, as a seminal Saturday Night Live sketch (yes, there used to be those) pointed out, if it's not (English or) Scottish, it's crap!

            Today, the sons and daughters of those last couple of waves of immigrants want to close the United States' borders to people looking to come here for the same reason the Pilgrim Fathers (and mothers; many of them were mothers) did: to get a job. The principled opposition of the right wing to immigration--people coming here, where their, the right wingers', ancestors came to make a buck, to make a buck--stirs in my breast a deep pride at the nobility of the human race; well, I think it's pride; it could just be gas. I'd get it checked out, but I don't have health insurance.

I personally have no objections to anyone immigrating to this great country of ours, be they Mexican or Canadian, Irish or Senegalese, Hindu or Muslim, hobbit or troll, Klingon or Texan. (Well, I might not be happy with a large infusion of Texans into the US.) For one thing, there's a large segment of the population that I really dislike--it's mostly coincidental with the people who stand against immigration--and I figure lots of immigrants will dilute them, not to mention outvote them. (Which is probably what they're afraid of too.) It's not that I'm for a less-white America (though I am), it's that I'm for a less-stupid America. It's not that I hope that with proportionally fewer white assholes to watch Lou Dobbs, he winds up washing dishes in a taqueria somewhere…oh, wait, it totally is. Rhetoric…whoosh! Just ran away with me.

            I have a sense that the opposition to immigration, the frenzied calls to police our borders and such, stem from a feeling on the part of these people that they've lost control, that they would agree with that one Birther woman who mooed, "I want my country back"--meaning, presumably, not their country, they being anyone of any color other than beige. (Also, as mentioned above, I suspect most Native Americans would agree with the Birther woman on that, though now that they have casinos, maybe not.) Do they, those white nativists, suspect that those they've oppressed for so long somehow deeply yearn to do the same to them, knowing full well that if they, the white nativists, had been oppressed, they would not hesitate to stick it to their oppressors, given the chance? Or are they more afraid that they're just irrelevant, history's trash? (Instead of, as usual, the trailer park's.) That, in a century or so, being white might be more exotic than being Tiger Woods?

             I'd like to tell those people: It doesn't matter. You'll like it. But then I remember that I don't care.

            It is the nature of immigration and assimilation (not the Borg kind) (well, okay, that kind too) that those who formerly lived someplace when immigrants came have to compete to keep what they formerly had by right. WASPs ran pretty much every aspect of life in America for several hundred years, and that worked out just fine—for them. It was not such a great deal for blacks or Indians or for Irish, Italian or Jewish immigrants. But people go where they can live better; they migrate, like birds going south for the winter, to where the money is. In a couple of decades, that might well be China, but for now, it's here, and here is where the immigrants are coming, and all the fences and armed guards and patrols in the world won't stop them, and I wouldn't want to. The previous waves of immigrants came here and did the jobs no one else wanted (except for the Indians, because of how they predated capitalism and jobs, and  also, sadly for them, cheesecake), and so will the new ones. In the process, those waves of immigrants made a rural backwater into a world power. It's not your country, lady, and it never was. You were just borrowing it from the Indians and, if global warming continues, from the ocean.