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- cross-posted to:
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With a border deal hanging in the balance and the Iowa caucuses a month away, Donald Trump amplified his attack on immigrants at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” the former president said. “They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia.”
While in the White House, Trump sought to deter immigration by building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, building some 450 miles of fencing along the nearly 2,000-mile border, much of which replaced existing barriers. In addition to strict border security measures, his administration also implemented a travel ban for people from several predominantly Muslim countries.
It’s even worse than that, only 1% of people in America don’t have an immigrant ancestor even as far back as one great grandparent.
Every single one of his supporters save maybe for some very desperately confused indigenous folks is a hypocrite of the fucking first order.
And I’ve seen video of plenty of instances of MAGA telling them “go back to your own country”, it’s like “motherfucker, this is their country, same as all the Mexicans you complain about”, the entire southwest from Texas to Cali used to belong to these people.
Not really, the folks that cross the borders and the folks for whom the old north was home are two VERY different groups of people.
In fact the latter are pretty liable to despise the former for a lot of mostly racist reasons.
Doesn’t matter, my point still stands, they’re all “American” too, we who descend from the colonizers, their slaves, and later wave immigrants are not, I’m just saying they have no ground to stand on when they tell these people “go back to your country”.
My point is that viewing it like that is reducing all indigenous peoples in the Americas to a single category, which they themselves much disagree with, see CGPGrey’s vid on the term “Native American”,
The narrative around the Aztecs for example often ignores that they themselves were a colonial settler state imposing foreign culture and religion against native people and extorting tribute of blood and resources by force of arms, in fact it ignores that so thoroughly that those same actual indigenous peoples are demonized in Mexico for “betraying” the Aztecs when they all sided with Cortez against them.
The Aztecs are an indigenous people of the fucking Rockies, they are more related to first nations residing in Idaho than they do the people indigenous to “their” land, but those facts disappear when we treat the Americas and everyone indigenous to them collectively as a unit.
Calling North America Turtle Island as anti colonialism also imposes against a lot of native traditions that have no such conception of the land they live on.
I’d hardly call myself a scholar of Indigenous American anthropology but I mean just look at a language map of pre colonial America and you can see that there’s a lot of nuance to just saying “it’s their land” when referring to central and South American migrants even of almost entirely indigenous descent, it’d be like saying that Palestine is native Zulu land because colonized people on the same general macro-continent.
Not to mention how the idea of land being something you can slap a possessive pronoun on in the first place is anti-freedom of movement and is currently the chief excuse held up for the genocide of my kin in Gaza.
You can’t own land, you can be from there, you can have a document that gives you the rights to control it, you can erect places of significance to you on that land, but you can’t own it, the land is it’s own, it doesn’t parcel itself to match who we say it belongs to, it doesn’t recognize what person’s feet walk over it or who’s blood is spilled in the name of it, it’s been here since long before our most distant ancestors could even leave the oceans to come upon it and it will be here long after our most distant descendents are dead or have long forgotten this place we arrogantly say is ours as if we could own an entire planet.
But they don’t care about that because all they give a shit about is the present. They are arrogant and they think they themselves own this country and the new people currently coming here are taking what they believe is theirs. It’s all about feelings to them, not facts.
To argue the history and actual facts is to miss the point because Trump cultists have no meaningful connections to their pasts, and even if they were told they have immigrant relatives by other family, they wouldn’t care, because the truth is not the reason why they believe what they do.