Immigration

This is an amazing song which, I think, hits the nail on the head. The artist, Tom Russell, will be in Madison this Thursday. I'm looking forward to it.



There is also an article in the current New Yorker entitled The Lost Children: Immigrant Families in Detention by Margaret Talbot. It is appalling and disheartening, and underscores in no uncertain terms that the bogus "war on illegal immigrants", like all wars, is about massive profits for a few fat cats at the top (and is anyone surprised that in this case, one of the fat cats who is profiting from the suffering of innocents is Dick Cheney's son-in-law?) I am unable to link to it, but I urge you to look it up.

Of course this isn't the first time our country has incarcerated children on a large scale. Everyone is pretty familiar with the Japanese-American internment camps, but did you know that German-Americans (and some Italian-Americans) were also interred in camps, mostly in Texas? Some of them were rounded up in the United States, others were picked up in South America and brought here. The grand plan -- conceived of by George Marshall ("peaceful" architect of the Marshall Plan after WW2) -- was to use these people as pawns to trade with Hitler for "real" American prisoners. Perhaps the most despicable part of all of this was that some of the people who were indeed shipped back to Germany at the height of the Holocaust were Jews who had fled Germany, some as long as 30 years earlier.

Haven't heard about this? That's because the State Department covered it up for years, and it is still not widely known. 60 Minutes did a piece on it a few years back, and there is a traveling exhibit from out of the Twin Cities.

I am absolutely ashamed of our history of human rights violations that continues to this day, but I am proud of my fellow Americans who speak out and who work tirelessly to shed light on the ongoing miscarriages of justice. Perhaps one day we will truly be a country of peace, eh?