American Gold is for Americans, Part 1

Anyone familiar with US immigration history, and most Americans are not, have concluded that as a nation of immigrants we have some significant hostility toward immigrants. Mitt Romney’s roots, and many others in the Republican Party, for anti immigrant measures began almost as early as the founding of this country. This was brought to you by the same people, (Thomas Jefferson included), that gave us the Declaration of Independence. The first of these laws was enacted in March of 1790. It provided the rules for the granting of national citizenship. This law limited naturalization to aliens who were "free white persons". Left out were indentured servants, slaves, free African-Americans, and later Asian Americans. No opportunity for Barack to be a Senator or run for president then.

Nearly every generation has had a crack at solving the ‘immigration issue’. Ours is not immune. During the 1849 gold strike in California, and for a period of time after, Chinese were welcomed into the US to do the heavy lifting and hard labor on the mining claims around Sacramento. When the gold started to run out so did the tolerance of Americans. Labor groups formed with the intent of forcibly removing all Chinese from the gold fields. American gold was for Americans only after all. Those forcibly removed settled in enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, where they took up minimum wage jobs at the Wendys and McDonalds of their day.

Jump forward one hundred and fifty years and we find former Governor Romney who worked to bar any non-citizen from employment in Massachusetts by wanting to supply everyone with a biometric identification card. Employers would be fined and jailed for hiring 'illegal human beings'. He sought to have the state police enforce immigration laws as well. It seems that Mitt is not unlike many others presently and a number who have gone before to marginalize and criminalize those who are different from the majority and came later to American shores. The only crime they committed, like my ancestors from the coalmines of Wales, was their wanting a better life for their families and themselves. One has to wonder when each night as Mitt is on the campaign trail and staying in those plush Marriott presidential suites who is it that turned down his bed, vacuumed the carpets, and cleaned the bathroom? It wasn't any poor and struggling college students working to pay their way through Harvard or MIT.