Making America Great Again!

More than three years ago, we watched a PBS documentary on The Chinese Exclusion Act.

Thank you, @AmExperiencePBS
We watched "The Chinese Exclusion Act"
Lynchings in Los Angeles?
Massacre in Hell's Canyon?
Angel Island?
...
I had no idea!https://t.co/ex67ECw3KT #MuslimBan #Othering

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) June 11, 2018

What was it about? Well, when the gold rush in the mid-19th century attracted immigration from China, initially these different looking and behaving people were tolerated by whites. The whites also found the Chinese to be cheap labor to build railroads.

But then, doggone it, the immigrants wanted to become citizens and bring more people, when that was something reserved only for Europeans.  The Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming!

So, the white supremacists did what white supremacists like to do--a ban on immigration of "others."

(Watch that documentary, and then watch a multi-part documentary on Asian Americans.)

So, for a period of time, from the late-19th century to the JFK era, Blacks were living hellish lives in the Jim Crow era; the lives of Chinese, and other Asians, in America became nightmarish; Mexicans were ... well, it was good times for white supremacists.

Then the civil rights protests began.  The South tried to rise again, but was put down by federal forces.  The Civil Rights Acts was passed in 1964.  In the following year, the immigration act was overhauled.

When the new immigration law was passed, white supremacists and liberals alike believed that brown people would not want to immigrate to the US from afar.  They were confident that the demographic composition of the US would not change.

But, hey, if Norwegians and Sicilians yearned to be free, why wouldn't the brown-skinned also yearn to be free?

The browns started coming.

At the rate at which the demographic composition is changing, whites won't even the majority group in just about two decades--roughly a generation.    The browning of America, the presence of people with strange names like Barack and Kamala, is freaking a good chunk of the Republican Party.

You see what happened because Blacks and Chinese fought for equality?  They made possible even for people like me to come to the US, and adopt this as my land.

I am in deep debt.

In fact, I am in even greater debt to Frederick Douglass. 

Douglass was absolutely ok with people like me coming to America.  He welcomed us.  During the peak of the anti-Chinese hysteria in 1869, he said:

"For his sake and ours."

In a recent opinion essay, Shikha Dalmia, who is also an Indian-American immigrant like me, writes: "To continue America’s upward trajectory in the 21st century, the country must reverse its current demographic decline."  The reversal, she argues, can happen only--and easily--with immigration.

We need to do that, for their sake and ours.