The arrogance, amnesia and human indifference of Mainers for Responsible Immigration (“Maine Voices: Immigration terminology is based on a myth that needs to be challenged,” March 22) are disgusting.
The view of Bob Casimiro, the group’s executive director and the column’s author, is that after Colonial refugees of persecution, indentured servants and criminal deportees had stolen 99 percent of Native Americans’ habitat to create livelihoods and imported 388,000 African slaves to create an aristocracy and wealth, and several generations of further immigration had built infrastructure, staffed burgeoning factories and performed menial labor, the bounty and open spaces of the United States became exclusively current inhabitants’ to hog.
Where my grandparents’ generation and those before and after crossed open borders – save where racism prevailed, those now born here have full title to this rich part of the planet – ours alone to abuse and waste as we choose. Our convenience alone should dictate how few of the current 60-odd million refugees we should let in.
They conveniently forget that Earth is the human race’s to share. They also conveniently ignore history, that our greedy determination to have Caribbean and Central American countries’ resources and exploit their markets and labor, has, since the 1954 overthrow of Guatemalan democracy that led to the Reagan-blessed Rios Montt genocide, fomented, abetted, financed, blinked, even led the overthrow of responsible governments (e.g., Haiti) and brutal repression of liberation movements there, creating hundreds of thousands who could survive only by coming here. (Hillary Clinton’s sabotage of Honduran democracy is the latest chapter.)
And forget the 12 million Mexican farm families who lost their livelihoods to the North American Free Trade Agreement’s U.S.-subsidized grains. They forget the victims of the like destruction of Haiti’s rice economy and victims of earthquakes and hurricanes there who come here to survive.
Like Donald Trump, Casimiro cannot recognize the human bond manifest in care for those in need.
Ursula Lukas Slavic
Portland
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