Immigration

A fellow CA blogger, Terry over at TerryFacePlace wrote this moving piece marking today, June 19th known as Juneteenth, which celebrates the emancipation of the slaves. She ties it nicely into the immigration debate.
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Today is June 19th, otherwise known as Juneteenth.

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration of of the emancipation of the slaves in the United States. The significance of June 19 is that day in 1865, Major General Gordon Granger landed at Galveston, Texas and announced the order that the slaves had been freed. This was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and the reasons for this could be one of many, including the desire to not let them know so owners could reap another harvest, to the fact that there weren't enough Union soldiers to enforce it until Granger arrived. Nevertheless, they were finally freed from their enslavement, and Juneteenth is the celebration of that day.

Slavery was both an economic issue, and a moral issue in America, and slaves, alongside free men and indentured servants, were the people that built America.

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A lot has happened on the train. We have all gotten to know each other a lot more every day. Without exception we have gotten along fabulously and bonded. Even with a 7 hour train delay out of LA to San Antonio and being 3 hours behind schedule to Chicago we are in high spirits.

The United States of America is an Immnigrant Nation. We Americans collectively have forgotten the sacrifices of our ancestors. We Americans have sanitized the history of American immigration. We have santiized it to the point that we firmly beleive that our ancestors all came over on the Mayflower or through Ellis Island. We have conveneniently forgotten that our European ancestors were also economic refugees and came to the Americas in search of the ultimate American Dream.

[Continuing my series of interviews with the Nisei children of Japanese immigrants early in the 20th century. Below is my third interview with Tom Takeo Matsuoka, which took place Aug. 31, 2000, a little less than a year before he died at the age of 98. Once again, his daughter, Rae Takekawa, sat in on the interview and assisted.]

DN: How old were you when you went back to Japan?

Tom Matsuoka: Three.

DN: And how old were you when your mother died?

I'm preparing for my upcoming cross-country trip aboard the Dreams Across America "Dreams Train" -- during which I'll be trying to tell the stories of some of the 100 immigrants who are embarking on a whistlestop tour of the country to share those stories. The posts will be carried here, at the Dreams Across America blog, and at Firedoglake. In order to introduce the kinds of issues and stories we'll be talking about, I thought I would run some interviews of immigrants -- or more properly interviews with the children of immigrants -- who tell both their stories and their parents' I conducted in the 1990s: specifically, the raw interviews of Japanese Americans that provided the basis for Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community

What follows is a transcript of an interview I conducted in March 1992 with Tom Takeo Matsuoka, who was 89 at the time. Matsuoka was a "kibei" -- American-born (in 1903) and thus a citizen like most Nisei, but one who returned to Japan at an early age and was educated there, then came back to the United States (in 1919) and remained as a citizen. Matsuoka was a community leader in the rural Bellevue farming community near Seattle through the 1920 and '30s. He was arrested the day after Pearl Harbor by the FBI and detained at by the Justice Department for some six months; upon being reunited with his family at the temporary facility at Pinedale, Calif., he worked to get them out on a work-release program and they relocated to Chinook, Montana. After the war the family bought a farm in Chinook and remained there for another 48 years. When I interviewed him, he was living in Ridgefield, Wash., near his daughter, Rae Takekawa, who assisted with the interviews.

[This was one of my earliest interviews with a Nisei immigrant, and it shows: the conversation is unfocused and skips around a great deal, and a number of salient questions went unasked because I had not developed a good ear yet for what the interviewees were telling me. (Some of the notations, incidentally, are taken from my handwritten notes.) I interviewed Matsuoka twice subsequently (I'll be running the latter of these, which has fewer of the flaws of this interview, shortly as well). Matsuoka's story forms the human core of Strawberry Days, which was finally published in 2005.]

[Cross-posted from earlier this week at Orcinus.]

If you want to see how extremist-right talking points work their way into the mainstream of our political discourse and eventually attain "conventional wisdom" status, watch how Lou Dobbs' phony leprosy statistics continue to be repeated and given official media imprimatur.

Last week, on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, host Joe Scarborough had the following exchange with Patrick Buchanan (whose descent into unreprentant extremism has already been remarked):

SCARBOROUGH: Now, Pat, let me stop you right there, and let me ask you this question...

A family's painful split decision
Deported to Tijuana, conflicted parents decide their 3 U.S.-born children should stay in San Diego.
By Anna Gorman, Times Staff Writer
April 27, 2007

San Diego — EACH night, Leslie, 16, and Adilene Muñoz, 8, sleep restlessly in their parents' bed while their brother Marcos, 13, covers himself with a blanket on the floor beside them.

Across the border in Tijuana, their parents lie awake in their small third-story apartment, feeling anxious and helpless.

Many of the early posts here have focused a lot of attention and energy on whether an immigrant is "legal" or "illegal." As much as it may start controversy I wanted to pose the questions, "Does it matter?" I think how many people that come in is a valid topic as is assimilation in terms of language, norms, and commitments. However, I think it is ironic that when my grandfather came here 90 years ago he broke not one law in doing so. However, if he had eaten at a dinner he would have broken a serious one.