Struggling for manual labour in the war years after decades of restricting immigration and expulsing people, including Central and South Americans, California developed the Bracero programme, which later spread to the rest of the country. The program imported Mexican workers to perform tasks in a variety of industries, not just agriculture, compensating for the significant …
Tag Archives: immigration
What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Immigrants?
In this country’s steady march against immigration and seeming desire to isolate itself behind a wall that no one can scale, the same question keeps pressing to the forefront of my mind: what, exactly, is so wrong with immigrants? In the midst of this tide of hateful rhetoric, I see a lot of people on …
Why Are Progressives Ignoring Immigrant Women?
My colleague Flavia Dzodan has done tremendous work in the area of representing the rights, concerns, and interests of immigrant women around the world; particularly in Europe, where she lives and works. Yet, one of her recurrent frustrations, and one I share with her, is the lack of attention on the part of the progressive …
NAFTA, NAFTA, How Does Your Garden Grow?
They’re found along the US-Mexican border. Trees decorated in bras and underwear in varying colours and sizes, fluttering in the breeze. You might think it’s absurd or even funny, looking at a tree decorated in underpants, except that these trees are much more sinister. They are the ‘rape trees’ used to commemorate conquests, decorated with …
Laying Some History On You: The Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907
Japanese immigrants to the United States started entering California in larger numbers in the late 1860s, later than their Chinese counterparts, and they tended to come in families, rather than as single men seeking to make money in the goldfields. Once they arrived, many assimilated into white culture, living in mixed neighbourhoods, sending their children …
Anti-Immigration Rhetoric In Pop Culture
Our pop culture says much about what we are thinking and feeling, culturally, because it is how we express ourselves without admitting that this is how we really feel. It becomes a brilliant distancing tactic as a mode of communication that can be easily dismissed when anyone questions it; relax, it’s just pop culture, you …
Laying Some History On You: Women of Good Character
Asian immigration to North America in the 1800s was heavily slanted male as men left their communities to seek their fortune and send money home; this is one reason many male immigrants took up gendered work like cooking and laundry in the mining camps and later in Chinatowns in regions like San Francisco and Vancouver. …
Turning the Border Into A War Zone
Good fences, goes the saying, make good neighbours. Walls and fences have been used as messaging for thousands of years; early humans probably made a point of building fences as soon as they could figure out how to do it. We’re fond of fences as a method of social control, a firm reminder of who …
The US Is Wasting Vast Sums On Mandatory Immigration Detention
Under the Constitution, people are entitled to all sorts of rights, particularly around personal liberties and freedoms. The current state of the immigration system in the United States is clearly violating some of these rights, in spirit if not in actual fact. Case in point is immigration detention; under the law, immigrants can be indefinitely …
Teachers Are Not Immigration Officers
Schools in the United States are increasingly tasked with activities that are outside their normal purview, of providing education to students, and a safe place to learn, and an environment where people can explore a variety of topics. The compulsory nature of education makes it appealing to use schools as locations for enforcement; for vaccination, …
