Jack White — Icky Thump

Indigenous Peoples

Look in the mirror, it’s probably not you

Lets get a few things straight about asylum seekers attempting to cross the border:

1. These people are legally seeking asylum. If you want to spit and stamp your feet about how you have to cross at special border crossing for asylum to be considered legal that’s fine; but when they try to do so they are being turned away. If you don’t believe me, go to one of these crossings and ask the people. They try every day and are told to turn back, which, by the way, means that our Border Patrol is violating international law. While we’re on the subject of the law:
2. There is almost no other legal path to citizenship for these people. I would love for someone to explain to me how just about anyone from Latin America is supposed to enter legally. If there were an easy way to obtain legal citizenship, do you really think 10,000 people would have died in the desert entering another way?
3. They are not taking jobs away from anyone. They are doing work that no one wants to do here. Fruit is rooting in the fields because there is no one to pick it. Just like all other times in the history of the USA, there is work to do and immigrants to do it.
4. Huge parts of the USA used to be part of Mexico. There are actually still Mexican families, here, in the USA, that lived and owned land here when it was still Mexico. They don’t need to “go back where they came from”, because this is where they came from.
5. There is no official language of the USA. The fact that you speak English instead of French or Spanish or German is pure coincidence and none of your personal privileges are being taken away if you have to “press 1 for English” when you talk to an automated machine. Voting material in multiple languages isn’t some sign that the country has gone downhill.
6. These people are Americans (because, you know, Latin America is also part of America; in fact, it makes up most of America)
7. Although these people tend to speak Spanish (IKR? What else would they speak half way across the world from Spain); many of them also speak a Native language from their geographic area. That’s right! Not only are these people Americans, they are Native Americans.

If you think you have more right to live here than a Native American who is going to die because our government and corporations thought they could play RISK with other countries; just because you are a White European, because a White European wrote it down on a piece of paper, and other White Europeans voted on it then YOU can go back where you came from. Because, thanks to us White Europeans, they don’t have much of a where to go back to.

Anticipated rebuttal:

“But it’s the law of the land!” If you care so very much about respecting the law of the land then why didn’t the settlers who colonized the Americas respect the law of the land when the Indigenous People lived here? Do Transnational Corporations respect the law of the land when they gut communities for natural resources? Ask people in the Appalachians if they like losing their land.