It seems strange to me that all of a sudden, immigration has been trumpeted as such a big problem that congress feels compelled to use taxpayer money, including the taxes paid by immigrants, to build walls accross the US borders. This in the wake of a group of armed racists calling themselves the minutemen, patrolling the southern border hoping to accost people crossing from Mexico. I call them racists because they aren't patrolling the Canadian border, where presumably only Anglos would bee crossing, and thus that they are motivated not by issues of undocumented immigrastion per se, just the immigration of Latinos, who are fast become a majority culture in the southwest west. Though they target illgal immigration, its important to undersdtand that immigration laws have long the purpose to control the ethic composition and cultural character of the United states.
In previous chapters of the reading I've been doing from John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education, he explained how the developers of compulsory state schooling wanted to impose certain cultural values, those of Anglo Saxon protestants, on the children of immigrants, in order to prevent challenges to the exisitng order. Various social movements challenging class power and priviledge were sweeping across Europe in the 19th century, and swept into America with immigrant populations. This exploitation of immigrants when they arrived here only fueled class based social activism such as the labor union movement,
And as we will hear in the first hour of the program from our feminist scholar silvia federici, witch hunts, and I mean the original ones against women alleged to be witches, were based in struggles about power, profit and hierarchy as capitalism came into being,. We'll follow that with another reading from John Gatto's underground history of American education, and its development by what he calls true believers as a method of social engineering modeled on Europeans systems designed to preserve class stratification.
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