Many peoples’ attitudes on immigration in this nation seems very strange to me. We tell the story leaving out some very important details. First, when we leave out the history of the holocaust of the indigenous people, we can ignore the fact that most of the people we are calling “immigrants” are the survivors of that tragedy. They were here first. When we call them “illegal aliens” we are accomplices to our ancestors’ crimes against humanity.

Second, when we leave out the history of the Monroe Doctrine, we forget that our own nation adopted intrusive policies that allowed us to undermine governments and open local economies for exploitation. It was our own policies, in large part, that made the economies and politics of some southern nations unlivable.

America has a problem with immigration, but it isn’t the immigrant people. We cannot understand the problem of immigration by only looking on one side of a boundary, nor solve it by listening to only one side of the story.