The Same Countries that Complain About Immigration Create it
Immigrants from unstable countries are assumed to be poor and their home countries rampant with corruption scandals. Western countries complain when immigrants cross their borders illegally. And they also complain when immigrants achieve legal immigration status. Citizens of Western countries blame every state-level inconvenience on immigrants, and these narratives are amplified by politicians who run on nationalist platforms. However, everyone has selective memory when it comes to how Western countries obtained their wealth and how they maintain their stability by creating unlivable conditions for others abroad.
Over the last century, Western power structures have repeatedly intervened in African, Asian, Caribbean, and South American countries under the guise of “democracy,” security, or humanitarian reasons. However, Western foreign policy has always relied upon regime change, economic warfare, and resource extraction. Governments are infiltrated, undermined, and toppled. Resources and assets are seized. Economics are destabilized and destroyed. Public institutions are weakened to the point of collapse.
Currencies collapse. Food becomes scarce. Healthcare systems become overwhelmed while anxiety, illness, and violence rise. Faced with these conditions, people do what is innately natural for biological survival; they migrate in search of protection, stability, opportunities, and resources. Western countries have been painting migration as a cultural problem or a lack of leadership ability in the countries they destabilize, when it is quite literally a biological drive for survival. But the same countries that help to create these conditions lobby to criminalize movement, harden borders, and blame displaced people for the instability of their homelands while simultaneously benefiting from the wealth and resources extracted when they topple regimes. This pattern of intervention-collapse-migration-scapegoating continues because the citizens of Western countries refuse to acknowledge that their comfort is built on the devastation of the citizens who show up at their borders seeking refuge from the lawlessness their countries’ governments create.
Migration Before and After Imperialism
Migration is not a new concept. Since the beginning of time, people have moved freely in response to seasons, trade, marriage, conflict, climate, or opportunity. These are natural cycles that even animals follow. Nationalism is the new concept. Empires have risen and fallen because of it, yet it persists in the minds of small men hoping to be the next Napoleon. Imperialism established global economic systems. European empires conquered territory to reorganize the world’s economy. Colonized nations were restructured to serve the conqueror’s GDP. Local needs were never considered. Food systems were replaced with export crops. Entire industries were dismantled. Borders were drawn to establish control, and countries that had been economically self-sustaining were forced into dependency.
Imperialism produced multiple forms of migration. There was a time when migration was forced, coerced, and extracted through torture, violence, and depravity, which is white-washed out of the patriotic textbooks disbursed to younger generations. People were enslaved, indentured, and displaced. Native Americans were displaced from their lands for European settlements. Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic to build the American economy into what it is today. Asian laborers were shuffled between plantations, mines, and railroads to reinforce the economy’s infrastructure. Despite the American empire being built on the subjugation and exploitation of these groups, they all take turns as scapegoats when politicians fail to deliver on policy initiatives and campaign promises and instead implement policies that solely benefit wealthy donors.
Colonizers practiced controlled migration. Europeans moved freely within colonized lands while restricting the movement of natural-born citizens with laws that offered the colonizers legal protection for racial violence inflicted within foreign borders. The laws instituted by foreign proxies were meant to quell local rebellion against foreign occupation. After formal colonialism ended, newly independent nations were left with economies that were designed for extraction and a political or social system meant to stoke division. Colonizers created what amounted to 360° deals through debt trade agreements and resource control. They enforced these deals with economic, political, and military pressure. When governments re-established their sovereignty and protected their resources in pursuit of economic independence, they “needed” the West’s brand of “freedom” in the form of sanctions, coups, and foreign intervention.
Post-imperial migration is not driven by culture, laziness, or lawlessness. It is driven by economic collapse, political destabilization, and violence as symptoms of the disease of imperialist policies. When a country’s currency collapses under sanctions, public services fail after privatization, or when violence rises following regime change, people flee to the safety of the colonizer’s country. Not for the purposes of making you acknowledge your privilege of being a part of the colonizers, but because colonizers walk around their war-torn countries unfazed by famine and untouched by loss and grief. Your countries and citizens are safe, abundant, and far removed from the atrocities committed abroad. You export their resources and import your entertainment and selective morality. Of course they view Western nations as safe havens and places that facilitate the upward mobility no longer available in their countries. If your country’s history is literally “ a nation of immigrants where everyone can achieve the American dream,” why would you not expect the citizens of the countries your government destroys to show up at your borders seeking community among the descendants of immigrants?
The very nations that destabilize regions decry the influx of displaced people, many of whom support the very economies that they are alleged to leech off of, simultaneously contributing to the workforce and GDP in their host countries, while the resources of their homelands fill the coffers of the host countries. The displaced pay twice, but are the ones labeled parasitic. It’s hypocritical and ironic how Western nations frame migration as an external problem when much of the current-day migration is the return flow of their imperialist agendas. Simply put, people are migrating along the same pathways of the wealth and opportunities that left their countries after your countries plundered them.
If your country’s depravity, nationally and abroad, has to constantly be re-framed around excuses that the people they hurt and turned into economic drivers are less victims because they “deserve” it because of “x” (insert invented negative cultural characteristic that is generally applied to the whole group) may have participated tribal wars, accepted shady deals from your country, or gullibly were the victims of broken treaties initiated by your country, you are fully aware of the atrocities committed for your “comfort,” and your “patriotic pride” rests solely on the idea of your country being the victor in their villianous arcs.
Admit you fear immigrants want the chance at the top of a wheel YOU ascribed to, instead of simply seeking the freedom to exist and prosper because YOU brought into the concept of a hierarchy of bullies and victims, because it currently benefits your country, the bullies. It’s the real reason all the Western countries cry, “immigrants don’t assimilate.” It’s another way of saying they don’t appear to accept their place in the hierarchy as inferior humans that are meant to be exploited by the higher class, which is supposed to include themselves. It’s why they always take the side of the billionaire class, even though it never applies to them. Trickle-down economics is the poor man’s version of believing in the tooth fairy. It’s your tooth, and the money comes out of your household, yet someone somewhere else is getting credit for the redistribution of funds while doing absolutely nothing to contribute to it.
You lambast immigrants entering your country and support your country’s atrocities abroad. You refuse to directly admit you benefit from a corrupt system while celebrating being beneficiaries of the system. You paint yourselves as saviors after pillaging and destroying, and then demand gratitude from those you hurt to make yourselves feel better. You proclaim that “it’s just the way things are” because YOU feel it absolves you of any responsibility to dismantle the system. Truth be told, you truly believe in the hierarchy and enjoy your place in it. Admit it is not about immigration, but preserving the hierarchy where you have placed yourselves at the top of an imaginary wheel that is falling apart because all empires fall. You are not special or immune. And while you are worried about people wanting karmic retribution against you, nobody is even thinking about you, yet you choose to center yourselves in everybody else’s stories. Do better.
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