Enough with the “nation of immigrants” language. We are also a nation of people who were forcibly brought to this country as chattel, and of people who were here long before the colonizers showed up.

I mean, yes, my family got here through immigration & I’m grateful we made it here—running from pogroms & the Czar’s army—before the racist Immigration Act of 1924, which included the Asian Exclusion Act; if set quotas on European immigrants & effectively barred those from Asia.

We can talk about how the US barred refugees (including refugees from the Holocaust— @Stl_Manifest tells one part of that story) and all the people who were not lucky enough to get in, even if they were tired, hungry, yearning to breathe free.

I am so grateful for the fact of my own family’s immigration stories AND we have to be careful not to romanticize even the ways in which the US has been around immigration—and who, and how, and when, and in what ways immigration has been permitted.

To say NOTHING of the immigrants & asylum seekers in ICE detention, families separated, children whose parents’ identity has been “lost” by DHS, forced hysterectomies, COVID death traps, abuse reports, human rights violated, and more.

Are they not yearning to breathe free?