Were she a sentient being, Lady Liberty would drop her torch in disgust, bow her head in shame, and erupt with tears. Portrayed as the gatekeeper to freedom and opportunity, the sad reality is that her beacon of hope has drawn many into the predatory system of American Capitalism, providing the White wealthy elite of the United States with cheap, easily disposable cogs for their machinery of profit powered by human suffering.

Smugly convinced of their moral superiority and inalienable right to world domination, America’s ruling White Patriarchy (and those of the White working and middle classes who choose to support them) have now decided they have an immigration problem. Too many “little Brown people” are streaming across their borders.

Already feeling overwhelmed by the “cultural contamination” and diminished White power resulting from rising populations of “savage” Blacks and Hispanics, the White Americans who still desperately cling to the absurd notion that they sit atop the peak of human evolution are desperately demanding further draconian measures to protect them from their “inferiors.”

To assuage the fears of their privileged constituency, America’s de facto ruling class is wrangling with numerous potential solutions. Yet thus far, they have overlooked the obvious: ask the Native Americans what to do. After all, the White invaders who forged the American Empire nearly drove the indigenous people of North America to extinction.

At the very least, the relatively few survivors of the Native American Genocide could help their White “superiors” put their comparatively minute problem into perspective by reminding them that things could be much worse.

While the Caucasian invaders merely murdered and displaced hundreds of thousands of Native Americans and held millions of Africans in chattel slavery as they exercised their “divine right” to build their “Christian,” Capitalist Empire, many of today’s brown-skinned “marauders” are committing such heinous acts as working hard, exercising a devotion to family, and living decent lives.

Wearing their psychological shackles with delight, the White Americans who truly believe in the myth of their superiority provide unflinching support for a government of war criminals, Social Darwinists, and state terrorists seeking to subjugate, suppress, or eliminate the “Dark Threat” posed by Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and Middle Easterners. While some of the indoctrinated may not be conscious of their allegiance to evil, they are just as culpable as those who are.

Fueled by a compulsion to consume, unwavering “patriotic” support of a militaristic regime drenched in the blood of millions of murdered civilians, narcissism, xenophobia, racism, and an insatiable demand for exploiting the rest of the planet to keep them comfortable, the American Empire’s loyalists are demanding an end to the “Southern Invasion” of illegal immigrants. Long-term oppression of Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans persists as Arabs and Persians find themselves targets of a pernicious racism born of ignorance and blind acceptance of government propaganda related to the “War on Terror.”

Sadly, hubris, racism, torture, state terrorism, and unsurpassed avarice are the hallmarks of a nation which purports to be a bastion of freedom, justice, human rights, and equality. Fending off the fierce blizzard of facts exposing the United States as a ruthless empire, the purveyors of the American Myth doggedly indoctrinate their minions with a relentless argumentum ad nauseam that the United States is a benevolent haven for humanity and liberty.

Monsters are monsters (regardless of their ideology)

Just as several attempts to implement Communism have resulted in human suffering and totalitarianism, America’s brutal form of Capitalism is also an abject failure for humanity, registering quite high on the misery index. Few would argue that the United States affords a robust standard of living to many of its citizens, but how much of humanity really benefits?

The 295 million people of the United States account for a mere 5% of the world’s population. A tiny fraction (about 2,950,000 individuals) of that meager sliver of humanity feasts on a herd of fatted calves. Meanwhile, 3 billion human beings are left to gnaw on the leftover bones, clinging to survival on an income of less than $2 per day.

Despite its abundant resources and wealth, the Empire even neglects some of its own. 13% of Americans live below the official poverty line. Over a million Americans are homeless, many of whom are children, untreated mentally ill individuals and military veterans. Ironically, the homeless veterans proudly served their country. As a reward for their loyalty, the Empire cast them aside like sacks of garbage.

American Capitalism comes complete with a dose of significant racism. 25% of American Blacks and 22% of Latinos are poverty-stricken while 91.4% of the privileged White majority lives above the poverty line.  Three-fourths of White American families own their homes, while fewer than 50% of Blacks and Latinos enjoy that “luxury.”  Shorter life expectancies and significantly higher infant mortality rates amongst Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans reflect the superiority of health care available to White America.

Economic progress by Black Americans in the early Twentieth Century was severely retarded by vigilantes, lynchings, and the decimation of entire communities, like “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa. After years of struggle to attain civil rights, Hispanics and Blacks today face less visible yet still formidable socioeconomic barriers, including substandard public education, a serious dearth of opportunities to enter universities and higher paying jobs, and an Apartheid-like system of deteriorating urban cores populated primarily by Blacks and Hispanics surrounded by affluent White suburbs.

Consider that the Capitalistic economic engine of the American Empire, which benefits a thimbleful of the world’s 6.5 billion people, was built through mass murder perpetrated against Native Americans and the profoundly evil enslavement of our Black brothers and sisters. Devouring half of Mexico in the US invasion of Mexico in 1846, the Empire expanded its land mass significantly. And American Capitalists have exploited cheap Latino labor for many years.

Further perpetuated by the exploitation of the working class during the Gilded Age, the juggernaut American economy is now maintained by the cheap labor of illegal immigrants in the United States, the gross exploitation of workers in corporate America’s offshore sweat shops, decreasing regulation of corporations, and an ongoing assault against the American working class including massive layoffs, union busting, and job off-shoring.

In a gross perversion of justice, those human beings who have contributed the most to America’s wealth have benefited the least.

Obviously, one cannot change the past, but one can learn from egregiously immoral behaviors, make amends, and work to change. It is evident that the devoted White Capitalists of the American Empire have no intention of mending their ways.

There are White Americans who support minority rights and social justice, but their efforts are often crushed by the influence, power and propaganda of a White-dominated system and culture.

Despite the false dichotomy presented by the government and the mainstream media, there are choices beyond the totalitarian Communism of Stalin and Mao and the unfettered greed and imperialism of American Capitalism. It is a moral imperative and a pragmatic necessity that the United States begin to strive for a more equitable distribution of wealth, stronger government regulation of corporations (to minimize their crimes against humanity), and socio-economic justice.

Intolerance, Bigotry and Racism

Beneath the noble rhetoric about equality in America lurk the sinister realities of racism, bigotry, and ignorance. America’s extremist Christians persistently fight to deny rights to homosexuals and women while supporting the ongoing state terrorism committed by the US and Israel. The Klan and other White supremacist groups have been making a powerful resurgence by recruiting youth via the Internet and popular culture. A federal government which collects massive tax revenues (and which is charged with providing for the general welfare of its people) committed passive mass murder and criminal negligence in New Orleans, where virtually all of the victims were poor Blacks.

Despite some progress, many Blacks and Hispanics still find themselves desperately grasping for the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. The wealth gap between Whites and minorities is a chasm, with White families averaging ten times the average net worth of Blacks and Hispanics.

American criminal justice is served with a heaping side of discrimination. As of June of 2004, 2,531 out of every 100,000 blacks and 957 per 100,000 Latinos were in prison. Compare that to the 393 of every 100,000 White Americans doing time. Over half of US death row inmates are Black or Hispanic.  Amongst the 38 states still practicing state-sanctioned murder, 98% of their prosecutors are White. Curiously enough, the prosecutor is the one who makes the decision whether or not to pursue the death penalty. And let’s not forget that minorities seeking clemency often encounter men like California’s “Terminator.”

For many outside of the “inner circle” of America’s White Patriarchy, the United States is not the land of opportunity; it is a land of economic and social brutality.

Paul Revere rides again

America’s ruling class created their own immigration problem. Now Congress is contemplating draconian solutions which will cause more human suffering. How typical for the leaders of the Empire and their lemming-like supporters. Spurring Congress to take action, a repugnant vigilante group calling themselves the Minutemen now patrols parts of the southern border of the United States. They are armed and dangerous.

While the Minutemen are endorsed and supported by White supremacist groups, they claim they are simply there to help the US government protect America’s borders from potential terrorists, criminals, and immigrants carrying diseases.

With the Minutemen crying, “The Mexicans are coming! The Mexicans are coming!” the White Establishment and their collaborators are debating several severe measures to deal with the latest threat to their domination of America’s society, economy and government.

Some of their proposals include the erection of an Apartheid wall, the arrest and criminal detention of 12 million illegal Hispanic immigrants, and criminalizing the act of helping illegal immigrants. One of the more “humane” measures under consideration involves granting temporary guest status to Hispanics who have established themselves in the workforce.

How generous to “allow” them to continue working in dangerous, miserable conditions (i.e. meat-packing and produce harvesting) for low pay and minimal benefits, living with the knowledge that once their physical health is in ruins, their Capitalist masters will toss them out of the frying pan and back into the fire of the abject poverty of their homelands.

Banish them or exploit them?

Representing the Hispanic illegal immigrants who have established residence in the United States, millions of Latinos and their supporters have engaged in a number of protests around the United States over the past few weeks. Their moral outrage is justified in the face of the entrenched power structure’s bid to criminalize millions of hard-working human beings and to punish compassionate people who help them. Some amongst the Empire’s White masters seek to relegate the “Wretched Refuse” to the landfill.

Meanwhile, corporate champions (i.e. George Bush), whose greed supersedes their racist, xenophobic tendencies, are taking a more pragmatic malevolent stance. They want to find a way to keep illegal immigrants in the United States as “temporary guest workers” to provide the cheap, submissive labor corporate America craves. With the Thirteenth Amendment preventing outright slavery, the leaders of America's Corporatocracy are not about to let these indentured servants slip away so readily. One man’s “Wretched Refuse” is another man’s treasure.

Self-inflicted wound

Living in deep denial, the American Empire is blinded to its culpability in creating the immigration problem. By enabling US corporations to build manufacturing facilities in Mexico starting in the early 1970’s, the Empire’s Capitalist masters set themselves up for a mass exodus across their border while simultaneously betraying their own working class.

While the US factories in Mexico maintained miserable working conditions and paid a small fraction of what they were paying American workers, impoverished Mexicans flocked to work for them. Unfortunately for the Latinos, a substantial number of the American businesses closed up shop and moved on to other countries once they found cheaper labor pools. Many of the closed factories were close to the US border, leaving large numbers of unemployed Mexicans living near states like Texas and Arizona. Who can blame them for risking illegal immigration to escape their miserable situations?

Furthering its illegal immigration woes and deepening the plight of the American working class, the United States accelerated the movement of US corporations onto foreign soil by passing laws such as NAFTA. Utilizing neocolonial and imperial tools like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, CIA support of dictators friendly to US corporate interests, state terrorism, and invasion, the Empire has parasitically drained the people and resources of developing nations.

Besides subjecting the citizens of other nations to abject poverty, the Empire has slaughtered millions of innocent civilians with its behemoth military machine, and is continuing this pattern in Iraq. Employing the lessons of its early history, the United States enthusiastically enables Israel in the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Perhaps Shawn Sugg of the White power rock group Max Resist voiced the suppressed racist beliefs quietly held by those who work vigorously to perpetuate Caucasian domination when he sang:

Stop the killing and share the wealth

Why wouldn’t people flock to the security and prosperity of the Empire?

After all, the rest of the world is a dangerous place. An imperialist United States sitting on the world’s largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction has run its “collateral damage” count into the multi-millions, has declared that it is above international and humanitarian law, and claims its right to invade nations in preventive strikes, not unlike a man shooting his neighbor because he believes the neighbor might be a potential threat.

Since 25% of the world’s resources flow into a nation of only 300 million, some of the other 6.2 billion human beings are bound to show up on the Empire’s doorstep begging for food and resources.

American Capitalism and the American Empire are blights on humanity, particularly outside of the United States. They render far more damage to the rest of the world than to those living in the United States, which explains why a small number of Americans expatriate while millions of immigrants flock to this nation. Paradoxically, people are streaming into the United States to escape the United States.

The bitter irony is that once immigrants arrive in America, most of those who have too much skin pigmentation and fail to adopt the “infinitely superior” White Culture find themselves victims of economic and social servitude.

Applying a band-aid to a gaping wound

Congress will pass a law which will put a bandage on the immigration problem, but the wound will not heal. One piece of legislation will not come close to addressing the myriad underlying causes.

Ultimately, America’s increasing trajectory toward a more brutal form of Capitalism coupled with a rapid acceleration of the American Empire’s quest for global hegemony will continue catalyzing the influx of immigrants. Until the White American elite and their brainwashed adherents end their tenacious and destructive efforts to fashion the Earth into a “White man’s world,” they will continue to be plagued by an onslaught of “little Brown people” whose cultures are “downright un-American.”

Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts and an extensive self-education (derived from an insatiable appetite for reading). He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at [email protected] or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at civillibertarian.blogspot.com.