Know Your History

You know who needs the civics lesson? Not the immigrants required to take one to gain citizenship. We do. Those of us born and raised here. Because we fail to remember how we've always had illegal border crossings:

Operation Wetback

In 1949 the Border Patrol seized nearly 280,000 illegal immigrants. By 1953, the numbers had grown to more than 865,000, and the U.S. government felt pressured to do something about the onslaught of immigration. What resulted was Operation Wetback, devised in 1954 under the supervision of new commissioner of the Immigration and Nationalization Service, Gen. Joseph Swing.

Swing oversaw the Border patrol, and organized state and local officials along with the police. The object of his intense border enforcement were "illegal aliens," but common practice of Operation Wetback focused on Mexicans in general. The police swarmed through Mexican American barrios throughout the southeastern states. Some Mexicans, fearful of the potential violence of this militarization, fled back south across the border. In 1954, the agents discovered over 1 million illegal immigrants.

In some cases, illegal immigrants were deported along with their American-born children, who were by law U.S. citizens. The agents used a wide brush in their criteria for interrogating potential aliens. They adopted the practice of stopping "Mexican-looking" citizens on the street and asking for identification. This practice incited and angered many U.S. citizens who were of Mexican American descent. Opponents in both the United States and Mexico complained of "police-state" methods, and Operation Wetback was abandoned.

This is the reason you're seeing people in the streets.

I'm ashamed to say I couldn't even find the rally in downtown Los Angeles yesterday. It apparently was very small (I guess they shot their load with the half-million a couple weeks ago). But driving through downtown, maybe the fifth time I've been there in 4 years, and seeing lives whose paths I'm destined never to cross, I felt disgusted. I felt like Bush looking out his airplane window at New Orleans right after Katrina. We should all be ashamed of our insularity, ashamed that non-citizens apparently know how to mass and protest and raise public awareness better than we do. We can talk a good game for peace and justice, but we can learn something from those how actually risk their livelihoods to do something about it.