The Enemy Within: Blaming Immigrants for Government Greed
It's a plague and it's happening everywhere.
The word “immigrant” has become a slur, dripping unkindly from tongues across the globe.
White people with money who can afford to set up a nice new life in another country choose to call themselves expats, short for expatriates. They seem to feel that this title divorces them from what they truly are - immigrants. The fact that they have privilege and money doesn't change this fact.
The definition of the word as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, states:
immigrant [noun]
a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.
It does not state, a person of colour who comes to a country to take up permanent residence. However, this seems to be the definition White folks have given to the word.
I am White, I am also an immigrant and I wear that title proudly. As I have chosen never to return to my country of birth to live, I will always be an immigrant. I’m not ashamed of this title, even turning it into my brand, International Immigrant.
Wealth and Privilege
Wealthy countries have built their economies by exploiting and bullying other nations through shows of might and the stealing of land. If you are White, the only land that you can stake a claim to is in Europe. Everything else in this world was taken from the original inhabitants.
Crossing borders has become a terrifying experience for many, mostly due to the hatred levelled globally at anyone of colour trying to get a piece of the global pie.
Imagine for a moment that someone comes into your home, shoots members of your family, puts you in a pen in the backyard, and stakes claim to your home and resources. I’m pretty sure that would make you angry, bitter, and out for vengeance.
Yet, we think nothing of our ancestors doing the same to indigenous populations.
This is invasion.
Now imagine that those same people head over to the local grocery store and locally-run businesses and take whatever they want, again through force, and then after they’ve looted everything, they throw the owners a bone and force them to accept a pittance of payment for their goods. They then take those goods and sell them to their wealthy neighbours, who have also inhabited other houses in your neighbourhood.
This is colonialism.
Next, imagine that a friend of yours, a good worker, comes into the neighbourhood to sell their services at the same price as those who appropriated the land, to make decent money. Instead of being forced to sell their services or products to a middleman and get an unfair deal, they decide to go to the source.
Instead of being welcomed for their innovative ideas and hard work, they are ridiculed, beaten, and told that they are lower than everyone else, merely for trying to cash in on what was stolen.
This is immigration.
Placing blame on a non-existent enemy.
Global governments have found their sacred cow - blaming immigrants for everything. Nothing makes a ruling class happier than when they can identify a common enemy for the people they control to despise, whether that enemy exists or not, whether that enemy is a threat or not. It creates a smokescreen, a sleight-of-hand tactic enabling them to do as they please. And what they please is to disadvantage their own people in order to line their pockets with gold.
The fear that lingers after the pandemic is a beast, and none more so than assuring we have a secure home should another plague or international crisis develop. To this end, rental prices have increased globally, including here in Canada, to extreme levels as greedy landlords take advantage of the undercurrent of fear and need.
Guess who is being blamed for the rent prices in Canada? You got it: immigrants.
The rental prices have increased because of greed from those who have. Immigrants can’t afford to pay the elevated prices, so Canadians are disadvantaging Canadians and blaming immigrants for it. Consequently, the locals get riled up over nonsensical propaganda and the perpetrators go scott-free in their greedy pursuits.
Inadequacies within the healthcare system in Canada are also being blamed on immigrants. This couldn’t be further from the truth. According to Statistics Canada, immigrants make up roughly 23% of the Canadian population. More interestingly, according to the Government of Canada website, is that they also make up 25% of the healthcare providers.
In Canada, immigrants make up
25% of registered nurses
42% of nurse aides and related occupations
43% of pharmacists
37% of physicians
45% of dentists
61% of dental technologists and related occupations
Let that sink in for a moment.
Locals are blaming immigrants for creating a problem in the healthcare system when all along, they are the solution! A report released by Statistics Canada definitively states that “Overall, ASHRs [age-standardized hospitalization rates] among immigrants were lower than for the Canadian-born population.
So, no! Immigrants are not the problem in Canada; the people with power and wealth are. They are also the ones raising food prices. The same food that was picked by immigrants, driven in trucks across the country by immigrants, and stocked on the shelves of the grocery store by immigrants.
A Global War On Immigrants
I have highlighted some of the misinformation in Canada as this is where I currently reside. It, however, is not the only place on the planet where this is happening.
I’m not even going to address the war on immigrants in the United States. Just about everyone with a heartbeat and access to the internet knows the insanity that the orange megalomaniac and his band of fascists are wreaking over there.
My Turkish students lament about Afghan and Syrian immigrants coming into their country. I don’t hear them lamenting about the Russian oligarchs with money, but they do complain about other immigrants who are coming in, poor and downtrodden. They seem to forget that it is their government allowing them in with hopes and promises of keeping the current president in his seat of power.
Nothing has been put in place for them to find housing or jobs, but they have been allowed in legally and yet demonized by the people. Instead of being angry with their own government for allowing so many immigrants in without providing support, they complain about them, inaccurately stating that there is now terror on the streets of Istanbul and that crime has reached an all-time high.
A recent academic review and a scientific study conducted in 2022, both state that immigrants are not responsible for increased crime in the city, the latter stating: “Overall, the empirical analyses provide causal evidence for a rather lower propensity of crime commitment among the Syrian refugees in Turkey compared to the country’s native population.”
The propaganda is being disseminated to the population by an autocratic government desperate to stay in power, knowing full well that creating a common enemy among the minions will allow them to disadvantage their own people without blame.
My Saudi Arabian students love backhanded comments about the Egyptians who live and work in the Middle Eastern country. As most Saudis refuse to do the blue-collar work vital to any functioning society, the government has spent decades bringing Indians, Filipinos, Pakistanis, and Malaysians into the country to do this work. And yet, the locals complain about the vast number of immigrants living there. At no point do they put two and two together to realize that if they, as locals, refuse to do this work, their comfortable lives would not be so easy.
Most of my Saudi students have drivers and housekeepers from Africa or Asia. What would happen if they could no longer access the services that continue to cushion their lives?
Just a few weeks ago, I read a message from an Irish friend of a friend complaining about how high the rents are in Ireland because of the… wait for it… the immigrant problem in the country. Again, untrue. One article explains the issue very succinctly.
The housing crisis is easy to explain: it is a result of allowing Irish property to be placed in the hands of companies seeking to maximise profit rather than to provide homes.
The misinformation and government-led propaganda continue all the while benefiting governmental greed and allowing the wealthy to get richer.
In most of these cases, you will find that immigrants are going to countries that have actively bullied, harassed, and engaged in negative trade deals with their homelands, hoping to earn their piece of the pie. Trade deals built on profiting from the exploitation of workers and devaluing products and services are the modern equivalents of colonialism, as I have written about before.
Very few people want to leave their homelands; they do so because they feel they have no other choice. The need for a future outweighs their desire to stay. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but if your situation is comfortable and you feel that you have choices and opportunities where you are, you’ll choose to stay.
Crossing borders has become terrifying for many. Crossing borders should never be terrifying. Borders are manmade - literally lines drawn in the sand and mostly on stolen land. After much of the world’s land was illegally appropriated, borders were drawn to keep others from doing the same. The pilferers were then able to protect what they had taken, continuing to disadvantage others with more swindling and profiteering.
Wealthy countries become wealthy, not of their own volition, but on the backs of others; slaves brought over from Africa, workers being trafficked from Asia, and outsourcing to factories where pay is low and profit is high. The mining of natural resources on stolen land has brought extreme profit to some and disadvantaged those where those resources were found.
Rules are put in place on how to mine and acquire those resources that advantage those with money. This has created the global situation in which we find ourselves now and capitalist governments love it. They revel in this situation and run on this ticket, creating false narratives aimed at the privileged to hate the unprivileged. Emotive language is used to provoke the residents toward a global hatred of immigrants.
How sad that we live in a world where empires are created by the same people who are then demonized. I, personally, am so tired, so weary of hearing hatred aimed at good, honest, and hardworking people; human beings simply trying to survive. I’m so tired of the privileged trying to actively destroy others in order to keep their privilege. Privilege that was in no way earned.
If the truth of what is actually happening dominated the airwaves as much as the racist and xenophobic rhetoric we are being spoon-fed, there would be change. Change that those in power are terrified of.
No human being is illegal, but most governments are.
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