Thread by @matt_cam

How different would the discourse around our undocumented population be if every American had even a superficial understanding of the immiseration & death their country had brought to Central America over the past 120+ years? Would it matter at all?

I had a general understanding that we had interfered in any number of sociopolitical & economic ways before I began this work, but spending most of the past 15 years hearing the stories from the victims of our empire has completely changed me & my relationship with the US

We only really began to publicly grapple with the legacy of slavery a century after the war which ended it, and the past couple of months have shown yet again that we have so far to go. How much longer before we're forced to confront a history that is barely taught?

And then of course on top of that try to explain that the United States intentionally created the concept of "undocumented" people in 1965 by introducing visa quotas for the Western Hemisphere for the first time ever with no real provision for the established migrant workforce

I appreciate and generally agree with the responses suggesting that it wouldn't make a difference to opponents, but in my experience most liberals have no real conception of this history either bc it doesn't fit with the "America has ALWAYS been great" narrative. More hope there?

I have personally come to believe introducing the reality of this history to liberals and linking it up with everything they've come to notice about immigration during the Trump era is one of the simplest ways to put them on the road left, but your mileage may vary there

Here's where I'm at with this question:

This knowledge should be the difference between being annoyed that strangers are sleeping on your lawn for no good reason & being annoyed that strangers are sleeping on your lawn after you recklessly burned their house down.

It should be

(this analogy works for most of the countries we routinely accept refugees from, but is ofc not meant to exclude those who are coming here for reasons we may have actually had nothing to do with)

One point of clarification here:

I wasn't only thinking of nativists/xenophobes/conservatives here! Centrists & liberals are so often missing this vital context, which is one of many reasons that the right has driven the narrative around the undocumented for most of my lifetime

Would liberals be quite so insistent on an extremely arduous "earned" path to citizenship if we all had a shared understanding of what Central Americans and their parents & grandparents have already endured at our hands? They understood this in '97 w/#NACARA

The Nicaraguan & Central American Relief Act was the closest thing we've had to reparations for our deadly malfeasance in CA. It granted residency to ~98% of those who fled affected countries. The Congressional record reflects that it was at least in part compensatory.

Temporary Protected Status ("TPS") is another good example. Until Trump ended them this yr, #TPSElSalvador (2001) & #TPSHonduras (1999) were extended by 3 Presidents well beyond the natural disasters which originally precipitated them as a kind of lowkey reparations program.

Many American centrists and liberals have quietly acceded to the right-wing "economic migrants" / "better life" narrative, which lends itself more to a paternalistic (or, at best, "they're in the same position my family was at Ellis Island") approach than a reparational one.

This deserves much more than a footnote in this thread, but IMO reparations are absolutely the appropriate framework for our immigration policy as it relates to Central America. Not necessarily $$ (although, sure) but a path to citizenship & full participation. A NACARA 2.0.