Jobs, Immigrants and Genocide at 7AM

I got in a fight with a good buddy of mine this morning.

Firstly he calls me at 7am to chat. I guess I can forgive him that err.

His 2 kids are getting ready for school, as are mine. He has news. He was laid off on Friday. This is a guy who's two months behind on his mortgage.

He tells me the about the job he just lost. It was a concrete job, the low of the low in carpentry: hard, dirty and relatively unskilled. Building forms for concrete pours. Rico described the forman standing on the hill above the workers, yelling profanities as the workers hurriedly swung hammers and zipped circular saws. One worker was fired on the spot for not following the bosses' orders swiftly enough. The bosses aren't letting guys forget that they're "lucky" to be working.

Rico explained how many workers put up with this boss because he'd promised everyone "you'll be working for the next 3 years." After a while Rico's ire turned elsewhere. "Yeah, two guys didn't get laid off. They were the guys with who were illegals." This is coming from my buddy who is not just Latino, but Latino-proud. Then we go through our usual back and forth on this question. I ask if the immigrants were of British descent (which I am), he stops his rant mid-sentence. Then he laughs, ignores my interruption and gets back up on his rant. Then I add emphasis, "dude, you know I'm an immigrant!" Then he asks, rhetorically, if I have my papers. I give him an evasive reply just to annoy him, he takes the bait, getting madder and I start laughing. This conversation we've had many times, and it's almost always identical, everytime.

Finally, I tell him to stop. He's a bit shocked. I had upped the ante. "So how do you think the Native Americans feel about you Europeans coming over here without your f****** papers?" The tension is broken by a huge belly laugh on his end of the phone. "The undocumented ain't genociding you, are they?" I ask him. I can see him scratching his head at his kitchen table.

Once again, we agree to disagree and then we go on to BS about the many things we agree on: the cowardice of our union leaders, the greed of Goldman Sachs.

Muhammad Ali once commented on why he opposed the Vietnam War by saying that "No Vietcong ever called me N*****!" Well no undocumented worker ever told me he planned to Genocide me.

Academics will never agree how many Native Americans were killed during the European invasions. The low figure is around 4 million, the high figure around 110 million. What scientists can agree on is that the average life expectancy today for Americans is 78 years and the average life expectancy of a South Dakota Native American is 58 years. Twenty years less life is the legacy for those who arrived here first, and for not accepting the European ruling class' right to steal their land from them. The same ruling class who are in charge today of deciding who gets an immigration document and who doesn't.