An Immigration Letter
The immigrants will keep coming because you left them no choice—and because we need them!
September 1, 2024
To the long-suffering wealthy nations of the world who are fed up with immigrants coming to your countries:
Let me begin by asking just how the f*ck do you think we got here? Remember, it was you, the Western Colonizers and Imperialists, who encroached upon their lands when they were minding their own business. You barged in uninvited and proceeded to completely upend their homes and their lives for your own enrichment.
Just what the f*ck did you expect when you expropriated their lands and depleted their soils and robbed them of their natural resources and enslaved and brutalized their bodies and completely dismantled their socio-political systems?
Or when you erased their histories and razed their sacred sites and outlawed their cultural traditions and their native languages and stole not only their labor, their innovations, their skills and their natural resources but also their priceless artifacts, some of which you still boast as a token of national pride today.
You seized their lands and handed them over to profit-obsessed ventures who abandoned their regenerative practices in favor of unsustainable monoculture and rampant extraction with only short-term dividends in mind. You forced upon them your culture, your economic system and your overpriced goods, made from the very raw materials you stole, and you did all this under threat of bloodshed against not only the objectors themselves but their children and entire families.
You raped them, humiliated them, dehumanized them, and you even performed medical experiments on them. You left their lands overcultivated and overgrazed and their water sources overdrawn and over-polluted and their societal structures in utter shambles while using your ill-gotten gains to build up your own treasuries, infrastructure, industries, institutional advantages and military might.
Even in cases where independence was won you meddled in their affairs. You incited coups to overthrow their democratically elected governments, you assassinated their democratically elected leaders, and you installed dictators who would cooperate in your kleptocratic schemes to keep their resources flowing into your hands, sustaining your greedy way of life. You even went so far as to aid these autocrats in forming secret police forces to carry out extrajudicial killings of political opponents while extolling the virtues of democracy back home.
And the inequality only widened. You set up international financial institutions to impose predatory loans on those you shamelessly pilfered to keep them under your control via the trap of debt. You underwrote oppressive terms and high interest rates knowing full well that your deprivations and depravations had left them in a state of desperation.
When they predictably fell behind on payments, you forced them to slash education, healthcare, food assistance, infrastructure and other public services to stunt their growth further. Under threat of sanctions, you repossessed their lands by means of lawfare instead of outright conquest, once again expropriating their natural resources to ensure the thievery would continue uninterrupted. And when you offered them a mere pittance in aid compared to all that you had taken and ruined, you defamed them as indolent charity cases.
But it is you who have consumed far more than your equitable share of the planet’s finite sources of energy and materials, while exceeding its assimilative capacity, essentially using up the carbon and environmental resiliency budgets before developing nations have had a fair chance to grow.
You hoarded for yourself the lion’s share of planetary resources and assimilative capacity to gain insurmountable advantages. You consumed so rapaciously that the oceans and atmosphere have become dangerously overheated and polluted, and it is the colonized nations you deride that are paying the much heavier price due to their inherently sensitive ecosystems.
All these crimes and acts of gross negligence you have committed have made their homelands far less productive and habitable. This isn’t just history—it’s a crime in progress. You are fueling conflicts around the globe to secure favorable access to critical resources without having to pay fair prices. You refuse to forgive unfairly imposed debts when you should have been paying reparations instead. And you refuse to reduce your carbon footprint even as their ecosystems collapse.
In short, you took away everything they had and left them without the means to recover, forcing them into complete dependence on you. You ended up with highly developed economies and reservoirs of wealth at their expense. And now you’re exasperated that some have found their way back to your homelands.
Often, they migrate as a matter of survival. But they also migrate because you need them. Your economic machine is starved for more labor than you can supply on your own. But they also bring many of the crucial skills you lack. They perform the essential work you refuse to do. They start businesses at a higher rate. They support aging populations. And for all this, they commit crimes at lower rates than you do. And this is to say nothing of the many cultural contributions they make.
But sometimes they come in need of some help to get started because in some cases you have really gone above and beyond to reduce their homelands to unlivable hellholes.
However they come, it is your favorite pastime to dehumanize them. You love more than anything to paint them as beggars in search of a handout. After all the damage you have done, after all that you have stolen, after the appalling inequality you have wrought, you still insist on treating them inhumanely, subjecting them to racist abuse and slander, and in many cases, violence.
But they are going to keep coming because of this situation you created. And they are going to keep succeeding because they are more capable than you. They are more resilient. And they have the tailwind of justice and fairness on their side.
But here’s the thing that you really need to let sink in. You don’t get to have your artificially cheap materials to keep your essentials and your amenities and your luxuries affordable, and you don’t get to build up your infrastructure and systems of wealth and power and then just expect you can insulate yourself within your walls and your curated bubbles, shielding yourself from the unsightliness of all the thievery and carnage that makes your pampered way of life possible.
Immigration is an inescapable fact of life, especially when you have expropriated, desecrated and obliterated so much, leaving people with nowhere else to turn. You have stolen, you have wrecked, you have meddled, you have sabotaged, and you have massacred. You have been a parasite of body, blood and soul.
It doesn’t matter whether you have done any of this personally. You are the beneficiary. You willfully turn a blind eye while loudly insisting that you deserve all the good things in life as is your God-given right. You refuse to hold your country accountable because you refuse to sacrifice even the slightest convenience.
But your way of life comes at a cost. It is fueled by the blood of those born in the wrong place at the wrong time and in the wrong color. But when you place the heel of your boot on the neck of your fellow humans, even if by remote extension or passive complicity, it is only natural that they will fight with all their strength to wrest themselves free.
And when they do, it will become immediately and hauntingly clear that you were never as strong, clever, industrious—and sure as hell not virtuous—as you had made yourself out to be. You were just cruel.
By accidents of history and geography, you found yourself in an advantageous position over others. And then you viciously leveraged that advantage for all it was worth, with absolutely zero regard for the vulnerable. And you’re still doing it.
So forgive me and most of the rest of the world for not giving two shits about the discomfort you might be experiencing in dealing with the slightest consequence of your actions. Even when you’re actually benefiting from this consequence, you still find a way to make yourself the victim. How weak and pathetic is that.
