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Immigrants (lemy.lol)

submitted 10 months ago by King@lemy.lol to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works

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https://masto.ai/@rbreich/111753037715271040

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[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Being of middle-class standing doesn't invalidate that they were seeking adventure, opportunity, or freedom. What a strange conclusion to arrive at.

[–] mathemachristian@lemm.ee -4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

What kind of adventure though? Freedom to do what exactly? What they were seeking is a bit different from what the current immigrants are seeking dont you think?

Edit it does invalidate the narrative that the early settlers were impoverished or convicted people fleeing an oppressive feudal england, which the tweet seems to suggest.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There were those too. Just because 45% of the people arriving were middle class, doesn't mean that nobody was poor. There were people who would commit to 7 years of indebted servitude in the new world to cover the cost of their move. Nobody does that if they have any money. Additionally, you're viewing things from a modern perspective. Middle class did not mean what it means today, and life under English rule was not as it is today. The Irish specifically came here to escape oppression, and then found more here. They didn't escape their oppression here until centuries later, but even then, they still found the Americas to be the lesser of the two oppressive environments.

[–] mathemachristian@lemm.ee -2 points 10 months ago

Whats the "45% were middle class" referring to? Also I didn't say nobody coming into the US was poor, my main gripe is with the "Almost all of us", as if the white immigrants benefitting from slavery and genocide were a small part. As for what the white laborers were up to, we only need to read a bit further in the book I'm urging everyone here to read:

What was the essence of the ideology of white labor? Petit-bourgeois annexationism. ... To this new layer of European labor was denied the gross privileges of the settler bourgeoisie, who annexed whole nations. Even the particular privileges that so comforted the earlier Euro-Amerikan farmers and artisans - most particularly that of "annexing" individual plots of land every time their Empire advanced - were denied these European wage-slaves. But, typically, their petit-bourgeois vision saw for themselves a special, better kind of wage-slavery. The ideology of white labor held that as loyal citizens of the Empire even wage-slaves had a right to special privileges (such as "white man's wages"), beginning with the right to monopolize the labor market.

We must cut sharply through the liberal camouflage concealing this question. It is insufficient - and therefore misleading - to say that European workers wished to "discriminate against" or "exclude" or were "prejudiced against" colored workers. It was the labor of Afrikan and Indian workers that created the economy of the original Amerika; likewise, the economy of the Southwest was distilled from the toil of the Indian/Mexicano workers, and that of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest was built by Mexicano and Chinese labor. Immigrant European workers proposed to enter an economy they hadn't built, and 'annex', so as to speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created.

If you want to actually know about the irish and other immigrant workers and don't like to read that much I would recommend Chapter 4.5 "Contradictions of white labor" where this passage is from, but again the whole book is superb.