Call them immigrantes, if that’s your word for someone who would walk a frozen bridge from Beijing to Buenos Aires. Or call them immigrantes, if that’s your word for those who live under shadows of macroeconomic policy exclusion. And call them immigrantes, if you’re pointing to the cheapest of “cheap labor” who send their savings to loved ones far and wide.
Call us immigrantes, if that’s your word for us who swallow heartache and keep a dream or two hidden from your stabbing gaze. Or call us immigrantes, while you lie about your law-abiding nature and your love of state certification.
And call us immigrantes, even if we qualify under your all-American regime as so-called native born, because we don’t like the way you use the word like a wanted poster, as if in your high-and-mighty tradition anyone ever cared about who was actually native born or what rights exist on other people’s ground.
Call yourselves immigrantes when you sign up to work for some overseas company because that’s where the money is. Or call yourselves immigrantes when you never cease moving in search of the better way. And call yourselves immigrantes when you say, “live free or die.”
Call us all immigrantes who are set loose on this new world market. Or call us all immigrantes who would be free under any part of the sky. And call us all immigrantes, the people of this shrinking earth who would sometimes roll along some glorious open road, just to see what’s on the other side.
Go ahead and say it. We are immigrantes all.
Greg Moses is author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence.
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