How's it going America,
Check out the latest episode of The Pod Millennial in which I talk to Phil Labonte, lead singer of All That Remains and co-host of Timcast IRL, all about American music. You won't want to miss it! Subscribe, rate (5 stars, of course), and listen.
Let's get into it:
A video emerged of Texas Rep. Gene Wu on the podcast Define American with Jose Antonio Vargas, where he said that the push against illegal immigration is born from white nationalist sentiment. At the beginning of the episode, he advocates for immigration for the purpose of cheap labor.
He speaks about the illegal immigrants in his district, Texas 137th, saying, "And these are all the people who take care of everything. Your life. They work for your companies. They clean your house, they mow your lawn. They take care of things that you don't even know that they take care of. And if they're gone, if they're deported, you will, I promise you. You will feel it immediately."
Then he says it's a white nationalist attitude to keep them out, saying "what is driving this newest round of anti immigrant sentiment is is purely a sense of white nationalism, that there is a sense of America really just belongs to white people, that this was a lot of people believe that God gave America to white people to rule, and that anytime that immigrants minorities make progress in this country, that that is a scene as a slight against them, instead of saying that this is a shared nation, where, when we all do better, our nation does better."
His claim is that white nationalists want to prevent immigration but that the purpose of immigration is cheap labor. Sounds like Wu wants to be the oppressor. And he goes on to talk about how immigrants who have a positive view of America must be educated to know that they need to take to the streets to fight for their civil rights.
Wu states "a lot of the immigrants who came here, they came here in the last 20 years or so, and they see an America where everyone essentially has about equal rights, and that things are prosperous and things are great, and their vision of America is a movie version of America... The problem is we have this internal vision of America as a place of true equity, as a place of fairness and justice, without acknowledging the fact that those things have to be fought for. They don't just happen because you wish it. They happen because people go in the streets and demand it."
He goes on to say "it's not just Latinos, it's not just Asians, it's not just African Americans, it's everybody right. We, our country and the forces that be, the powers that be, have spent tremendous time, effort and money to make sure that those groups are never united, that they always see each other as enemies, as competitors, without ever realizing that they share one thing in common, that their oppressors all are the same right, the oppression comes from one place.
"And I always tell people the day the Latino, African American, Asian and other communities realize that they are, that they share the same oppressor, is the day we start winning, because we are the majority in this country now. We are, we have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fair."
This is a man who is supposed to represent the entirety of his district in Congress. He urges Asian Americans and Latinos to stand up and fight the government. "It is time for the Asian American community stand up. It is time for the Latino community to stand up and start demanding rights and having the same fights that the African Americans had," he said. But the only ones trying to keep Latino and Asian immigrants down and in low-wage jobs are people like Gene Wu.
Libby