Friday, June 7, 2013

Golden Venture aground 20 years ago

Today, Storycorps has a 20th anniversary vignette from one of the most revealing episodes in American immigration history, the Golden Venture.  Restricting immigration here supports forced depopulation there.  "There," of course, varies -- sometimes China, sometimes Africa, most often today latin America.  Anti-immigration propaganda encourages Americans to feel that we are crowded and being pushed beyond our capacity to help, even though we the richest country in the world with a population density that is about 2/3 of the global average.  If we are over-crowded, then the world is tremendously over-populated!  But beyond the propaganda, when we refuse to accept immigrants and refuse to offer an escape, we are complicit in the brutal depopulation policies of emigrant nations.

http://www.npr.org/2013/06/07/189222117/finding-an-anchor-for-a-life-set-adrift-by-a-shipwreck

Shengqiao Chen, left, met Zehao Zhou while in prison waiting for asylum. Zhou was his translator. Here, Zhou shares memorabilia with Chen — twenty years after the Golden Venture arrived in the U.S.