When you were 16, you couldn’t get an unskilled, part time, summer, construction job.
It was all the Italians, or those Portuguese, although if you had paid any attention, those older men had actually come over after the World War Two, and had already been here a decade or more.
In the early 70’s, you complained about all the ‘Boat People’ who had fled Viet Nam (and the war your country started), and all the small corner stores that they opened ‘stealing all the business’.
Although you missed the fact that whole families were working 12 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, managing those super fresh vegetables that you were always buying anyway.
You bitched in turn about the Mexicans, the Jamaicans, the Chinese, the Samalis, who in turn came as migrant labourers, and then struggled to bring their families, and how 'they were taking all the work'.
As if you had ever remotely imagined yourself picking fruit from dusk to dawn, outside in the sun, while living in a barracks shack on some remote farm.
You demanded your aging parents ‘get better care’ at the senior’s residence you shoved them into, that being a not at all subtle code for ‘not those Pakistanis, get a white person’.
As if you personally would wash bed pans, or change soiled bed linens, or put up with the constant dementia screaming, the reason you put your mom and dad there in the first place.
All your life you have raged about ‘them damn Immigrants, coming here and taking all the jobs’, always work that you personally never remotely considered applying for.
Never considering that the true reason you can’t get that dream job you want (even though you are not remotely trained for it, or have any of the basic abilities it requires) …
Has always been YOU.
Image : 'Immigrants leaving IRELAND for New York - 1874'
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