The cruelty underlying anti-immigrant sentiments is not of America. The land doesn’t discriminate. The land supports and nourishes and homes. The land provides and shelters and holds.

The only distinction between myself and the immigrants currently facing or fearful of deportation are pieces of paper. Words written on trees the land gave us used as an instrument of control. We insist that we are a country of laws but the truth is the land predates those selectively applied laws, too.

The truth is that the individuals attempting to enforce anti-immigrant policies are themselves the decedents of immigrants.

Every single one of them.

Without exception.

To pretend as if that’s not the case is to feed a fallacy rooted in white supremacy and selective history. Their inability to relate stems from their refusal to embrace the totality of who they are. For if they did, they would recognize themselves in the same people that they claim indifference, disregard, and animosity towards. We cannot force them to see our humanity, but we can continue to ask them: what happened to your own?

We can understand that at the heart of what ails humanity, is an obsession with perceived scarcity forged from the conviction that loving you somehow TAKES from me. The belief that there isn’t enough to go around has falsely convinced us that your well being is fundamentally at odds with my own. But the Earth? The land around and beneath us? It knows nothing of such scarcity. Look at the flowers and the mountains and the seas — look at the extravagance of a sunset on any given day and try to convince me that life itself justifies such behavior. You can’t because it doesn’t. There are seasons of challenge and change but life inevitably and definitively finds a way.

And so here, too — we find ourselves faced to reckon with an America that is, and an America that could be.

An America that grasps for something outside of itself, versus an America that simply becomes. An America that simply allows. An America that refuses to abandon, or deport, or dehumanize ANY ONE standing firm in the knowledge that a life built from scarcity, and security obtained through fear and division, will always remain decidedly insecure.

Because security forged in scarcity will always leave us fighting to maintain claim over what we perceive as ours. Never at home with what we claim to have, or who we claim to be.

Perpetually lying to ourselves.