All men (sic) are created equal…in Southern Cal

The Fourth of July weekend in the southern Pacific coast of California from San Clemente to San Diego has on display an ethnic rainbow of residents and visitors in its fabulous beaches, the cost of gasoline doubling from last year notwithstanding. Commuters on the Metrolink along the coastal rail service that goes through the famed Solanas Beach and the celebrated Torrey Pines Federal Reserve, site of Tiger Wood’s last magic on the links not too long ago, would be forgiven if they thought that an ordinance had been passed to ban anyone who was not golden tanned, with abs flat as a mesa, and muscles toned like those of the Mediterranean gods and goddesses liberally exhibited at San Diego’s Balboa Park.

On the hills of Del Mar Heights and the valley of Carmel and the homes of La Jolla live my two grandsons of Irish-German-Scot-Sino-Malay-Anglo-Saxon-Iberian pedigree and are learning their numbers and ABCs with denizens of equally complex genetic lineage. They join the polyglot and mixed-bags of DNAs that populate the place whose young, if their grannies only believed that “all men are created equal,” have taken it for granted and are just too busy living it.

Unleashed more than two hundred years ago, the notion of universal equality—not sameness nor equal ratings on a common scale—but equal treatment by government before the law. Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “all men are created equal” was but a rebuttal to the prevailing “divine rights of kings” during his time, and “all men” definitely did not include the African slaves and native Americans, nor women and children. In fact, it referred to propertied white males.

Whatever the phrase meant it is one of those that “we hold (these truths) to be true.” On this basis, JFK in A Nation of Immigrants (1958) wrote that “Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn to the world, and to our own past, with clean hands and a clear conscience.”

Until 1965, immigration to the United States favored national origins from England, Holland, Germany and France, traditional nations who first settled and shaped the original 13 Colonies. In fact, until the U.S. Civil War, the colonies pretty much determined issues of immigration with an open door policy toward Europe and forced coercion from the tribes of West Africa.

Asian and Latin American contract workers in the West Coast would alter the reality of a New England culture, with a reaction so strong that it resulted in the banning of immigration from the Asia Pacific Triangle culminating in the blatantly racial incarceration of residents of Japanese descent during WWII.

Yet, the phrase itself would come to mean in our time, “all humankind,” praised during the 1976 bicentennial 4th of July celebration when a new Declaration of Interdependence became the tenor of festivities and town meetings across the nation. This shift of the United States as simply an outgrowth of colonial Europe, to a United States that is a microcosm of the whole world happened during the vast social experiments of the 60s. This social upheaval is a living feature in Southern Cal.

We need “an immigration policy reflecting America’s ideal of the equality of all men without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin,” said Senator Hiram Fong of Hawaii when the Senate opened immigration hearings in 1965. The resulting immigration act was a repudiation of the restrictive policies from the 1870s to 1929, which prevented migration from anywhere other than the traditional source of the 13 colonies. Henceforth, immigration would be based on preferred professional skills and enabling family reunification.

Preference toward skills created the “brain drain” phenomenon that saw the educated and competent from third World nations magnetized to the United States and Canada. The newly sprouted Japan and Korea towns, and the well established Chinatowns, have sent students to top universities in the last two decades. This second criteria would identify the Act as the “brothers and sisters act.”

A study profile in the 70s goes: An Asian male comes to the U.S. to study, gets certified to work, becomes an immigrant and decides to “reunite his family.” He petitions his wife and children to join him. The couple become citizens and then petition for their parents and brothers and sisters—all outside the numerical quotas. The brothers and sisters then petition for their own spouses, children, parents and siblings. In 10 years, the one student-turned-immigrant would be joined by an average of 18 relatives with their own extended families in tow.

From such fact, otherwise sane Peter Brimelow would issue his book, Alien Nation, echoing the nation’s group anxiety and “common sense about America’s immigration disaster.” The mixed review on the current state of U.S. immigration would have President Bush declare in the State of the Union Address in February 2005 that “America’s immigration system is outdated, unsuited to the needs of our economy and to the values of our country. We should not be content with laws that punish hardworking people who want only to provide for their families, and deny businesses willing workers, and invites chaos at our border.” Underneath this group anxiety is the misguided intent to keep the nation remain a “New England,” with English as its sole language in processes of cultural assimilation as a melting pot, rather than the mosaic of the Global Village coming to stay.

The United States celebrates the Fourth of July as Independence Day while we in the Commonwealth see it as Liberation Day, a seeming deliberate attempt to distance the Commonwealth from the “all men are created equal” motif were we to gauge current government actuations, and an illusory exercise to exorcise the reality that the people of these isles willingly cooperated with the efforts of Japan, the post-WWI League of Nation’s administering authority on islands north of the Equator, during the 40s conflict.

But for now, I am working on my abs in the Nation of Immigrants here in Southern Cal. Happy birthday, America!