The American Dream Is Not Dead
An editorial on why the American Dream endures: the poverty and violence driving migration persist while U.S. and Mexican policies fail migrants.
An editorial on why the American Dream endures: the poverty and violence driving migration persist while U.S. and Mexican policies fail migrants.
The US has not only historically benefited from the labor of millions of migrants; it has built its economic power on them. And Mexico, at the same time, has paid a very high price: loss of productive capacity, rural decline, community uprooting, and dependence on a model that expels people only to turn them into cheap labor.
Millions of women who have endured unspeakable violence on their migration journey are now being persecuted in the United States by an extremely xenophobic and misogynistic government, led by Donald Trump,
On the world stage, the reaction to Trump’s imperialist assault remains at the level of statements of rejection: condemnations that sound firm but are ultimately empty, incapable of halting the Trump machine.
Trump’s danger lies not only in the harm he inflicts on migrants in the US, but also in the possibility that his xenophobic model will be replicated in other countries.
Trump’s actions & rhetoric have once again placed migrants at the center of public debate, creating an adverse climate characterized by restrictive measures & open xenophobia.
To talk about migration in this month of November, when we honor our dead & celebrate their memory, is also to renew hope. While many governments remain silent, millions of people organize, march, and protest against authoritarianism and hatred.
How is it possible that those who have driven the economic growth of the United States and their countries of origin such as Mexico remain trapped in a grinding poverty that condemns them to exile?
It is not enough to denounce Trump: it is necessary to point the finger at the global system, led by the United States, which has historically exploited the
poorest peoples.
The recent introduction of the Dignity Act makes clear the structural disdain of US Republicans and Democrats towards the migrant community.