In a 1987 interview, then-Smiths frontman Morrissey complained about the arrival of the McDonalds franchise in England in 1974. He called it the beginning of the end for Great Britain.
Decades later he would complain about the ‘scourge’ of immigration afflicting the homogeneous quality English identity.
As intelligent and well spoken as the pop star is purported to be, it never dawns on his awareness that McDonalds was as much a symptom of the capitalist cycle of reverse colonialism as of any liberal immigration policy.
Within a decades-long gestation of capitalism, even the colonizer inevitably becomes the colonized.
Fortunately or not, reverse colonialism seems to only happen to the colonizing nation like a Great Britain or United States. In the mid-1970s, the United States arrived at the end of its manufacturing/exporting stage and began importing more products than it exported.
Enabling that shift to a trade-deficit economy were U.S. manufacturers who exported jobs to ‘developing’ nations like China and Mexico; where labor costs undersold the American labor market.
Overlapping the diminishing manufacturing sector was an expanding service economy, creating a demand for lower wage workers. Cue the “tired” “poor” “huddled masses” arriving to work for sub-living standard wages.
Aside from the colonizer’s shifts in exporting, consider foreign policy decisions that prompt a migration response. For years, the U.S. bolstered right-wing governments or funded right-wing revolts in Central- and South America as well as in the Caribbean. The fallout of said support typically plunged the meddled nation into civil war or a general domestic strife (involving death squads and kidnappings).
As a result of such foreign policy exploits, citizens of the aforementioned meddled countries typically sought refuge within the United States. Specifically speaking, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua and El Salvador have each dispatched ample samples of their respective populations northward.
Given the complicity of American economic- or foreign policies, driven by extractive financial systems — who is in any position to criticize or condemn the undocumented entry of foreign civilians?
Granted, the shallow-minded, self-appointed moral scolds who target immigrants, can’t be bothered to account for the political and economic forces that channel and shape individual destinies.
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Previously Published on Medium
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