Essay on Native American and Ethnic Immigrants

Capitalism negatively affected immigrants and Native Americans from the perspective of self-interest, private ownership of property and the limited intervention by the government; the three primary pillars of capitalism. The American government has little to do against the capitalist evident through Takaki's (2008) elaboration of the warfare between the then US administration and the indigenous individuals which led to the passage of the law regarding the rights of the Indians to own lands in 1805. The negative impact of capitalism among the Native Americans and immigrants is evident from the characteristics of the capitalists' mode of goods production such as wars, genocide, violence and coercion against Americas' indigenous populations (Jaimes, 1992). The development and expansion of capitalism commodified and privatized the lands for tobacco and cotton production and consequently forming the primary force by which the capitalists accumulated wealth and power to exploit immigrants and the Natives Americans through wage labor and slavery. One of the other negative consequences of capitalism is the ripping of the lands from the Native Americans which was their sole sustenance means hence turning most of the native-born Americans into subjugated laborers in their previously-owned farms. It was through capitalism that the issues of exploitation and class oppression against the immigrants and the native-born Americans. It also due to capitalism that the concept of the struggle for Indigenous autonomy and sovereignty against continued dispossession of their aboriginal rights.

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Cesaire (2012) equates the invasion of the British colonialists into America with genocide to the immigrants and the native born-Americans since most of them succumbed to the brutal force of savage and wage labor in their fertile and productive land. As a confirmation of the attribute of the colonial invasion as a form of genocide, Cesaire says that "the very humanism upon which the West was built also justified slavery, colonialism and genocide" (Cesaire, 2012, p. 19). The capitalists exploited the colonialists' military force to conduct series of self-interest economic transaction such as the acquisition of lands from the natives for the expansion of tobacco and cotton plantation where immigrants and native-born Americans served as sources of cheap labor. Cesaire (2012, p. 23) further asserts that the capitalists took control of most of the land belonging to native-born Americans with the remaining small plots set aside for the immigrants and native-born Americans as "reservations." Therefore, the lifestyles of the Native-Americans were destroyed to form what Cesaire (2012) terms as "assimilations into modern lives." Smith (2007) considers the consequence of capitalism on ethnic immigrants as a way of sending them to rot in reservation quarters. In Cesaire's (2012, p. 37) attempt to explain the traits of capitalist society, he uses Hitler's case to clarify that the capitalist society at the colonial time that it was unable to establish the notion of equal rights hence proving the incapability of the capitalist system to develop personal ethics. Cesaire (2012, p. 43) confirms the adverse effect of colonization and capitalism by stating that they turned the ethnic immigrants and the indigenous men into slave drivers, army sergeants, classroom monitors and instruments of production in cocoa and cotton plantations. The description leads to Cesaire (2012, p. 43) equating colonization with "thingification" and description of the colonized individuals as those "whom fear has been cunningly instilled to possess inferiority complex and made to despair, kneel and tremble justly like flunkies."

Takaki (2008) on the other hand illuminate the effects of colonialism on the ethnic immigrants, Irish individuals by saying that the invaders took their heads and used them as trophies. Furthermore, the Irish immigrants as the primary targets and savages in the English warfare hence their reduction into wretchedness. The negative impact of the expansion of the cotton and tobacco plantation is mainly on the Irish and the Indians who were the majority ethnic immigrants. Takaki (2008) attributes the atrocities between among the English to the British belief that as colonizers, they were engaging in ethically and biblically correct as their religious ideologies permitted the treatment of people from different cultures and those who hold diverse religious views to be lesser human beings. Capitalism also had financial repercussions among the ethnic immigrants. For examples, the act of denying the Indians their rights for land ownership according to Takaki was a way of "destroying the Indian immigrants financially" (Takaki 2008, p. 48). In tobacco and cotton plantation farms, the ethnic immigrants and the imported low-wage employees were very useful tools of production among the British capitalists. The usefulness is the sense that as a result of the availability of cheap labor from the immigrants, the indigenous workers were forced to resent to insufficient and commonplace public services, overcrowding in workers quarters, poor working conditions and reduced wages. Such labor conditions affected the native-born Americans' living conditions at the expense of creating more profits for the capitalist society's plantations.

The type of segregation and prejudice against the ethnic immigrants is related to initial UC's Master Plan that only benefited the indigenous student from California and excluded immigrants and non-traditional students. The exclusion is evident from the later expansion of the weekend programs to accommodate the immigrant students. The denial of land ownership rights among the ethnic immigrants is comparable to the UC's Master Plan attribute of unequal utilization of resources among all students.

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cesaire, A. (2012). Discourse on Colonialism. Marlborough, England: Adam Matthew Digital.

Jaimes, A. (1992). The State of Native America: Genocide, colonization, and resistance. Boston: South End Press.

Smith, J. (2007). Europe and the Americas: state formation, capitalism, and civilizations in Atlantic modernity. Boston: Brill.

Takaki, R. (2008). A different mirror: a history of multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.