Here are two short stories that Oklahoma children read in class. “Paper Son”, and “Path to Paper Son”, the subject of which is illegal Chinese immigration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Children have no context to understand illegal immigration or its disastrous effects upon local, native populations who are forced to contend with them, competing for jobs and resources. They’re instead presented with emotional portraits of immigrants who lie to immigration authorities in order to bring more Chinese to the United States, painting the criminal dishonesty in a sympathetic light. Ryan Walters and other Republicans waste their time trying to get the Bible into our classrooms, while totally ignoring the real, long-term subversion that is occurring right under their noses. The children who absorb these stories will become voters in 15 years, and they’ll remember the emotional context, but none other, when thinking about mass illegal immigration. These stories are sad, as many stories of migrants are. But that doesn’t give them a claim upon a foreign nation, and it doesn’t force upon us an obligation to decimate our nation to help them. We can’t help everyone, and it doesn’t make us bad people to face that fact. Far too many Oklahomans have stories that are far more tragic, but where is the outcry? Why should these stories be forgotten, while those of the foreign-born are given priority?
