Boat People

 Unless your ancestors walked across the Bering Strait Land Bridge tens of thousands of years ago, chances are they were Boat People. 

You may recall this term being used in the mid to late 1970s as a derogatory epithet to refer to refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. These were people who were fleeing their countries in fear for their lives and livelihood as their countries had suffered massive upheaval at the end of a war that had most recently featured the weapons and destruction of (checks notes) The United States of America. In attempts to free Southeast Asia from the grips of the tyranny of Communism, it seems we forgot to account for the massive wave of emigration that could occur in the wake of the departure of the American Armed Forces. 

So when those folks who fled their countries looking for freedom, they had their eyes set on the land of the brave and the home of the free. And did I mention immigrants? Oh yeah. There were quite a lot of those. With the exception of a small group of surviving Native Americans who had been scooped up and relocated to what I can only assume was ironically referred to as "reservations." The rest of us showed up in much the same way, fleeing oppression of one form or another, or in a bizarre turn of events as a part of oppression in the form of oppression called the Slave Trade. 

By boats.

From the 1960's through the mid nineties people fled the communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. They faced the same hostile reception as their compatriots from Southeast Asia. It was easy to keep track of these interlopers because they looked different than the folks who came over in a boat called The Mayflower. It was around this same time that folks started to flee Haiti, making the somewhat longer trip to the shores of the United States in boats just as sketchy as those that made the ninety mile trip from Havana. 

Once a group of individuals arrive on our shores, they tend to do what most of us have done since John Smith stuck a flag in Jamestown: They huddle together in settlements where their culture and traditions can be shared in order to give the impression of homogeny, in spite of they way they look different from those surrounding their enclave. Chinatown. Koreatown. Little Havana. Little Saigon. And so on. 

Periodically these become focal points for xenophobia, in spite of the obvious hypocrisy. Meanwhile, those who continue in the vague tradition of the Bering Strait Land Bridge find themselves blocked not by a washed out span, but by fences, walls and armed checkpoints. How dare you try to find your way to freedom and bravery without a boat.