To the Journal editor:

Immigrants, refugees, migrants, what’s the difference and why do we fear, or (be) made to fear them? They are all leaving their country of birth for many reasons and causes such as climate change, colonialism, and foreign policies that support of tyrants, dictators, death squads, funded by American money, and gangs to which this nation bears responsibility for.

As this nation seeks to dominate the world, it turns its back on the casualties of its policies, seduced by militarization and the empire in support of globalization, intruding and intervening into nations and people who we perceive to stand in the way of this nation’s selfish policies.

“The political map has also changed dramatically over the past decade. It has seen the resurgence of an increasingly violent hard right, a force that is gaining power across the globe by stoking hatred against ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, often manifesting as xenophobic hatred directed at the growing numbers of people who have been forced to leave their homelands,” wrote Naomi Klein in her new book “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for the Green New Deal,” September 2019.

Millions of people worldwide have fled their homes due to the extremes of climate related weather events, that include hurricanes, floods, landslides, wildfires, and the extremes of temperatures and rising seas, to which the United States is not excluded, but which seeks to insulate itself from, keeping out those seeking out to founder for themselves. These people did not create this crisis.

It was largely, overwhelmingly, the creation of the wealthiest aspect of society. As they turn their backs on the victims of centuries of exploitation, pillaging, and destruction of their lands these victims pay the price and seek reparation from the perpetrators, take desperate measures for which they often face extreme suffering, humiliation, and death in their efforts to seek a better life.

There are powerful interests who like things just the way they are, grinding down people and the landscape in the pursuit of profits over human needs.

This is an emergency, a crisis of climate change, brought on by the capitalistic players who dominate the politics, who corrupt our leaders through money, who buy power by scapegoating and blaming the victims, to preserve power and wealth in an increasingly unequal world.

FRED JAKOBCIC

Marquette