Since billionaire Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States, his speeches have been dedicated to the rejection of illegal immigrants –and the threat they allegedly pose to the economy and stability of his country– has formed an inseparable part of his political platform and election prospects.

"In US penitentiaries you will find that immigrants –legal or illegal– are just a quarter of the number of convicts that, statistically, they would correspond to considering their proportion in the US population. This means that "wetbacks" are four to five times less likely to commit a crime than Mr. Trump’s children."

The above paragraph is part of an open letter to the –quite likely– Republican candidate for President of the United States, Donald Trump, which was sent by Jorge Majfud, the Uruguayan writer and professor of Latin American literature at the American University of Georgia.

"For centuries, long before your grandparents came from Germany and had great success in the hotel and brothel business in New York, and long before your mother arrived from Scotland, Mexicans had their families here and had already given names to all the Western states, rivers, valleys, mountains and cities. California architecture and the Texas cowboy –symbols of authentic US Americans– are nothing but the result of the hybridization of the new Anglo-Saxon culture with the long-established Mexican culture. "

"When your mother came to this country in the 1930s, half a million Mexican-Americans were expelled from their land. Most of them were US citizens, but had the misfortune that the national frustration of the Great Depression –which they did not create–labeled them as foreigners. These people had been branded foreigners and rapists (as you describe them) since the United States seized half the territory of Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century. And since those people who were already there would not stop speaking a barbarous language (Spanish), and refused to change the color of their skin, they were persecuted, expelled, or simply murdered, accused of being bandits, rapists and foreign invaders.”

"The real Zorro was dark-skinned and did not fight against Mexican despotism (as Johnston McCulley wrote to sell the story to Hollywood), but against the invading Anglo-Saxons who seized their land. He was dark and rebellious like Jesus, although in religious paintings you always see the man from Nazareth as blond, blue-eyed, and rather submissive. The hegemonic power of the time that crucified him had obvious political reasons for doing so. And it continued crucifying him three centuries later when Christians were no longer persecuted illegal immigrants who hid in the catacombs, and became the official persecutors of those in power."

“European immigrants –like your parents and current wife—did not appear to be foreigners; but if your mother had come forty years earlier, she might have been mistaken for Irish; and these had indeed been branded invaders,” wrote Majfud. “The creativity of US business men and women is admirable, but its importance is overrated, and the fact that it was not businesspeople who promoted democracy in Latin America –but quite the opposite—is forgotten. There have been several US companies which have promoted coups d’état and have supported a long list of dictatorships.”

“There were businessmen, like Henry Ford, who made interesting contributions to industry; but it should not be forgotten that, like many other entrepreneurs in this country, Ford was a declared anti-Semite who collaborated with Hitler when shelter was denied to the Jews persecuted in Germany, while consortiums such as ALCOA and Texaco collaborated with the fascist regimes.”

Majfud reminds Trump that part of the current basic scientific knowledge was contributed centuries ago by those "horrible and primitive Arabs"; and that we owe to them the numbers we use, as well as algebra, algorithms, and many other sciences and philosophies that are part of Western culture today.“It was not businesspeople who managed, with their active resistance and popular struggle, the progress in civil rights that the US enjoys today. It was other patriots who, in their time, were demonized as dangerous, rioters, and anti-American.”

"Mr. Trump: a country is not a company. You have turned US politics (where intellectuals have never been abundant) into a perfect commercial marketing campaign whose main slogan against immigrants has not been a good choice." Majfud concludes.

June 28, 2016.

- Manuel E. Yepe - http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.