What will we tell our children?

Long, long ago, California used to be part of a country called the United States of America. The United States of America, or America, as some people called it, was the most powerful country on the whole planet.

I know it's hard to believe that today, when we're sending them food to keep them from starving, but once upon a time, many of the states in Mexico, like Texas and Arizona, were part of America.

Much of Canada, like Washington, Idaho, Montana, and other large areas also were part of America. The states in the Confederacy were also part of the country that was once called America.

How did everything change? Why did it change? Those are really good questions. And it all began when this amazingly huge, rich, and powerful country began to harass many of it's poorest people.

These people were not born in America, they were born in another country. Some of them were born on islands in the Pacific, like Tonga or the Philipines. Others were born in European countries, like England, Germany, and Albania. Many were born in Vietnam, China, Burma, and other Asian countries. But most of these people were from countries south of America's border.

These people were called immigrants, which was strange, because all of the people in America had come from somewhere else, even the ones who crossed the land bridge from Asia during the last Ice Age to become the group known as the Native Americans. Some of the immigrants were brought to America by force from Africa and other continents, but most of the immigrants came there freely.

Most of them came for the same reasons that immigrants keep coming today: not enough food at home, not enough jobs where they were from; while others had been persecuted by other people for their beliefs, their customs, and I know it's hard to believe, but even for the color of their skin!

So if this whole country was filled with immigrants and the children of immigrants, why was there a problem with these new immigrants? Well, the immigrants had not done anything different from the people who had come there before they did, they worked long hours at the hardest jobs for very little money. They often lived in the worst neighborhoods. And they paid a lot of taxes to the government of America, too.

And these people hadn't done anything wrong, either. What had changed was the fact that many of the people whose families had been in America for a long time, and were still poor, were told a lie. They were told that they were poor, because all of these people who had immigrated were stealing their jobs.

This would have been funny, because many of the jobs that these people had lost went to India, Russia, and other places where people would work for even less than the poorest people in America. But it wasn't funny, because the people who had lost these jobs, most of them working in technology and customer service, were very angry and afraid. They wanted someone to blame for their troubles.

The reason why these jobs had gone away was that their government, the government of America, had changed the laws to allow the companies that had given these people their jobs, to take those jobs and move them to other countries so that the rich people who owned these companies could make themselves even richer.

Some of these people were so wealthy, that they had more money than entire countries. You might think that that was enough money to keep them happy, but no, they were so greedy that they wanted even more money. It had become a game to them, but this game was killing and starving other people. But since these rich people didn't see the poor people suffering with their own eyes, it didn't bother them. It didn't seem real. Maybe it was like watching a movie for them.

Meanwhile, the immigrants who were growing their food, taking care of their children, building their beautiful houses, walking their dogs, cleaning their homes, cooking their food, and doing it all for almost no money were told that the laws were about to be changed again.