Editor:

San Francisco’s “outside lands” has a long tradition of supporting racist ideologies and concepts. It was just last year that Stow Lake had the name of the head of the California’s Know Nothing (formerly Native American) Party removed. Yet and avenue and fort both, nauseatingly, still celebrate the life of General Funston, the butcher of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, and White Aryan Resistance made the Outer Sunset its headquarters as recently as the 1990s.

So it is sad yet predictable that a former judge, who has worked tirelessly for decades to limit citizen input (the latest being his campaign against district elections) would quote the far-right cult-controlled Epoch Times and employ contrived and questionable statistics to rail against immigration.

We should note that, while immigration has benefited the Sunset and Richmond district economies and society immensely (providing restaurants, shops and even additional holidays for opportunists to profit financially from), immigrants themselves have had a tough path. Restrictions against ownership by the new arrivals prevailed until relatively recently, and many immigrants such as Vietnamese and Cambodians were forced into exile as a result of misguided American military imperialism motivated by lunatic concepts such as the “domino theory.”

While these have long been proven false, Judge Quentin Kopp’s May column shows that San Francisco has a long path ahead to achieve social equity. It is completely racist and intellectually pathetic to call any individual “illegal.” The system has always been geared towards preferring the entry of white minorities. Immigration quotas have always been motivated by illogical fear of the other. Brookings is far from a “liberal” policy group, but the policy paper referenced, not surprisingly, is distorted by the good judge, and actually calls for meaningful positive change.

Many of our current immigrants have been forced here by our actions. NAFTA, climate catastrophe, and support for a coup in Honduras come to mind. But nobody is going to acknowledge that  —  any more than many of today’s luminaries are the offspring of “illegal” immigrants or that San Francisco is an imperial city which benefits and has benefited mightily from the exploitation of both those arriving here and from those exploited by Apple, The Gap and  other unjustly celebrated corporations.

Bay Area corporations such as Hearst, Lockheed and others have profited immensely from our imperialist foreign policies. Both Kopp’s policies and the support of his and other prominent San Franciscans for the slaughter of tens of thousands of women and children in occupied Palestine – with our weapons – shows that we have a long path toward educating and reprimanding our heartless demagogues ahead of us.

While Quentin Kopp regularly receives free opera tickets – a perk of his privileged presence on the War Memorial Commission – “illegal” immigrants work tirelessly to clean our toilets, diaper our children and prepare canapés for our galas. Perhaps it is time we acknowledge our debt to these hardworking individuals, rather than indulge in petulant vituperation and utterly pathetic name calling. Teaching real history would be a good start.

Harry S. Pariser