51% of Americans in 2001 wished to see the government make it harder for immigrants to enter the United States. This is interesting not only since most Americans are immigrants themselves, but also because four centuries ago America engineered a forced immigration of West-Africans to American soil as it was in America’s economic interest. The United States now claims to hang its head low in shame at its history of the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery. Dignified as that declaration appears to be, it does not change the truth that the country economically benefited immeasurably from the breaking backs and bleeding hands of slaves whose free hard-labor is responsible for today’s flourishing of US insurance companies like Aetna and banking firms like Fleet Boston. Slavery’s economic self-aggrandizement was part of the reason slavery seemed sustainable because of the US’s consumerist modus operandi. Proportionately, slavery lingered for almost three centuries.
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