The song “America the Beautiful” ends on a high note: “and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.”

But what exactly is America? Some define it as an immense tract of land about 1,500 miles wide by 2,500 miles tall, north of the Rio Grande and south of the Great Lakes.

However, many inhabitants of the other countries sharing our longitudinal lines define America as the land stretching between the North Pole and the South Pole, west of the Atlantic, east of the Pacific.

Although we do not share a government with these people, we share a kinship, and we are both inheritors of a legacy: We were once colonies of a European nation, but now we are free.

Since the declaration of our sovereignty more than 200 years ago, the United States has done pretty well for itself. A fledgling band of English expatriates laid the foundation of our government using social concepts that had yet to be proven. The European colonist nations scoffed, but despite a variety of wars that followed, they could not wrest our land away.

Soon we expanded across the breadth of the land, our population swelling as immigrants flooded in from Germany, Norway, Italy and more. Yet even those born here knew deep down they were the sons and daughters of immigrants, celebrating their diversity through various traditions.

Unfortunately, not all of the American nations prospered in similar fashion. Che Guevara realized this in his journey around the South American continent, and saw the oppression of his people from the legacy of colonialism that still exists today.

In similar fashion to the stratification that segregates the children of colonialists from the children of the indigenous peoples, some citizens of this country seek to further inflict economic harm on our Southern neighbors. Congress is currently debating a bill to alter immigration law.

At the heart of this matter, as is true for most recent legislation, is money.

One side of the equation represents those in this country who have capital interests, and the other side represents immigrants and their families, the majority of which left the oppressive conditions of their homeland to seek a better life in our magical land of freedom and liberty.

They come to do the jobs we don’t want to do, working in landscaping, plastics factories, car washes and meat packing, and their busboy kin empty the trays of ashes from our fancy cigarettes and wipe up the spills from our martinis.

They also provide a source of cheap labor to American businesses, effectively keeping many companies from opening foreign plants and abandoning their plants here.

Legislation to increase the troubles that our immigrants must face is not only unjust, but unwise and ineffective. This legislation intends to keep the wealth of our nation in the hands of the American elite, yet many businesses in America will either ignore immigration laws as they always have, or take their business overseas.

In either case, our greed could eventually become our nation’s economic downfall, and raising the minimum wage will not help us. We are too proud to accept that we are as American as the poorest people of Canada, Guatemala, Brazil and even Mexico, who will never be too proud to outbid us.

Che Guevara saw this and fought for this. He said, “The reward is seen in the distance; the way is lonely. Further on it is a route for wolves; one can succeed only at the cost of the failure of others.”

The CIA killed him, but no bullet can silence the truth that a man leaves behind.