Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Feeling Native

For days I've mulled over a New York Times story about the town of Fremont, Neb., population 25,000, which finds itself in a raw divide over immigration. What must it feel like to experience the fading away of the town you've known forever into merely a pimple on the globe's fanny?

At the core of all the alleged immigration anxiety that has prompted an unenforceable law in Arizona, self-anointed "Minutemen" in Herndon, Va., and ripples of xenophobia in countless little towns like Fremont, where suddenly the descendants of immigrants oppose immigration, lie not merely some Angloes hankering for their pre-Civil Rights white sheets, much less any real knowledge of immigration demographics, policy or law.

At heart, this is about being a former something, in Fremont's case a mid-19th century railroad and farming town, that has now been absorbed into a more cosmopolitan world, courtesy of urban sprawl, globalization and the Internet.

Fremont is now only an exurb of Omaha, which is "big city" as it gets in Nebraska — been there. Herndon, whose "bustling downtown" you can pass in less time than it takes to read this sentence, had even less significance before its notoriety.

As for Arizona — what can you say about a state that doesn't even observe daylight saving time? — it's been downhill since the alliances between the Pueblos and the Navajos, long before Europeans set foot in the area.

Bewildering, isn't it, to dwell in country music's homeland (or a wannabe facsimile) — with whispered-about wife-swapping, divorce-prone barroom flirting and unmentionable inbred farmland fornication — to awaken with the world at your doorstep and all your wailing misunderstood.

Nothing would seem to resemble the complaint of a hateful Arizona kicker than that of a bewildered Afghan mountaineer (or Mexican farmer or Navajo tribesman or Pueblo villager): "Where do these people come from and what do they think they're doing in my country?"

Watch out, folks, history's multilingual, multicultural bulldozer is coming!

Saturday, July 14, 2007

My Virginia Boycott

First it was Herndon, now it's Prince William County. The Virginia yahoos are out with their pitchforks and getting inane local ordinances passed to vent their anti-immigrant spleen. How original of the cradle of slavery and Jim Crow!

My response? I will stop spending a penny in Virginia (just across the river from me).

I urge all who live too far from the Washington area to stop buying anything made in Virginia. That means the following:
  • No U.S. tobacco products unless labeled as made with tobacco from somewhere else.
  • No Virginia hams; Kentucky makes better ones.
  • No Virginia wines. This shouldn't pose too much of a challenge.
  • No Virginia airports. If you come to Washington, make sure you do not land in Reagan National or Dulles Airports, which are both in Virginia -- try Baltimore-Washington International, instead, which is in Maryland.
  • Refuse to do business with the Pentagon or the CIA at their headquarters -- in Virginia. Both have offices in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
  • Contact Virginia public officials informing them of your decision to cease contributing to Virginian xenophobia and racism:
  • Pass it on!
PS: Read a Washington Post story, one of many, here; go here for a taste of anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Monday, May 21, 2007

When a Door is not a Door

You remember the grade school riddle: When is a door not a door? When it's ajar. The same could be said about the immigration bill now on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Crafted as a compromise, the bill would
  • legalize foreigners who entered the USA without authorization prior to Jan. 1, 2007;
  • increase border barriers;
  • alter the family unification visa system to favor those with skills or assets.
Some people say this is too generous, as 12 million people would be legalized. Other people point out that each person has to come up with a $1,500 processing fee and a $5,000 fine, which for a family of four would mean $26,000.

Some say the border barriers will make the country more secure. Others point out that the open border, Canada, has been the gateway for would-be terrorists, whereas the patrolled border with Mexico has not coughed up one single such operative.

Some say that it's high time we stopped (other people's) family chain migrations. Other point out that changes will separate families.

Still, the politics being what they are, this is probably the best bet -- unless the Senate amends it beyond recognition.

The problem in this country are the millions of hypocritical and downright mean people who love to make life difficult for others and evade responsibilities themselves. They are easily recognizable as conservatives and Republicans.

They shout about "family values" but get caught with affairs and multiple, messy divorces -- some even with minors. They tut-tut about abortion, but they only impede the choice for poor women, who don't vote Republican if they vote at all, while leaving the possibility open for middle class and wealthy women, some of whom do vote Republican.

That's the hypocrisy part. Now comes the meanness part.

It is amply clear that the immigrants unauthorized to work hold jobs employers are happy to hire them for and that the loss of these people would be an economic setback. See, for example, this study for a snapshot of the situation in California that is representative of the national picture.

Despite the popular misconception, immigrants do not steal jobs from native workers. See here.

Yet nonetheless, there are burgeoning groups of chauvinist nativists who harass immigrants with vigilante tactics and are the backbone of the anti-immigrant movement.

There's no rhyme or reason here. It's just pure meanness. (Mixed with a generous dose of racism, which is also plain mean.)

Solutions that occur to me -- expelling the South from the Union or deporting nativists back to their beloved white, European homelands -- are either impractical or unworkable for the present.

The only solution is to give the irrational segment of our society, which unfortunately is much too large for a nation that stakes a claim to lead the world, some emotional satisfaction in exchange for a saner immigration policy.

That's what Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass) and John Kyl (R-Ariz) did last Thursday when they cobbled the present bill before the Senate.

It's time to move this nation toward a more reasonable and open policy, as open to the immigrants we will increasingly need in the future, as we were in the past to those who came before.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Assimilate to what?

Given that bringing up immigration summons the cry for assimilation, let's consider a pertinent question I don't often hear answered: to what should immigrants assimilate?

The verb to assimilate has five meanings. Physiologically, it refers to consuming and incorporating nutrients into the body after digestion and the process of anabolism. Figuratively, it refers to incorporating and absorbing knowledge into the mind. The word also means to cause something to resemble another. In linguistics, it refers to altering a sound by assimilation, as happens when a language adopts foreign words (for example, the Spanish lazo and the English lasso).

The fifth meaning, also figurative, is what people have in mind in the immigration debate: to absorb immigrants, or a culturally distinct group, into the prevailing culture. Yet in all the meanings of "assimilate" something is consumed, absorbed, incorporated (literally, to become part of a body), after some process of digestion and alteration.

All of this, means B becomes somehow enmeshed in A.

In the case of a country, for example the United States, the question is: What is that A and why does it deserve pre-eminence? The answer is more complicated than it sounds.

History tells us that the first U.S. inhabitants were the Indians. The European colonists did not assimilate into Indian society. Are anti-immigrant advocates suggesting that we at last show some respect for the native inhabitants? Somehow, I think not.

History also tells us that what is today the United States became the colonial territory of three European powers: England, France and Spain. Which one of these countries' cultures deserve predominant respect? On what grounds?

Let's try history again. In thirteen of the North American English colonies, a civil war broke out in the 1770s, with the population so divided that an estimated 100,000 loyalists fled abroad at the end of the conflict. Moreover, cultural roots among whites were about evenly divided at that time between England and Germany, to the point that the issue of a national language for the United States was deferred in all the foundational discussions as too divisive.

(We might be singing "O, sagt, könnt ihr sehen" on the Fourth of July had the Deutsch, or "Dutch" prevailed, but then we're forgetting the "other Persons" of the Constitution, who were African and spoke multiple languages.)

So the English of the 1780s had deferred the language issue knowing they might not win; half of them wanted King George, anyway, the Germans didn't want to learn English (some of them still don't speak English at home).

Then they purchased land from France (the Louisiana territory) and Spain (Florida). By the 1840s and '50s, the third major European group of the early United States arrived: the Irish. They were certainly not English. They fled a famine induced by the British, the inventors of genocidal germ warfare, to dispossess the native Irish Catholic farmers of Ireland.

Remind me, in this mix of Africans, English, French, Germans, Irish and Spanish ... by what reason was only the culture and language of the English to be accorded legal supremacy, when even the English dared not debate it for fear they would lose a vote?

But wait, then there's the entire Southwest and West. That was stolen outright by war and conquest. The predominant language and culture there was not English. Why should the territory from Texas to California have to assimilate the culture and language of the last and most unlawful newcomers, the Anglos?

Much the same question could be raised about almost any corner of the Earth.

Take Israel. Jewish scripture says God gave them the land thousands of years ago. But those lands weren't uninhabited. If Jews can leave for 1,900 years and still lay a territorial claim upon their return almost two millenia later, what about the ancient Caananites and their descendants, who didn't leave at all? Who should assimilate to whose culture and language?

This is what 50 years of war in Palestine has been all about, proving once again the irrational, tribal and nonsensical nature of all the notions that one culture has an inherent right to dominate.

People have the inalienable right to their own language and culture. Asserting that right is in the best tradition of the United States (even though in many chapters of the nation's history it was not observed), as it is of the United Nations and of Lady Liberty, whose powerful gaze watches over both from her island.

Monday, May 01, 2006

A Dream of Lady Liberty

At the cutting edge of the debate impelling millions of immigrants in the United States to wrestle with staying home or going to work today, often a choice between a full stomach or dignity, is the question of what kind of society we want -- indeed what kind of world in the future. Yet it is also an argument about the past and who we are now.

This is why this is so emotional. At the core of the immigration debate lie images awash in our emotional freight about who we citizens of wealthy countries are as societies and our place in the world. This is not just a U.S. argument: in France they resent Arabic immigrants, in Germany it's the Turks, and even Italy, a net population loser for more than a century until the 1990s, now frets about Lybians and Albanians.

We nurture fond fantasies of who we are, the heirs of Napoleon and Goethe and Jefferson (but we don't claim Paisley, Stalin or Attila). Yet the G-8 countries have in common a history of expansionism, violence, enslavement of and disdain for people of other cultures. All immigration laws are everywhere, at heart, racist and xenophobic.

For example, the first U.S. immigration laws were enacted to keep out the Chinese, later darker nationalities who were not from Northwest Europe. Even U.S. humanitarian policy has always had the stench of selfishness and right-wing ideology. The USA would not admit the Nazi-fleeing Jewish passengers of the German transatlantic liner St. Louis in 1939; in 1980, the USA admitted 900 refugees from Communist Poland but only 1 from El Salvador, where murder and dislocation, at a rate of 300 dead a week, was U.S.-funded.

Not only are the myths misleading about the past, they do not contemplate a future in which the torch of power might pass to to another land, nor one in which the white northwestern European peoples of Europe and North America, no longer reproducing at replacement levels, become an imperiled minority.

Perhaps this is why this is such a hot button issue in Berlin, Germany as it it in Berlin, New York, because it summons our tribal instincts, our fears and preconceptions of ourselves.

It is also why the famous poem by Emma Lazarus, engraved at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, deserves a second read:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

We are so accustomed to thinking of the poor huddled masses that we forget the major paradigm shift Lazarus was proposing, in an age when it was still preposterous. Lady Liberty, more than 10 times taller than the Colossus of Rhodes to whom the poet compares her, is not merely one more male conquering giant, but a mighty woman who commands with her eyes while she sheds light in the world.

The USA, at whose eastern door she commands and gives light, is not merely a tribal extension of Europe, it is the first country formed as a state, without ever before having been a people, an ethnos, a nation. Its name is a concept: unity among various territories. How fitting that the locus of a dream of unity at a global level, the United Nations, is headquarters well within the gaze of Lady Liberty.

The United States and the United Nations stand as yet unrealized ideals of common human unity, the globalization of the altruistic impulse to rejoice, revel and develop resources together, thanks to our differences.

Are we ready for such a dream? Lady Liberty commands it from her serene perch.