On Immigration

[Above photo: A plane at Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok with a timely message.]

15 May 2023

A murmuration of starlings is quite a sight, swelling and contracting, forming a variety of rounded shapes in the air. Unfortunately, I have only a single starling who visits my suet feeder and aggressively chows down each day on enough suet and seeds to feed a family of nuthatches for a week. As with many aggressive imports, starlings take more than their share, terrorize smaller birds, and breed unconscionably. Still, they are birds and, as such, remarkable. I suppose that green crabs, which are decimating the bivalve (mussels, clams) population of the coast of Maine, are also amazing but I don’t feel the same charity toward them.

Immigration is a huge problem. And will become a larger problem as climate change, violent gangs, arbitrary and tyrannical governments, and lack of economic opportunity force masses of people to leave their home countries for places better suited to human life. Those with whom I have spoken, and it includes quite a few from Latin America, the Philippines, Malawi, and Myanmar, would much rather stay in the countries of their birth with their extended families, terra cognita, and mother tongue. Life, however, is unsustainable in many of their home countries. It isn’t that they move to get rich; they travel afar to survive and to assist their families. Many women in the Philippines work in the Middle East, leaving their children and receiving foul treatment to boot.  It is common for men to leave Malawi, where there are no jobs, and travel to S. Africa where the leftover scraps they can get exceed what they could at home.  In Myanmar, even in peacetime, many were working in Thailand or Malaysia in order to send money home. During the current civil war and economic collapse in Myanmar, people leave so as not to be arrested for opposing the military coup, as well as to try to eek out a living. However, it is a rare person who prefers to take on the exclusion, suspicion, language barrier, and poor treatment they get from citizens of a foreign country to which they travel for subsistence work, rather than to stay at home with wife, children, parents, uncles and aunties, grandparents, siblings, friends, and mother tongue, unless desperation forces them to do so.

Our former Maine governor, who was openly and unapologetically racist, allegedly said in a radio interview that the crime rate in Lewiston, where Somalis immigrants have settled, had “gone through the roof” since their arrival.  To the relief and amusement of many, the Lewiston Chief of Police said, “To the contrary, the crime rate has decreased significantly since the Somalis settled here.”  In a series of studies, US citizen communities have a considerably higher crime rates than socio-economically matched immigrant communities. Reports from the media, even if factual, are often misleading, amplifying the “danger” of this immigrant group or that simply by differentially reporting it and not giving equal time to our home-grown criminals.  Then there is the Donald with his “Mexican rapists and murderers”, the blanket exclusion of Muslims, and the “massive George Soros-financed  caravans moving toward the Mexican border”, which statements exaggerate, or completely contrive, danger. The induction of fear of “other” groups is a common technique of mind-control used by dictators throughout history: Gays, Jews, Armenians, the educated (China and Cambodia), Hutus/Tutsis and so on.

It is inevitable that we are going to see huge shifts of population in the next half century, masses of people moving away from untenable living situations like we have never previously experienced. And since they are people, like us, who want safety, education for their children, jobs, food, shelter, medical care, and the rule of law in a stable society, we cannot dehumanize them as rodents or aliens without dehumanizing ourselves equally. We had best attempt to develop a unified approach toward them that does not include, for example, separating children from their families as a means of dissuading them from coming.

The problem of illegal migration from Mexico has been with us for a long time. It has well-served farmers who have wanted and needed cheap labor.  They would not have been able to get their crops out of the fields and to market without the farm workers. But we have been very ambivalent toward them and excluded them from collective bargaining agreements that covered all other unionized workers.  Only after many years of struggle were Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers able to secure those rights. We have been unable to formulate a coherent and humane policy regarding Mexican laborers through many administrations, both Democrat and Republican. We have wanted to use their labor each planting and harvest season but have not wanted to accept them as citizens of our country. It is hypocritical and unfounded to throw eggs at Joe Biden for his current immigration failures unless we are simultaneously willing to acknowledge our own complicity, and that of every preceding administration, Republican, Democrat, and Trump, to resolve this issue. I cannot think of a way to do it but I know we’d better have some basic principles to guide us as we formulate our immigration policy or we will be no better than Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Milosevic, Pinochet, Pol Pot, and numerous other cruel tyrants who dehumanized and killed large groups of people.

For me, it’s about what kind of a world do I want to live in and how do I want to view myself.  Will it be one where we try to keep everything static because it feels safe and comfortable but for which I must pay a huge price in my humanity and my awareness of the suffering of others?   Alternately, can I accept that the world is inevitably changing and can I personally accommodate and support those shifts so that I have a richer, not a poorer, spirit in order to feel proud, not ashamed of myself?

Immigrant energy is a lot of what has made our country great. Providing dignity for all is much more likely to result in peace and prosperity than demonizing or, even worse, humiliating or ignoring the existence and plight of others less fortunate.  I’ve lived in places where life is barely tenable and have seen the corrosive effect it has on those who are caught there.

When I lived in Berkeley I used to interview Harvard College applicants together with a Radcliffe graduate of my generation, an internationally-acclaimed architect.  She and I were astounded at some of the foreign-born kids we met. We were both floored by a particular girl, an Afghani, who had cowered in basements during the Soviet invasion of her country, unable to go to school. After two years in the US, at 16 yo she won a state-wide oratory contest, speaking in English. She was valedictorian of her high school graduating class and had participated in all manner of humanitarian good works by the time she was 18yo. She was a lively, friendly, bright, hard-working girl who had what we labelled as “immigrant hunger”.  Do we really want to miss out on harnessing her motivation and capacities, living as we do in an increasingly competitive time in which democracy and tyranny are vying for supremacy among nations?  And do we want to lose the power of all the other immigrants, the great majority of whom want to establish themselves as honest, hard-working Americans?

I certainly don’t know how we’ll manage these changes, but I hope we will do it in a way that preserves our decency and the immigrants’ dignity.