My ethnic heritage was a source of immense pride among my relatives when I was growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s. At our frequent family gatherings, most everything was “Italian this” and “Italian that.” Anyone who has seen the Rita Moreno character in the 1980s movie “The Four Seasons” — whose husband got so sick of her Italian references that he screamed about it out a window — can understand. Even though I’m basically a third-generation American, I thought of myself as an Italian in a sense (the American part was taken for granted).
I can’t help but think of this when I see what’s happening today in America. Many people from the older generations that were very attuned to their ethnic heritage, and very proud of immigrating to America, are now the most unwelcome to the newest wave of immigrants.
There is a lot to be disturbed about. But arguably most disturbing is that people seem to forget that everything they say about immigrants today is the same thing that people said about their own parents and grandparents (such as Italians) in the last century. “They” were lazy. Uneducated. Spoke a funny language. Worshiped the wrong religion (being Catholic was akin to being Muslim today). They ate funny food (recall Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” contemptuously referring to Italians as “garlic eaters”). Those who say the same things about the newest crop of newcomers have convenient amnesia. If “real Americans” had their way a century ago, Italians – among others – would not have been able to stay here, and I’d be somewhere else today.
This is not a new debate, and it’s not just America. Tribalism is as old as human history. The Hebrew Bible, for example, reflects a debate among Israelites about how to treat foreigners. Some thought Israel should be separate and treat the world with hostility. Those people wrote stories about killing all the foreigners on the way to the Holy Land. They wrote that God ordered cities to be cleansed by killing every man, woman and child (and sometimes livestock). Achan was executed for the sin of taking loot from a battle because even possessions of foreigners were unclean.
Others, however, had a different view, that Israel should live in peace with its neighbors. Like the author of the book of Jonah, a story about a Jewish prophet who wanted God to destroy the city of Nineveh, but God rebuked him and spared Nineveh. Or the prophet Ezekiel, who said that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because they weren’t hospitable to outsiders and warned Israelites to not make the same mistake.
It’s The Economy, Stupid
The wave of anti-immigrant sentiment is particularly puzzling at a time when the country is in the longest economic expansion in the modern era. It’s hard to say they are taking away jobs when jobs are not difficult to get. And the U.S. needs people. Our birth rate is not enough to replenish the population without immigrants. Japan and other countries demonstrate that a declining/aging population leads to low or negative economic growth. Fewer people, fewer workers, the economy shrinks – it’s basic math.
Immigration is especially important to large economic centers. I recently did a study on U.S. migration patterns for an article in a commercial real estate magazine. The domestic population has been gradually migrating over a half-century from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West, so the biggest markets (New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Chicago, for example) rely on immigration to maintain population and fill jobs.
What’s more, as the 80-million Baby Boomer generation retires and lives to a ripe old age, the number of Social Security recipients is about to mushroom. Without importing workers from other countries, the ratio of workers to retirees will fall to dangerously thin levels in coming decades.
I know I’m making rational arguments and the objections are not. People want the world to be frozen in time from when they were young. But that’s never happened and never will. America isn’t an ethnicity, it’s an idea that people can be free and pursue happiness in their own way. We have always welcomed immigrants and always must, because the day we stop, we’re not the same country.
Making Racism Great Again
That’s why it is so disturbing – no sickening – that we have allowed ourselves to accept white supremacist language from the president. And let’s stop pretending — that’s exactly what it is. This is what one white nationalist said about Trump’s recent tweets: “This is not some half-assed anti-immigrant white nationalism. Trump is literally telling American blacks to go back to Africa … All Trump is doing is once again expressing our collective anger. … This is what elected Trump and this is what will always be the best way for him to gain support.” Maybe the worst part of Trump’s rise is that it has made racism acceptable, and it will take a long time to recover from that, even if he is defeated.
It's also sickening that we accept the mistreatment, basically torture, of those who want to legally apply for asylum. What does it say about the Republican Party that the same people that lionized Ronald Reagan, who repeatedly said immigration was the core of America’s strength: (Reagan quote: “Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. We draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world.”) can also support Donald Trump? What principle connects the two presidents other than the “R” next to their name?
We’ve crossed a line into madness that is going to be hard to remedy if not corrected too quickly. We can debate immigration policies and try to structure them to create the best result, but some things can’t be debated. Immigration is necessary to fill some kinds of jobs and create economic growth. And every human being should be treated with dignity and respect, as if such a thing even needs to be said.