The echoes are pretty strong
Here’s a radical notion. People’s worth isn’t based on their citizenship status or economic output. One would think we wouldn’t need an essay on the topic to remind us. But since Team MAGA is floating rhetoric reminiscent of Radio Rwanda, sadly, we do.
All this time, Republicans scare-mongered about “illegals” and “migrant caravans” and “bad hombres.” After the fact-free smears of legal immigrants from “Haitia” eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Sen. J.D. Vance made plain he considers even legally admitted immigrants worthy of deportation en masse. MAGA isn’t interested in documented vs. undocumented immigrant status. What’s at issue for them is nothing new and, dare we suggest, a matter of white, northern Europeans vs. everyone else. SNL spoofed that in 1988 when Gov. Mike Dukakis ran for president against George H.W. Bush: Bush Political Ad: He’s Whiter.
President Joe Biden called the smears against Haitians legally in Ohio “simply wrong.” They have “no place in America.” Biden added, “We don’t demonize immigrants. We don’t single them out for attacks. We don’t believe they’re poisoning the blood of the country. We’re a nation of immigrants and that’s why we’re so damn strong.”
Prem Thakker explains at Zeteo:
Missing in the broader defense of migrants and immigrants is a dispositive case, a reclaiming of the conversation instead of conceding to the right-wing presupposition that newcomers’ must inherently be justified, rather than welcomed. The assumption of scarcity that the powerful imbue into society, feeding impulses of self-preservation, and more threateningly, racism.
Moreover, judging newcomers’ abilities to assimilate, to be “one of us,” solely by the merits of their labor production and legal status only reifies the notion that we too are only as good as the work we do and the papers we have. By holding immigrants to such an unfeeling standard, we too bring ourselves to mean less than the potential that we hold, the capacities we have to love and feel and share life with others.
I’ve gotten halfway through William Hogeland’s “The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding.” It’s stunning how much “the money connection” influenced the structure of our constitution, and how financial speculation by the investor class drove the adoption of the Constitution as a way of guaranteeing their interest on government bonds. If anything poisons the country, it is the mindset that reduces every human interaction to a transaction and persons to their net worth or economic output. That is, seeing the world primarily through the lens of money.
It is not enough to defend newcomers to this country as producers, as legal additions: that formula not only (ironically) dehumanizes them, it also degrades our ability to see ourselves as more than what is imposed upon us.
Ultimately, we are called to take to our hearts that we all are non-consensual players in the lottery of existence, subject to permutations of factors beyond our control, landing where we do, and doing the best we can to be, to exist, to live wholly within those outcomes. And feeling that, knowing that someone completely unlike you is only so by sheer raffle, and injecting that into our politics, would do much in defending immigrants not because they’re “like us,” but because they are not.
But that requires embracing diversity more than tribe and fear of the other. Fear is the mind killer, goes Frank Herbert’s Litany Against Fear from “Dune.” It’s also the community killer.
There is a Maple Street in Springfield, Ohio. Surprise.