Immigration: Republican Abandonment of American Ideals

On a plaque in New York Harbor, at the base of the Statue of Liberty:

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-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

- Emma Lazarus

The Presidentially ginned up fear of the immigrant “caravan’” of poor, dispossessed, and wretched souls looking for better lives in America is reprehensible. The silly border wall, keeping those in the caravan out of our country, would have to run through the middle of the Rio Grande, unless we ceded the river to Mexico, by placing the wall on the US side of the river. 

Most of Trump’s base are probably not motivated by white supremacist racism, but instead, by a misguided fear of the destruction of their own financial security and racial homogeneity stoked by a lying demagogue. They are, to use plain words, suckers, gullible suckers. Purchasers of a Kool Aid dispensing lunatic. A Brooklyn Bridge selling grifter. A snake oil selling self-enriching crook.  A latter day Elmer Gantry. The Pied Piper of low information Americans hoping he will improve their lives.  The only life he is improving is his own and his cast of miscreants and knaves.

The uttered shop-worn trope of “welfare moms, and anchor babies.” This echo of Trumpian fear and mendacity, in an appeal to an enraged base fearing loss of their jobs from immigrants, does not accept that new immigrants only want to do work that Americans will not; that they are first stage immigrants as were so many of our own parents, grandparents and great grandparents. This anxiety ridden GOP base does not understand that 80% of jobs are now lost to automation and technological change, not immigration. They do not understand that we are in a profound cultural metamorphosis, prompted by technological change unseen since the early industrial revolution and the first gilded age.  That the greatest challenge facing our country is technological displacement.

They believe dog-whistle racism and of a Machiavellian President that America is under attack from immigration. President Trump falsely claims that there “are middle easterners” among the poor, starving people walking across Mexico, just as he had said that Mexicans are rapists and bad people and “the blacks love me.” There are no middle easterners in a caravan of 15,000 poor souls.  And the US admits 300,000 immigrants each year. 

Thinly veiled racism and a tribal call to demonization of others disturb me deeply. It is a response to demagoguery, the same demagoguery that incited a homicidal Trump supporter to mail pipe bombs this week to prominent Trump opponents, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, James Clapper, George Soros, John Brennan, and CNN, the network branded by Trump as an “enemy of the people.” The putative-alleged bomber was born in New York, not Benghazi. The President failed to recognize any of the potential well known victims or ask for respect for those public servants who oppose him. It is the same methodology employed by Joseph Goebbels.

And now, encouragement of anti-Semitic crazies who murder Jews in their synagogue, partially because of the inflammatory rhetoric of a madman.

I wistfully reminisced about long-time GOP statesman of inclusiveness from my youth, and remembered fondly the civil discourse of different policy decisions, based upon rational thinking and a desire to meet common goals on how to meet the needs of our country.  I remember divisions between the two major parties, but mostly they were simply about policy.  Race incitement did not play as important an issue, although it was there, probably wrongly swept under a musty old carpet in the rush to reach some consensus about tax cuts, higher budgets, less spending, the economy, military expenditures, the role of the United States in the world.  But it concealed the slavery-ridden origins of our nation and the bitter Civil War that followed it by 80 or so years. It still lingers as a dark stain.

My father arrived in this country in 1923, with, he always said, 18 cents in his pocket. Given his penchant for exaggeration, it probably was a few more dollars than that, and his father had given him, upon his departure from an anti-Semitic Hungary, looking to draft him to serve in an even more anti-Semitic military, a gold watch, which he could always use to pawn if he needed a few more dollars.

From his first days in America, he looked to learn English, and read the American Newspapers, the New York Times, the New York Post, the Forward and lastly learn Yiddish for employment (he spoke none when he arrived. ) He ate strawberries and sour cream at HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which also helped him to find work and is now helping others who are not even Jewish.

Driven by an insatiable work ethic and a desire to succeed in the “Goldene Medina,” (a country where the streets were lined with gold,) he did forge a successful business career, marriage and family, dying in 1990.

He always remarked to me that he savored the famous Emma Lazarus poem when he arrived at Ellis Island to embark on a new life in America. When the great depression struck about six years after he arrived, he embraced Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. He became a life-long liberal Democrat, always valuing the idea of the inclusive and welcoming aspect of the American ideal. He did not understand those who would exclude people from coming to America.

The year after he arrived, the Congress of the United States passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924, essentially excluding immigrants from Eastern Europe, most of whom were Jews who sought to escape from oppressive anti-Semitism in the former Austro-Hungarian empire, now divided into smaller countries by the British and French imperialists, leading to another worse war and the slaughter of six million Jews and millions of others. Most painfully to him it excluded five of his brothers and sisters, whom he wanted to come to join him in New York. The Nazis murdered all but two who spent horrific years in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

The ethos of those involved in that Congressional act of discrimination was that Americans were under threat of “others” who were not the same as the earlier immigrants. Earlier, Fredrick Douglas Jackson’s call to the American frontier in the 19th century allowed those “others” to populate our Westward expansion (conducted at the expense of Native Americans). Those “others” included Irish, Asian, Scottish and Italians. Those intrepid frontiersmen went ahead to steal the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, and the lands of Native Americans.

Now the nativist call arises from a President who has no concept of American history, nor the imperatives of our Republic; he beckons to the basest of political instincts, tribalism, xenophobia, mendacity and misappropriated fear of potential contributors to the American dream who seek a better life for themselves and their children. 

He does this to advance his own political agenda, his own narcissistic ignorance, thinking nothing of separating families or putting children in cages.

It is incumbent on all Americans who love our country to vote to restore some of the purloined values of the country we all think should reflect the values of Emma Lazarus inscribed on the great lady sitting in New York Harbor by disempowerment of one of the biggest electoral mistakes in our nation’s history.