Not Like Us

As an apocryphal story from World War II goes, American troops were on high alert for German saboteurs trying to infiltrate their lines.  Speaking fluent American English and knowledgeable about all the ordinary things Americans would know, the saboteurs dressed and presented themselves as fellow Americans lost from their own units.  A “lost fellow American” was brought to one old sergeant for interrogation, and the sergeant asked him where he was from, to which the fellow replied, that he was born and raised in Baltimore. Then the sergeant asked him to name the street that runs by the harbor and on into Little Italy, the location of many fine Italian restaurants.   The fellow answered quickly, “That’s “Lom-bard” street. At which point, the sergeant took out his pistol and shot him.  For any native of “ole Bawlamer” would have pronounced it, “Lum-ber” or “Lum-berd” street.  We humans are really good at spotting those “not like us.”

We’re becoming ever more sophisticated at spotting infiltrators.  Back in prehistoric days, anthropologists tell us, the origins of art were the color coded stripes we painted on our faces to enable recognition of tribal membership at a distance.  Now we spot it in many ways.  The news today is of riots in moderate, compassionate Sweden against mainly Islamic immigrants, by poor native Swedes who view them as obnoxious job takers.  The same kinds of riots take place in Greece, as neo-Nazis challenge job-seeking immigrants from Albania and North Africa.  France pats itself on the back for the seamless way it absorbed Portuguese immigrants, aided immensely by sharing a common religion and a similar language.  Immigrants on their way from Central America through Mexico face violence and exploitation before they ever get near the U.S. border, from Mexicans whom many Americans would have difficulty in distinguishing from the immigrants being attacked.  Even China faces unrest as rural laborers from distant provinces move to the major cities.  And in the U.S., the immigration reform legislation trudges its way through the Congress, attacked bitterly at each step.  In part, that’s because resolving the American political issues requires understanding deeper global problems that go beyond America and beyond politics.

The first parts of these global issues are the causes, strength and likely duration of the current waves of immigration.  The easy explanations are economic.  The classical economic view is that all production of goods and services comes via the interaction among natural resources, capital and labor (these in turn break down into a variety of sub-factors like human versus intellectual versus financial capital, etc., the number and kind of which varies depending on which economics course you slept through.) Global movement of capital and technology and information and facilities forces a consequential global movement of labor, whether welcomed or not.  When two or three of the factors shift location, the others are forced to follow.  Greek immigrant riots are the consequence of shift of capital from Greece back to northern Europe.  The increasing dominance of multinational corporations in the global economy generates rapid strong fluctuations as the corporations rapidly change locations seeking their best advantage.  The pressure to reduce the cost of labor (that’s the rest of us) creates more and more wage flattening everywhere, and displaced labor searching desperately for a job, any kind, anywhere.  In addition this migration pressure will only strengthen as climate change produces more droughts, flooding, water wars, etc., around the world.   A big part of the migration out of Africa comes from increasing drought.  The growing visibility of the small elite, who profit exorbitantly from these movements while millions suffer, raises resentment among both immigrant and “native” working poor, and riots occur.  They are good explanations of the causes and inevitable increases in immigration, but can’t cover the whole story of what to do about it.  There was no global migration in the ancient Middle East, when Prophets reminded their people “you too were once strangers in a strange land”, a sure sign that discrimination was going on.  And while early humans may have feared that those “not like us” were stealing the finest antelope, their animosity to the “not like us” expressed by color coding their faces was closer to the defecatory circles around territory spread by hippopotami than to rational economics.

It does, however tell us about the things that won’t work.  Building a wall along the Mexican border to halt immigration is reminiscent in so many ways of the story of Canute, king of the Saxons, who in his pride told the tide not to come in, and got a good soaking for his efforts.  It tells us that America cannot just become a highly attractive place to live and work without participation in making other places better off, too.  Sweden’s problems are due in part to its being so moderate, compassionate and tolerant that it serves as a magnet for displaced labor.  You don’t move from Africa to just below the Arctic Circle by happenstance.  America’s wave of immigrant labor comes from Latin America, and any American immigration reform must look also to the causes of displacement in the south, and work with those nations to correct them.  And it tells us that reform that does not address the nature and causes of the fear and resentment on both sides of the question will not be effective in the longer term.

A major source of resentment among immigrants has been the lack of a clear path to citizenship; the legislation makes a start on that.  A major rational source of fear among opponents of immigration is worry about too easy access by terrorists from abroad.  Rational screening of immigrants is likely to remain part of the legislation. By the way, that’s always been a problem in American immigration.  The “Molly McGuires”, a secret society of Irish coal miners in Pennsylvania in the 1840's fought the big mine owners through tactics that today would clearly be labeled terrorism, and some historians depict the shooting spree of Billy the Kid in the Lincoln County Land War as a kind of terrorist extension of the Irish struggle for independence (Billy was a child of recent Irish immigrants to New York City who drifted west and changed sides.  Most of the ranchers in the Lincoln County War were English landlords. The homesteaders and sheep herders were very like the ancestors Billy had left in Ireland.)  Terrorism-minded hotheads have always been a part of the immigration stream, but we've endured that.  Another rational source of resentment among immigration opponents is competition for a dwindling job supply, but that presumes a static economy consumed with fear of corporate movements elsewhere.  An economic focus on infrastructure building and new technologies would work wonders.  Chinese labor was welcomed in America in the 19^th century while the intercontinental railroads were being built, and American railroad companies advertized in Europe for settlers to fill the spaces they had opened up. There are towns across an aging America that are drying up because of lack of young workers to carry on.  In short, economic reform must accompany immigration reform.

But the deep-down human issue is that immigrants are “not like us.”  They’re not properly color coded, or speak with strange accents or worship different gods.  The difficult problem is within all of us, to strike the proper balance between the need for native tolerance of difference and immigrant willingness to assimilate.  So far, the immigrants are doing a better job than the natives.  There is a rising fear that democracy can’t work in an enormous multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society where people just can’t get along with each other well enough to make necessary decisions.  But alternatives to that society are no longer available.  That’s what history is all about, listing the other experiments that failed.  This is our 21^st century test, how to work with the fact that tribalism and a global world are basically incompatible.  We need to translate within ourselves “not like us” to “possibly the bringer of a fresh approach.”