The Casual Blog

Spring is finally here, I’m happy to say.  We visited our loved ones at beautiful Beaufort, N.C., a couple of weeks ago and saw some of the wild horses there.  In Raleigh, the trees are starting to leaf in, and the early flowers have popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, with vivid colors.  I enjoy them every year, but this year is especially good.  The flowers below were from Raulston Arboretum, Fletcher Park, and the backyard of casa Tiller.  

This week we watched The Zone of Interest, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and is now streamable on Prime.  I highly recommend it.  The story concerns a family living a normal happy life right next to the Auschwitz death camp.  It raises some tough and timely questions about human behavior and ethics.  I expect we’ll be thinking about it for a long time.    

Our immigration situation also raises some tough and timely questions.  These days it’s often referred to as the immigration crisis, which is certainly true from the perspective of people desperately fleeing violence and poverty.  But there’s a massive misunderstanding of the situation, as shown in a recent Gallup poll. Immigration was most frequently cited as America’s biggest problem, and the number of Americans who think that has gone up.  

This is both understandable and absurd.  Fear of foreigners is nothing new, and has long been exploited by leaders for political advantage .   But we truly are a nation of immigrants.  They are running some of our most successful corporations, as well as building our houses, manning our hospitals and factories, picking our crops, and taking care of our children.  If there’s energy and creativity required, we rely a lot on immigrants, just as we rely on them to do a lot of unpleasant work that we want to be sure is done well.  

It should be obvious, but apparently needs saying, that we’ve always been a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious country.  The majority of us have ancestors that came from some other country not so long ago.  And we have friends, neighbors, and service providers who have different skin colors, different languages, and different customs.  We’ve got lots of problems, but our diversity is not a problem.  It’s a strength.   

With all the actual problems we’re facing, it’s really disturbing that the non-problem of immigration has become a central flash point of  our politics.  Whipping up more fear of immigrants was and is one of Trump’s main tactics; it’s hard to imagine his succeeding without it.  But even mainstream Democrats now believe we have a border crisis that is not of our own making, and that we somehow have to prevent more foreigners from getting in.

Franklin Roosevelt had a famous line in his inaugural address in 1933:  “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  He probably meant to reassure a nation in the throes of a financial depression with the thought that fears weren’t themselves likely to be fatal, and economic problems were solvable.  

But Roosevelt’s words have a different resonance now.  We truly have good reason to be afraid of the current panic about immigrants, because it is perilous, both for ourselves and others.  I’m thinking of three serious risks.

First, it could lead to the end of democracy as we know it.  Hard as it is to believe, there is a real possibility that Donald Trump could become the next president.   Trump has proudly declared his intention to become a dictator, to persecute his political enemies, to shoot peaceful protesters, to take away rights from women and minorities, and to fundamentally alter the constitutional order.  He undermines the rule of law with his claims to be immune from prosecution for any crime and pardons for his convicted criminal pals.  Again, his appeal is based in large part on his demagoguery about immigrants, whom he viciously and groundlessly characterizes as criminals, rapists, and animals.  

Second, our draconian limitation on immigration is a self-inflicted wound, in that we need immigrant workers.  The idea that  immigrants cause harm by taking Americans’ jobs is mistaken.  They pay more in taxers than they use in services. Many of them start businesses and create new jobs.  As noted, they do a lot of the most important high-level work we have, as well as some of the most difficult and dangerous jobs.  For example, without them, our food supply chain doesn’t work, or our cutting edge AI tools.  We have a labor shortage, and with an aging population, that problem is getting worse.  We need more immigrants.

Third, there’s morality:  treating immigrants with disrespect and cruelty diminishes us.  Refusing to respond to the needs of desperate people fleeing war, violence, and grinding poverty is a stain on our own humanity.  It takes work to get rid of our natural compassion for people in need, but some of our political and thought leaders have pulled us along that path.  They whip up our ordinary caution about people we don’t yet know into anger, hatred, and panic.  

In considering what we owe immigrants, it’s worth noting that we in the U.S. bear substantial responsibility for some of the problems that are driving people from their countries of birth.  We’ve done more than our share to create the worldwide climate crisis, with the rising heat, drought, fires, and storms that make some areas inhospitable or uninhabitable.  

Driven by greed and fear of Communism, we’ve also played a role in creating the chronic violence that drives emigration out of some countries, including El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, Haiti, and Cuba, not to mention the Middle East and Southeast Asia.  We have a lot to atone for.  

The solution is not simple.  The system we’ve constructed for our border is deeply flawed, and fixing it will not be easy.  We don’t have the necessary plans or resources in place to implement the current problematic laws.  More fundamentally, we need to rethink certain assumptions, including notions of what a great nation is and what borders are for, and that will take time.  

But it’s obvious that we need to stop panicking about immigrants.  We need to start seeing them as people and learning about their situations.  We need to have conversations about what the options are for helping them.   We need to rediscover our natural compassion, generosity, and love.  People in dire need offer us an opportunity to be more compassionate and generous.  Let us be thankful for that opportunity, and take it.