Immigrant Song

Throughout humanity’s relatively short but perpetually turbulent history, those in charge have used a common tactic of distraction upon their citizens, especially those of lower economic class. Through ruse or passionate oratory, the leaders of a place convince the workers of a place that they are, in fact, not that low; that there are others much lower and meaner than them. This often instils an almost surprising amount of pride and nationalism in the workers’ meager place upon some fabled ladder (built long ago and greased up good).

Nothing can rally a populace as urgently as a scapegoat. Sure, you might be a poor sharecropper sewing together rags for your kids’ winter coat and will die in debt to your employer, but at least you aren’t a black man. Wouldn’t want your daughter to marry one of those! Sure, you’ve just killed the last stringy cow on your ranch and are staring down a winter of hunger but it’s still better than being an Indian! Might as well hate them! Sure, you might be a poor Pacific fisherman who wreaks of scales and guts 20 hours a day, but you’d be a rich man if those Chinese stopped taking all your jobs! And these are just a few relatively recent examples from my own country. I bet you couldn’t find a country in the world that hasn’t dozens of its own.

A good con does a quick job harnessing whatever resentment the populace may feel at its current position on the ladder and then steadily focuses the gaze of that resentment downward. The upper class’s public relations team, pop culture, continues its unyielding worship of wealth and fame, making directing that resentment upward feel somehow Anti-American or contrary to the goals that we are all supposed to cherish. Now those people did it right! The people who take the lion’s share of the blame for everyone else’s misfortune are frequently and inexplicably those on welfare, the homeless, the unemployed, and the most common scapegoat in all of history, the immigrant. We are all fighting over a pie and these are the people with the least pie, yet we are told to blame them for taking too much pie.

We are a tribal species, there’s no getting around it. Nationalism and its extreme cousin Fascism have come and gone in waves as far back as you’d care to look. The last tsunami of this ugly fervor was put to rest by the dropping of the worst invention we have ever come up with: the atomic bomb. That terror was enough to push the world back into a more cooperative spirit for a while but because we are as inept at learning from history as we are at remaining peaceful, the idea that Fascism is some kind of acceptable platform has slowly crept back into fashion. People who lean that way rarely use the word Fascist to describe themselves these days, as was once common, but after two world wars and countless smaller ones dedicated to eradicating the practice, that would’t be very smart, would it?

Websters defines Fascism like so:

Fascism: a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition

Like any other political appellation, Socialism, Democracy, Communism, etc, the word Fascism is often pandered about willy-nilly by people with all sorts of blurry motives. Whisper-yelling “fascist! (lower case !)” at a cop as he ambles back into his rig after writing you a speeding ticket might serve the passion of the moment, but it is generally inaccurate. Calling someone a Communist simply because they wish access to health care for everyone is also a misuse. I am not educated enough on the subject to be fully sure what Donald Trump and his crew are up to qualifies as a bonafide shift into my least favorite form of governance (not to mention one that millions of people died trying to defeat just a few generations ago) but I will say that it feels that way to me. My gut tells me that if all obstacles were removed, we would be there almost overnight. Fascism is the governmental preference of the bully, and though I’ve never met the man, Donald Trump’s public track record pretty easily puts him into that category.

I live in Minneapolis, a place often called a Sanctuary City. Most of the people I know here use that term endearingly, while many people who don’t live here use it as slander. The way I understand it, the designation means this city is more willing than most to take in the refugees of political oppression and war from around the world. Sanctuary. Seems almost Christian, doesn’t it?

The current presidential administration doesn’t seem to believe in the words ol’ Frederic-Aguste Bartholdi etched into the Statue of Liberty before sending it across the Atlantic, even though the statue resides in the President’s very own hometown. Those words:

“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-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door”

(but Trump LOVES golden doors!)

I don’t know the horrors that must be visited upon a family in order to make fleeing their homes penniless and destitute, spending years in refugee camps, and then finally somehow surviving long enough to land in freezing-ass Minnesota where barely anyone speaks a familiar language or has familiar customs or even familiar traffic laws a better option. That is a very simplistic summary of the experiences of many of our African and, more specifically, Somali neighbors here in Minneapolis. I know this because I’ve spoken to several of them about it throughout my time here. I’ve spoken to several of them about it throughout my time here because these people, in record time if you think about it, have not only survived their ordeals, but have remade themselves into citizens of an entirely new landscape and have generally thrived in doing so. They are community members who hold a myriad of occupations and public service positions, whose kids go to school with mine, and, because of their trials, often own a strength of conviction that I am unsure of in myself.

Are there criminals among the Somali population in Minneapolis? That is a ridiculous question. There are criminals in every race, nationality, city, and town and county. There’s a good chance there’s a criminal sitting next to you right now. If we were to start evacuating criminals simply for being criminals we would be without a federal government in a matter of days. There’d be a lot fewer bands out there too, I’ll tell you that. Throw the first stone. I’d bet all the cows in Texas that most of the people being torn from their families, jobs, and homes and stuck on nameless airplanes to disappear via ICE have been charged with fewer felonies than Donald Trump. Trump sending his costumed ICE agents into our city and so many others to harass and terrorize has nothing to do with crime. (Side note, masked law enforcement enacting warrant-less searches is not usually equated with democratic values. More of a Fascist thing, really) It has to do with distraction and the fact that when nothing else seems to be going his way, he can always count on a large amount of us to be scared of immigrants. Stock market sucks? Immigrants! Epstein files? Immigrants! He can always point our gaze down the ladder a rung and say “See? If these people weren’t here you’d have more money in your bank account and feel safer at night! You may be poor but at least you’re an AMERICAN! If we got them all outta here you’d be able to tear down your home’s east wall and add your very own golden shitter!” It’s the same lie that has been perpetrated for generations. My fellow Americans, Nobody has any control over where they are born. It was neither some mystical talent nor some spiritual value judgement that allowed you to squeeze out of your mother’s holy place here in the US. It was dumb luck. To lord that over others who have actually had to work unbelievably hard to get here makes about as much sense as a rolling down the windows in a submarine, as a skyscraper made of cooked pasta, as a two-party political system.

As I sit and write this, there are many families here that are scared to leave their homes. My wife, Chloe, who works in labor and delivery, has had numerous accounts of patients, expecting mothers mind you, avoiding the hospital in fear that they might be targets of a raid. These are women about to go into labor. In following their distinctly bully values, ICE does not seem to bat an eye at breaking up a family or hurting a small business. They’ll take a parent right in front of a kid or take a worker right in the middle of a shift. In fact, the reputation these actions have gained them has only seemed to make the agents more brazen. I cannot for the life of me understand how the hell this behavior is supposed to feel like an improvement in our country. I must be missing the great again part.

Every city in our country is filled with people from all over the damn place. That’s what makes visiting them worth all the smog and traffic and noise. When you put a bunch of people from all over in the same city, you inevitably get culture. Nothing scares a Fascist more than culture. Art, music, fashion, menus in a different language, HOLD YOUR HORSES COMMIE! In a major city you get a big ol’ blended margherita of beliefs, foods, traditions, influences, and somehow, of course not always, it seems to just work out on its own. Take New York for example. Home of the Statue of Liberty and Donald Trump. New York is an immense tapestry of cultural neighborhoods that have, of course, had their disagreements (it would be almost inhuman if they had not) but, over the long run, the cultures there, ever changing and fluid, have more than simply co-existed. They have given the rest of us ungrateful slobs some of the best music, poetry, art, food, technology etc the world has known. As a rural-leaning person myself (though I love a trip once in a while to our world’s bigger cities, but I have had the advantage of touring in a band most of my life to show me that) I can understand the fear of such places. The thing is, you don’t have to like them. You don’t have to like New York or LA or Chicago or Minneapolis. Nobody is shoving a plane ticket up your nose and making you go visit. Our country is way too big and diverse to expect it all to jive with any one person’s taste. It is your right to live how you want to live but it is not your right to mess with everyone else. Live out the rest of your days in the woods and fields if you want. Our country still has lots of those too, thank the stars. All I’m saying is that cities are simply going to be cities. They will continue to be diverse and home to crime and homelessness and liberal politics and wealth beyond measure and every religion and every language and every beauty and every brutality and, unquestionably, immigrants. You can follow that all the way back to Constantinople if you wish. Our country is plenty big with room for everyone to find their community and for every community to find a home. There is no need nor use in trying to make the whole country one bland place where everyone believes the same stuff about everything and we all sing the same four government-approved songs. We are not all supposed to be the same! So please, Federal Government of the United States of America, and I’m saying this as a gun-owning, politically independent, straight white man who would rather be hunting or fishing than taking the subway, please just let our cities be cities.

Enter any country in the world illegally and you can expect to be shown the exit. I know that. What I don’t understand is in a case where someone has developed a life and a family in a place, works a job and pays taxes, basically proven to be a decent citizen, why aren’t they allowed a chance to make their status legal? They could pay a fine or do some kind of community service for giving the border agents the slip. They could sweep up peanut shells at Yankee stadium for a month. Congrats now you’re an American. If someone’s sole mission is to sneak into Iowa and dump a pile of fentanyl on a middle school, I’d still prefer they get arrested. But sweeping statements about everyone from so and so country is a criminal or everyone working at so and so is illegal are not only ignorant, but they are dangerous. As has happened so many times in the past, an overzealous group of supporters is likely to take matters into their own hands if they don’t feel the evil is being properly eradicated. If ICE is looking into a parent with suspicious immigration status, why is the move to kick down the door, rip this guy from dinner with his child, put a hood on his head, and shove him into an unmarked van? Isn’t there a middle ground here? Also, according to many local reports, ICE isn’t just grabbing known criminals or people known to be in the country illegally. They are just grabbing brown people and figuring it out later. We get to decide what kind of country we want to be.

We have never fully lived up to the inscription on that giant copper woman standing in New York Harbor, at least not without treating newcomers with suspicion and prejudice (even if the ones doing the prejudicing are only a couple generations removed from being newcomers themselves). But, all in all, we have done a fair job at taking in the world’s lost and country-less. Immigration is not a static event. At any given time there are people who just got here, there are those who are the kids of who got here a little while ago, the grandkids of an earlier migration, and so on. Where in the generational timeline the immigrant becomes a local is a matter of great debate all the way from Ellis Island to Bozeman, Montana to the Golden Gate Bridge. Since this country became a country, this wild and unruly blend has been its population. Throughout long term growth there will always be setbacks and in any civilization that has wealth over which to fight, there will always be those willing to distract others with petty fears while they fill their own coffers.

In closing, I would like to draw attention to this picture from a Minneapolis newspaper, the Minnesota Star Tribune. It depicts an ICE agent conducting a raid at a construction site (where people are WORKING for a living). His face is cowardly covered with an American Flag emblazoned kidnapper mask and he’s wearing a hat that looks to me like it contains two old-school nails in the shape of a cross. To my feeble mind, he is apparently suggesting that these days his work is the Christian thing to do; a hypocrisy so wide I cannot even find an edge at which to enter nor muster up the energy to attempt to understand. This is what our country looks like to a large segment of its population and to many observers from abroad. I would like to see that change.

(Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune)