Immigration and the US: Happy New Year

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I sit in Arizona at Christmas, finishing Dennis Lehane’s novel “The Given Day”[1]. Set in 1919 in Boston and culminating in the landmark Boston police strike of that year, Lehane documents the “red scare” of that period, accompanied by the real number and strength of “reds”, the overt racism of the period along with the early days of the NAACP, the early days of the labor movement, the early days of John E. Hoover and the BI (later, of course, J. Edgar and the FBI), all set to a backdrop of the mid-career of Babe Ruth and the Red Sox (and his ultimate move to the New York Yankees). But from here, in Tucson, what seems most relevant today is that it documents the massive immigration (at that time in Boston mostly of Italians, Russians, and Jews) and anti-immigrant sentiment that accompanied it. So our current anti-immigrant furor is nothing new. It has deep roots, and is now, as it always has been, misguided.

Of course, American anti-immigrant movements go back much farther than 1919. Before the Russians, Italians, and Jews of the late 19th and early 20th century. Before even the Irish immigration, the xenophobic reaction to which was dramatically shown in the 2002 Martin Scorsese film “The Gangs of New York”. Before the Germans, back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the John Adams administration at the end of the 18th century, and probably before that. Every group of European immigrants I have mentioned and more, Asians from China, Japan and the Philippines, and many others, have been vilified in their time. Each has been attacked by those already here, and ready to raise the drawbridge behind them. And they have made America great.

They come to America to escape grinding poverty or to maximize their opportunity. Most are poor, but some are doctors and engineers who believe they can do even better here than in, say India or Africa. (This is another issue, of brain drain, which I have touched on in earlier posts). Every time there are those “nativists” (some not here long themselves) who want to close the door, who worry that “they” will take “our” jobs. In Lehane’s book immigrants are leaders of the unions (as well as the radical revolutionary groups); immigrants have always mainly been workers. And is it different now, as the main focus of anti-immigrant wrath are those from Mexico? The wrath is centered here in Arizona (although, it should be noted, the sentiment is not uniform; although only symbolic, the Tucson City Council voted to oppose the state anti-immigrant law), and felt not only in the Southwest but all over the country. Does it make a difference that so many Mexican immigrants are “illegal”? Many of our citizens have been illegal. The major secondary characters in “The Given Day”, two older policemen who enforce “order” for the “Big Money” folks, came to the US from Ireland as teens, stowing away on a ship, and literally escaping into the streets of Boston, before later joining the force. Illegals, certainly, who believed themselves to be more "American" than the current generation of immigrants. And fictional, but representative of many real-life characters. Many “illegals” became citizens after serving in our armed forces, especially in World War II, when “we” needed “them”. Of course, America always needs “them”, to build our cities, our railroads, or industries; to be our engineers and storekeepers and cops and firemen and packing-house workers. We are “them”.

And we remain them, and they us, with only few exceptions. American Indians, whose “immigration” may have been in pre-history, and African-Americans, brought here in bondage, arguably the two most oppressed and discriminated-against ethnic groups. We can no more honorably close the door now than the descendants of English colonists who stole Indian land could for the Germans, or Irish, or Chinese, or Russian, or Polish, or Filipino, or Italian, or Jewish immigrants who succeeded them. They have always been the ones who did the work. Who pay taxes (so they are not caught) but receive no benefits, because we pass laws against “illegal” immigrants – denying them health care, denying them safety. Yet they are here; they get sick and injured, in working two and three jobs. And paying into benefit funds such as pensions and Social Security and Medicare for those of us, from earlier immigrations, to retire on, and receive our health care from. We can pass a health reform law that specifically excludes them from health coverage, not even allowing them to buy with their own money, but they will still need health care. We can even, in a gesture worthy of the persecutions of the 1920s, not pass the “Dream Act” so people who were brought up in this country can attend college with their classmates. Vigilantes can “patrol” the border, and fascist thugs like Maricopa County Sheriff Arpaio can terrorize entire communities. We can pass laws that make it a crime to help save the life of a person found dying in the desert. We can talk of children born to immigrant parents as “anchor babies”, and here I need to refer people to Lalo Alcaraz’ Christmas Day cartoon in his strip “La Cucaracha”. We can, and do, do all sorts of mean, short-sighted, and selfish things to oppress people, but this does not make them wise, honorable, moral, or even sensible. We can, however, be better than that.

In the coming year, I hope the Dream Act passes. And I hope that we can define ourselves, as Americans and as human beings, by our wisdom, our foresight, and the nobler parts of our nature, rather than by our narrowness, meaness, and bigotry.

Happy New Year.

[1] Lehane, Dennis. The Given Day. Harper Collins. New York. 2008.
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Quotes for the New Year

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The New Year is a common time to rethink, make resolutions, and in various ways commit to leading a better life. We can do this as individuals and as a society. As far as health is concerned, our individual decisions can and do make a big difference in our health outcomes, and it behooves us to learn as much as we can and to be able to distinguish what is information based in evidence from what is opinion, anecdote, or just plain wrong. As a society we can do a lot better in terms of improving health, only one component of which is improving health care. We can, and must, improve access (both financial and geographic) to health care, improve the quality of care and the use of evidence-based (rather than profit-influenced) practices, and the use of cost-benefit ratios to maximize the value per dollar. Maybe we are moving a little in that direction; I will continue to comment on a number of areas surrounding health reform and health care.

One thing that can help us in thinking about ourselves and our societies are the thoughts of others. Epigrams, quotations, can and often do, oversimplify complex ideas, but they can be powerful and pungent. I have frequently used them; on the left side of this blog is a quotation from FDR that I find particularly significant. So, for the New Year, I thought I would provide some of my “favorite” quotations, some more well-known than others. I will also supply the authors, although not attached to the quotations; you can know or guess or look them up, but it can make a difference; a statement by someone who knows about an area can be more powerful than when the same statement comes from one who does not.

My last entry addressed, in part, bigotry, and the attempts of some people to have their beliefs determine the actions of everyone. This is common and recurrent, and does not “get better with time”. Much of Texas’ Hill Country was settled by Germans, a high percentage of whom were Freethinkers. They stood, among other things, against slavery; Confederate troops raided towns like Comfort, TX, killing many and driving others to Mexico. Some years ago a monument commemorating the Freethinker settlers who established the town was proposed for Comfort, but it didn’t happen. The people, conventional “believers”, even descendants of those settlers, found Freethinking too much like “atheism” for them. Of course, people who emigrate, who move to new lands, are different from both those who stay behind. They are bolder, more adventuresome and more independent. They are also, sometimes disappointingly, different from their descendants who are more settled, themselves the “stay behinders”. Many of our “Founding Fathers” were people who were Freethinkers, Deists, and believers in less orthodox approaches to religion. Often they were condemned in their time, but that time was the Enlightenment, when it was believed (wrongly as it turns out) that time would bring increased knowledge of science and the world, and that would leader to broader, not more narrow, thinking. The thoughts of a few:

"I Have Sworn Upon the Altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

"Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good."

“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”

Not only FDR commented on the inequity of distribution; others also chose to identify what areas, including the determinants of health, might be a better place to spend our money.

"Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket that is fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed."

In a specifically health-related vein,

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

And a few more about our society, government, shadow government and rights:

“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”

"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spiritand go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

"Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days
governments had better get out of their way and let them have it."

And ones I will probably use soon:

"The war on privilege will never end. Its next great campaign will be against the privileges of the underprivileged."

“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."

Happy New Year.


Quotes are from (alphabetically) Dwight D. Eisenhower (3), Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr. (2), Abraham Lincoln, HL Mencken, Tom Paine, George Washington