The Immigration Crisis – the rise of “nativism.”

In August of Nineteen Fifty-four my father decided, after a family quarrel, that he would take his family and immigrate to the United States of America. It wasn’t difficult in those days: we stayed with Aunt Josefa, who lived across the border in Texas, and in two weeks my father’s immigration application was accepted. All of us, father, mother, sister, brother, and myself got brand new resident cards like the ones now known as “green cards.”

We went to live in a beautiful Gulf Coast town called Corpus Christi, in Texas. It was paradise. Our teachers were kind and stayed after school to teach us English, the school’s principal took me to the school library and told me to take home and keep any two books I wanted, so I could learn to read English faster. Our neighborhood was filled with refugees and immigrants from Europe and we could hear Italian, Portuguese, German, and French, among others, spoken and shouted at kids warning us not to fall in the water as we played among the ships anchored in the shipping channel.

Oh, how things have changed!

Immigrants, not only in the US but all over the world, are vilified, accused of taking jobs from the “native” workers, described as “murderers and rapist” by idiots such as Donald Trump, beaten by police, chased and jailed by border guards, and generally made to feel unwelcome.

How quickly the welcome signs were taken down!

Europe, which just a few days ago welcomed the refugees from the Middle East, has now begun to grumble that there are just too many. Germany has suspended train traffic with Austria; Hungary, acting like the right-wing police state that it is, has sent more guards to its borders to keep refugees from crossing through, and France, always wishy-washy concerning the issue, has decided to rethink the problem...again.

Immigrants against immigrants

The rejection of immigrants by people who are themselves immigrants or children of immigrants is nothing new. If you have watched Martin Scorsese’s bad film “Gangs of New York” or the excellent PBS documentary “The Irish in America”, you would be aware of a historical fact: that the most vehement, vociferous proponents of deportation or blocking of immigration are immigrants who now consider themselves “natives”, permanent residents, or citizens of the home country.

This has happened as far back as there have been humans on Earth. I can imagine the Neanderthals and other species of humans watching with trepidation as Homo Sapiens invaded their hunting grounds. (And, it seems they had good cause to be afraid since there are indications that our specie contributed to the extinction of other human species such as the Neanderthals).

In the Nineteenth Century, the Irish in the US rioted against the influx of other Irish. During the 1830s, riots broke out in rural areas among rival labor teams from different parts of Ireland, and between Irish and "native" American work teams competing for construction jobs.

Once the Chinese had helped to build the railroads in Mexico, an anti-Chinese sentiment that worried about an “unchecked influx of Chinese” grew to the point of frenzy causing riots and massacres of Chinese immigrants. (The Yaqui Indians were more native than anyone else in Mexico but their customs were “strange” enough to seem foreign so they were massacred, too).

According to Wikipedia, studies done in 2000 regarding opposition to immigration show that this phenomena is common in many countries because of issues of national, cultural, and religious identity. The phenomenon has been studied especially in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, as well as Europe in recent years, where immigration is seen as lowering the wages of the less well-paid natives. Thus “nativism” has become a general term for 'opposition to immigration' based on fears that the immigrants will distort or spoil existing cultural values.

In scholarly studies nativism, Wikipedia asserts, is a standard technical term. It goes on to say that "those who hold this political view, however, typically do not accept the term. A study done in 2010 found that "nativists...do not consider themselves as nativists. For them it is a negative term and they rather consider themselves as Patriots. Anti-immigration is a more neutral term for opponents of immigration."

Even in countries that were built by immigrants, such as the United States, anti-immigration has been common. It would surprise many to know that such an erstwhile and enlightened person such as Benjamin Franklin was hostile to Germans immigrating into his beloved state of Pennsylvania (named after an immigrant, by the way).

Countries such as Brazil, which in my experience is very racially tolerant and where the mixed blood population is significant, the rich and elite have always desired that the country be “more white.” Hence, there, as in Argentina and Uruguay, “white” immigration was encouraged but “other” races were discouraged from coming into those countries.

One can sense something similar happening in Europe as the media seems intent on showing us the “whitest” of the immigrants as people we should be compassionate with and the blacks as hooligans who riot and fight with the police.

This European Union, which in this matter as in so many others has shown it is far from being united, is ambivalent about what to do with this river of humanity flowing from east to west. One day we welcome the immigrants and shower them with gifts and kindness and the next we’re kicking them out (literally) like that Hungarian camerawoman who kicked and tripped a man carrying a child. One day we are citizens of the world and the next raving nativist.

We have to come to terms with the problem and accept that we are partly responsible for this diaspora. Europeans and Americans (in the sense of countries of the Americas) in our misguided efforts to impose our will on the Middle East and Africa, and in our greed for their natural resources and oil, in the hubris-fueled desire for empire and conquest, set up the situation from which wars and destruction emanate. 

We can’t go on lamenting that our economies “can’t take the burden”, as a commentator said in a television program. Even if the entire population of Syria were to come over, it would represent less than 5% of the population of the European Union.  This so-called European Union has to, for once, show some unity and come up with a solution not only by receiving the immigrants in several of the European Union countries, not just the UK, Germany, and France, but also by helping to end the cause of the immigration, that is, the wars in the Middle East and the despotism and terrorism in Africa, which we have exploited for our political and economic benefit.