Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor

The prejudice demonstrated by some parties in the immigration debates (OK, I’ll say it – the nativist parties) is galling and fills me with a rage unparalleled by any except the rage a nativist experiences when he hears Spanish spoken this side of the Mexican border. In Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest Intelligence Report, there was an article about the charges rancher Roger Barnett faced for threatening a group of American citizens, including children, who he thought were undocumented immigrants. Luckily, he was found guilty on fourteen of fifteen counts, and so is at least being held accountable for this transgression. Apparently, it is not his only one. This guy claims to have rounded up twelve thousand undocumented immigrants by himself, and is so extreme even President Bush labeled him a vigilante. There is not much I can add to this story in particular, so instead I will talk about the equally disturbing reactions of the community to Barnett’s case. From the link:

Nov. 25
Posted by “Native American”
There are many people like myself who will snap if pushed too far and if I were in this guy’s place there would be war already. If I can’t live like a civilized human being with the right to defend myself, my livelihood, and my property, then it’s simply not worth living and I would have nothing to lose by taking as many enemies down with me as possible! As more people are pushed to this point then war will be inevitable. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND EVERYONE ARM THEMSELVES … HEAVILY!

 

First of all, Native American? Really? That’s your handle? It’s entirely possible this guy actually is a Native American, but I think it’s unlikely. Putting that aside, let’s look at some of the rhetoric. He speaks of “war” twice, taking down “enemies,” and defending himself, his livelihood and his property. Defending against what? A working man or woman, drawn by the promise of America? Many on the anti-immigrant side of the debate like to cast it in terms of legality – that it is not about fear and hatred of immigrants, but about illegal immigration specifically. No, it’s clearly not. That this particular maniac refers to living like a “civilized human being,” implying that immigrants are uncivilized, is emblematic of the undercurrent of hostility towards the people coming to America, not just the methods they use. This quote is particularly frightening, both because it advocates murder and it proves the existence of an Ayn Rand devotee:

Posted by “John Galt”
Deadmen file no lawsuits. Shoot, shovel and shut up. Keep some quick lime in storage. Refuse to be a victim.

Luckily, this kind of response is fringe (I hope). Still, it embodies the spirit of irrational, disproportionate fear on the nativist side.

 

 

The recent immigration bill proposed by Senator Kennedy is making some headway as far as immigration reform, but I’m worried about “touchback” – for what purpose would we send undocumented immigrants back to their native countries if we were going to allow them legalization? I can only imagine that it would be part of a process of shutting out the “undesirable,” that is, people who for whatever reason are not considered contributive to the US economy. The grand irony is that at 4.7% unemployment, there are few people who are actually losing their jobs to immigrants. Those who are here are doing work crucial to the economy. Moreover, though the bill would ostensibly grant amnesty to the estimated twelve million undocumented currently in the US, as far as I can tell any new guest workers allowed in on a guest worker visa would have almost no paths to citizenship. We would end up with a class of non-citizens, I assume with less legal protection and certainly less (no?) services provided by the government, like we were Saudi oil magnates riding around the Gulf on the backs of their wage-slave Pakistani servants. “Guest worker” programs are highly problematic because they are the institutionalization of a separate legal class within your own country – combined with the class problems that will arise with these immigrants doing all the most menial labor for minimal pay, it begins to assume dark overtones of government sanctioned social inequality, the exact antithesis of American and democratic principles.

More on this later.

Procrastination

It’s been a long time.  I plan to update more when I finish finals, which will be after tomorrow.

I was reading Allen Ginsberg’s A Supermarket In California while failing to study for my final tomorrow.   The poem is about the narrator, possibly Ginsberg, following “Walt Whitman” around a Berkeley supermarket at night.  Though I knew Ginsberg was a beat poet and most famous in the ’50s, i hadn’t placed him in any particular time, and therefore placed him in the present or near past.  Thus, when I read his anachronistic references to Whitman, I felt that the distance the narrator felt from Whitman was much the same as my own – America’s premier poet, who lived in an America so far removed from my own he might as well be Chaucer or Virgil.  Still, he is the American Poet, and so I, like the narrator, feel close to him as if he some how matters to my life or my world.

Then I read the date on the bottom of the poem.  Berkeley, 1955.

1955!

This poem was written over half a century ago; there is nearly as great a temporal difference between me and this narrator, as between the narrator and Whitman.  What was Berkeley like in 1955?  Less homeless, hippies, liberals?  Less Asians.  Even more sleepy and suburban than it is currently?  Was there even a supermarket in Berkeley in 1955?

The profound irony of the poem, while I read it (though I have now spoiled the surprise for anyone who reads this post first) was that I identified with the narrator in many ways, only to realize that I could write the same poem today about  the Ginsberg of then.  The man is also an American Poet, someone who defined American post-war modernity in a way that perhaps shaped all American art subsequently.  References to famous writers past, in the writing of a famous writer, always strike me in an odd way.  I feel like I am somehow taken out of the fiction and brought into closer commune with the writer himself.  Famous writers are typically great writers, and a Great Writer is infallible and sometimes frightening in genius.  I wonder what it was like to be a physics undergraduate under Newton or Einstein; that’s how I feel sometimes, reading Hemingway or Solzhenitsyn.  When I read a poem by Ginsburg in his early days, about the staggeringly intimidating Walt Whitman, I can feel in him the reader and student – someone who has not yet garnered the reputation he will come to have, is maybe insecure about his own abilities, and is certainly in awe of and measures himself by the Great American Poet.  He feels like someone that I could meet in a Berkeley supermarket, rather than some kind of God-man who dominates American poetry.

Ginsburg later said he hated this poem, which is interesting to me because it is one of the few modern  poems I have ever read off hand and enjoyed immediately, without needing to delve too extensively into the meaning of the work.  It is there, I am sure, if I ever wanted to do so; but it is also immediately pleasurable in construction and imagery.  I happened upon it accidentally, and maybe some day I will return to it – for now, though, I’ll leave it be.