Messages from the Past for Our Current Crisis
by Albrecht Classen
Human destiny has often been determined by the need to leave the place one calls ‘home.’ In fact, growing up normally means just that: depart from the place of one’s childhood and move on to a new stage in life, often far away from where the parents live. We could describe life as movement, or migration, whether individuals and groups are moving on to distant educational institutions, are searching for a job, are looking for security and political asylum, are simply adventurous and want to explore the world for a longer period of time, or whether people are forced to depart from their country of origin because of external, political, religious, and mostly military reasons.
Our very first parents, Adam and Eve, were forced out of Paradise because of their decision to eat the forbidden fruit and hence to disobey God’s command. As tragic as that event certainly was for both, it turned out to be meaningful and productive for humanity because thus real life began, and the couple was required to embrace an adult existence. Without that ‘migration,’ there would not have been progeny, and actual human culture. Even marriage can lead to a form of migration, in the most positive sense of the word. Moreover, migration can be seasonal, i.e., temporal (e.g., workers), or permanent, and while some migrant groups have eagerly aimed for the new world (e.g., America), others have suffered deeply over the loss of their home culture and identity. Altogether, however, no migration has ever been easy because the immigrant must quickly learn to adjust to a new, often hostile, world, language, culture, political system, climate, geography, communication, or mode of transportation. We could globally claim that most migration comes with mixed feelings and experiences, and there is always some sense of nostalgia involved.
So we can immediately gain the axiomatic insight that migration has been, from time immemorial, a most critical event in all of human history, quite commonly associated with external force, physical violence, mortal threats, political pressure, and, broadly speaking, disregard for human life. In order to survive, people have often been forced to flee. But if there is no safe harbor, where can migrants turn to? Not too many European Jews were accepted in the USA during the time of the Nazi regime, and Japanese-Americans were even interned during WWII, hardly anyone willing to flee back to Japan where the parents or grandparents had come from. However, what American today can claim to be purely American, with deep roots going back ten or more generations, not considering the situation of our fellow-citizens, the American-Indians? In other words, most of us in the U.S. are migrants (as I myself am) or descendants from migrants.
The United States of America has always been a beacon of hope for people from all over the world who come seeking safety, political asylum, jobs, good education, and a future for themselves and their families. Tragically, we currently witness a dramatic change in the direction our country is taking, as the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) have recently (Oct. 25, 2018) received a notice from its director, L. Francis Cissna, a White House appointee, that we are no longer a “nation of immigrants,” a phrase coined by President John F. Kennedy for his book published posthumously under that title in 1964, who in turn drew it from an editorial in a newspaper published in 1874. Instead, we are suddenly told that the USCIS “administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland and honoring our values.”
This means that this country, built by millions of immigrants, is no longer truly concerned with anyone else but American citizens. As right-wing pundits have often stated, especially in Europe in face of the huge immigration crisis involving Syrians in 2015 and ongoing, ‘the boat is full.’ The rest can stay in the water, or in the desert, whether they might face murder or starvation, famine or torture back home. Migrants are no longer viewed as welcome, and when the so-called ‘caravan’ of refugees and asylum seekers from Guatemala and Honduras reached the U.S. border in November of 2018, they were ‘welcomed’ by more than 5000 soldiers, many of them armed, ready to shoot upon order. They would shoot children, women, men, old people, young people, and this indiscriminately in the name of a nation that wants to turn its back on the world and deny its many responsibilities for and obligations to Central and Latin America resulting from massive weapons export and the import of drugs. Those migrants are refugee-seekers, and they should be simply met by a welcome and a temporary visa to make their case of legitimacy. They have left behind countries torn apart by civil wars which threaten especially the lives of the civil population.
We have become a nation under siege, a siege that we ourselves have created because it is the product of artificially stoked fear of the outsider, the foreigner, the representatives of other beliefs, languages, cultures, and values. Of course, everyone who wants to live in this country must accept our laws and norms as the rule of the land, which also applies, of course, to everyone who was born as an American. Tragically, there are suddenly terrorists in our midst who, citing our own president, publicly denounce the foundation of our democracy and target minorities and immigrants. Yet, our constitution continues to be the absolute benchmark, and there is no reason to fear, except fear itself, to paraphrase President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Nevertheless, the current administration has publicly identified the USA as a threatened island, with all our efforts, resources, strength, and values to be dedicated entirely to the ‘protection’ of this country to the detriment of everyone else. But migrants will come, irrespective of the new guidelines, of border constructions, and the militarization of the borders everywhere. After all, America must trade and deal with Canada and Mexico, our next-door neighbors, and pursue economic, political, military, and social interactions with the rest of the world, especially with our friends, though the White House has begun to treat them as our enemies. How else could it be since we as Americans are part and parcel of the global family and should never disregard, detest, reject, or fight our own brothers and sisters everywhere. Moreover, the American population is aging, and we certainly need new, young people to fill the posts left behind by retirees in ever greater numbers.
Understandably, migration always constitutes unrest, disruption, fear, and worries because of perceived threats, lack of communication, and, most prominently, the complete absence of empathy for the suffering those migrants have to go through. No one would happily leave their own home if it provided safety, shelter, protection, and security. By the same token, who would not leave home if it is under siege and in danger of being destroyed? Neither the Hondurans nor the Mexicans, neither the Syrians nor the Sudanese in the recent years have left their countries out of greed, lust, criminal instincts, or other vices, exceptions always exempted here. The hungry and the desperate people at the border are not criminals or terrorists; they are desperate, plain and simple. Those Americans who wish to aim their guns at them, however, are violence-prone, and we should not give them any permission to use their weapons against innocent victims. It is one thing to defend our own country against enemies and external threats; it is another thing to close the border with terrible might when a stream of refugees arrives and really needs help. Of course, this constitutes a very difficult problem, as the Europeans have had to face since 2015 when a huge wave of Syrian refugees arrived at their doors, and continue to do so because they cannot survive back home. Europe has witnessed the same backlash against those despondent people, with some Europeans turning ugly and mean, just as could be the case here in the USA.
How far back would we have to look to understand the phenomenon of migration? I mentioned already Adam and Eve and World War II, but in all the intervening thousands of years, people have been forced to flee from war situations, revolutions (French, Russian, Chinese, etc.), the witch craze, the Inquisition, pogroms, and burning at the stake for alleged heresy. The Protestant Reformation created profound unrest and unleashed a major wave of refugees: Protestants fleeing from Catholic areas, Catholics expelled from Protestant areas, Anabaptists, Mennonites, Amish, and other groups forced into exile. When the French King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, after King Henry IV had signed it originally into law in 1598, he abandoned the principles of tolerance and forced huge groups of French Protestants, the Huguenots, out of the country, many of whom belonged to the highly educated and well-trained middle class. Already in 1492, the same year that Columbus ‘discovered’ America, King Ferdinand and his wife Isabelle ordered the expulsion of all Jews, which ultimately deprived the country of many of its best citizens. This was the culmination point of centuries of pogroms directed against Jews, who suffered the destiny of forced migration– diaspora–throughout the entire Middle Ages. Around 500 years later, the Nazis returned to the same vicious anti-Semitism when they launched the Holocaust. They did not manage, thankfully, to eliminate Jewry from the earth, but they caused massive suffering and a near-genocide.
Migration is never an easy thing, neither for the migrants nor for those who are required to welcome them. Almost ironically, after WWII, ca. 16.5 million Germans were also forced to flee from eastern and central Europe back to western Germany, creating massive hardships. Similarly, at about the same time, millions of Poles were forced to leave the Kresy region (today part of Russia and other states) and settle in the western parts of the country.
The history of the United States has not really been a shining example of true citizenship and humanitarian ideals and values either. From ca. 1910 to ca. 1970, about seven million former African slaves migrated from the repressive and impoverished rural American South to the North, the Middle, and the West where they found much better treatment and better-paying jobs. Does that mean, however, that racism has therefore come to a stop today? On the contrary, it has often come along with this Great Migration and has thus spread ever further across all of North America.
In the current situation, millions of people in the Americas are on the move from the South to the North, many of whom are simply economic refugees, but many of them are truly driven from their homeland and forced to abandon their country by military juntas, militias, mafias, gangs, and other violent groups. The reasons are not hard to fathom because in our age of post-capitalism the West tends to export weapons to those countries and buys drugs, which creates a vicious cycle from which the civil population suffers the most. The more Americans purchase illegal drugs, the more they fill the coffers of the drug dealers. Dealers then can buy weapons from American companies and terrorize ever more people in their own countries. Ultimately, as this logic tells us, we are creating the migration crisis ourselves, establishing a self-fulfilling prophecy, and instead of working toward practical, effective, long-term solutions that will help people and create new stable conditions in the countries of the migrants’ origin, our government now intends to defend the border in a military style, but against whom? The hypocrisy and absurdity of this situation can no longer be overlooked by anyone able and willing to examine the situation critically and become well-informed.
While there are no concrete solutions in sight, can we at least count on people’s willingness to search for solutions? The political development globally over the last years clearly indicates that this is not quite the case anymore. Instead of fostering a “Willkommenskultur” (culture of welcoming), as was the dominant tone during the early stage of the immigration of Syrians to Germany in 2015, right-wing parties have made dramatic progress in many elections (AfD in Germany, Front National in France, The League in Italy, The Freedom Party in The Netherlands, etc.), and thus also in the USA, obviously because fear whipped up by demagogues everywhere appeals more to people than the ideals of acceptance, sympathy, empathy, and the willingness to help. The German “Willkommenskultur” was at first strongly fed by the memory of the older German people’s own suffering after WWII, but once the numbers of refugees swelled tremendously, the publicly displayed hospitality and open-mindedness quickly gave way to hostility, hatred, rejection, and strong efforts to stem the flood of foreigners at all costs.
The often-voiced intention by the current U.S. administration to defend the southern border with Mexico with a mighty wall proves to be an iconic expression of fear, insecurity, and lack of understanding, especially when politicians irresponsibly claim that those migrants are nothing but criminals and terrorists. No wall in the entire history of humankind (the Chinese Wall, the Roman Wall, the Hadrian Wall, the East German Wall) has ever achieved its goal in the long-term, even if such a construction could hold at bay the outsiders for some time. The real enemies thus prove to be fear, small-mindedness, self-centeredness, greed, and naked hatred of the Other.
At present, worldwide, collaboration and a sense of community are replaced by exclusion, repulsion, and blocking out the migrants, irrespective of their suffering. Future historians may look back at us and bemoan the deep crisis, if not collapse, of the great nation once called the United States of America, the country of immigrants, the beacon of hope, the previously safe haven for the hungry and persecuted, and, as our national anthem so proudly pronounces, the “home of the brave.” Anyone who claims to be a religious or at least spiritual person ought to denounce such hostile, militaristic opposition to ordinary people, our neighbors to the south, who desperately need our help after our weapons have basically destroyed their countries. We can, nay we must, do much better than what our current government does in face of the new wave of migrants coming to our glorious country. Both our ethics and our economy, both our morality and our faith command us to do so because we must not turn our backs to our brothers and sisters.
