Immigrants, particularly immigrants from what President Trump has described as “S**thole Countries,” are rejecting those "S**tholes." That’s why they’re immigrants.
Yet it's long been the norm to assume otherwise. Consider 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Describing existing and would-be Irish immigrants, he thundered about how “They hate our free and fertile isle. They hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, our decorous liberty, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race has no sympathy with the English character.” And that’s not all Disraeli had to say about the arrival of the Irish and their capacity to “imperil England.”
It’s a reminder to Americans who think they’re acting as the proverbial culture carriers and protectors of same that their effort is wasted. Disdain for outsiders is as old as immigration, and it’s rooted in the false fear that failure is mobile. Quite the opposite.
It recalls yet another 19th century anecdote. From 1820 to 1860, people from Ireland accounted for more than a third of all immigrants into the United States. Did the Irish bring their “unbroken circle of bigotry and blood” (Disraeli again) to the U.S. on the path to its certain ruin? Clown question.
All the ranting and certitude about the people who got up and left failed states for something better implies that those who leave resemble those who did not. What a flawed way of analyzing immigration, no matter your view of it.
To state what should be obvious, immigrants are quite simply different. How readers should know this is to consider a longtime theme of American literature and movies: they’re frequently about American citizens spending their childhoods dreaming of exiting small, boring, opportunity-bereft towns for something better in the greatest zone of freedom the world has ever known.
No doubt more than a few readers remember the lines. “I left [insert small town] and never looked back.” “I got as far away from [insert factory town] as I could.”
Sometimes “immigration” takes place within U.S. cities. When Tim Russert told his sanitation worker father in South Buffalo that he wanted to attend prestigious Jesuit high school Canisius, his father said something along the lines of “that’s very far away." He wasn’t talking distance. Considering New York City, and Manhattan within New York City, arguably the biggest, most immigrant-like leap in all the U.S. isn’t the arrival of strivers from Tijuana to San Diego, or Nuevo Laredo to Laredo, it’s anywhere in the U.S. to Manhattan.
The main thing is that relative to Manhattan, more than a few of its inhabitants came from much worse. Call them “S**thole” parts of the United States. Except that Americans who reveal their quintessential American-ness through their mobility are indicating that they’re New Yorkers through and through.
Which is the point, or should be the point about the arrivals from countries not nearly as prosperous as ours. That they’ve left what is backwards in pursuit of something better tells us a great deal about them. As opposed to bringing their backwards, sometimes statist cultures with them, they’re loudly rejecting where they’ve come from.
In other words, those coming to the United States from “S**thole Countries” are revealing their American values by coming to America. Thought of another way, if you’re an immigrant you’re an American.
