The Chris Moeller Archives

Upon the Feast of St. Patrick

Happy St. Paddy’s Day, boy-oh. Of course, it isn’t a particularly happy one, not here in the United States, where a day that celebrates the immigration of one particular nationality is slated to be overwhelmed by the terrible narrative of the times-- a xenophobic president pushing construction of his border wall and targeting specific other nationalities for exclusion, and doing so in a shockingly-open fashion.

Second-generation Irish-American Andrew O’Hehir has a very thinkable piece up at Salon addressing his Irish countrymen and countrywomen in the New World. He claims that, "among all but the affluent classes, nearly everyone in Ireland has a friend or family member who has worked illegally in the U.S. or is doing so now.” He expresses embarrassment that the prime minister of the Republic of Ireland has arrived in Washington this week, and rather shamelessly made the tone-deaf, lopsided suggestion-- face-to-face with the U.S. president-- that, despite the current political climate, the roughly 50,000 Irish citizens that are living illegally here now have their status legalized. O’Hehir also laments that so many of the descendants of the U.S.’s once-despised Irish immigrant population are now on the front line of Trump’s war on the hungry, tired, and huddled masses. It’s worth calling them out by their Gaelic surnames: (Steve) Bannon, (Sean) Spicer, (Kellyanne) Conway, (John) Kelly, (Kevin) McCarthy, (Michael) Flynn… and I’ll add (Paul) Ryan. It’s the American way, it seems-- climb the proverbial ladder yourself and saw off every wrung behind you as you go.

I wish how it weren’t the same for my people, today’s German-Americans, whose rich Central European culture we abandoned, or were forced to abandon, in a virtual instant at the outbreak of World War I. At the time of the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination in 1914, there were still dozens of German-language newspapers just in the state of Iowa alone. But there he is now, instead: Mr. Drumpf, in the White House, spitting at the brown and black. Are today’s immigrants less educated, less hard-working, more dangerous? Why don’t they just play by the rules, many of you ask, the way your foremothers and forefathers did? Well, how easy did my emigrant ancestors have it compared to the migrants of today? Hardships of a hard land, my ass. Wood fires don’t keep you as warm as a high-velocity heat pump, that much is true, but those resettled Americans then were considered United States citizens, with all of the accompanying privileges, almost the instant they stepped off the boat on South Manhattan’s Castle Garden.

This was the 1860s. There were entrance tests for health, but none for citizenship, nor for language. There was no such thing as temporary status, no overstaying a visa, no restrictions on work permit or school enrollment. Those endeavors were actually encouraged without qualification. There was no need for detention centers for expulsion, separation of families, no “expedited removals,” no immigration prisons, to say nothing of a detention industry for profit. The length of the line to get in was measured not in years, but in mere hours. There was no such thing as being “illegal,” and no quota systems for national origin, not for the Europeans anyway, but they were coming soon for groups like the Chinese.

And how easy did my ancestors have it economically, relative to 2017? After they landed as citizens, they were given land. It was called the Homestead Act, signed into law by Abe Lincoln in 1862. What did the land cost? How did they pay for it? Your questions aren't even correct. They paid only a small filing fee-- eighteen dollars. The land itself was free. All that a man 21 years or older had to do to own this allotted land was go live on it for five years, and then it belonged to him. This policy of land grant was in place for a long period of time. The amount of acres allotted by the legislation was increased in 1909 and again in 1916.

The door is no longer open. With the rights of the migrants disappearing, ours disappear as well. Now we have debates about which newcomers are the “good ones,” which ones are the “bad ones.” We make up false narratives that immigrants drive down the wages of the native-born and that there are more crimes committed among the newly-arrived than among our tenured residents. Both major political parties openly admit that we value them more highly if they are skilled than if they are unskilled, even though the nation’s economy has always demanded the contributions of both groups. We wonder why the “illegals” just don’t get in line when there is actually no line to get into.

Above all other reasons, we despise them because they are poor. We make a presumption of their guilt, even for refugees. The entire game is rigged against them. It's built on the historical fiction of hardship referenced above, and one that is, in truth, specifically designed not to deliver new Americans out of peril, but to keep them in it, ripe for manipulation and exploitation.

Migration is a human right. Without it, our other rights fade to nothing. The lord and savior of a predominantly Christian nation had his parents turned away at his birth. Then he was turned away during his life. He preached for inclusion and never once gave any indication that he would support the garbage that is our bureaucracy today, or even the concept of a national border. Though we looked to these parables for meaning for decades, they are now just lost lessons on a collapsing empire that is, taken as a whole, mean and stupid.

posted by CM @ 6:19 PM