Just Another Day in the Land of Hopes and Dreams

Something strange happened today. Something that very seldom happens to me. And when it does, it happens gradually and almost imperceptibly. Subconsciously even. Today, I felt a shift in my perspective. A small, subtle shift. But a shift nonetheless.

A few weeks ago, I volunteered to tutor immigrants at a community center not far from where I live. All the immigrants are getting ready for the naturalization interview, their penultimate step towards US citizenship. This community center provides free English-language lessons, lessons that will hopefully help them pass their interviews and become US citizens.

Today was my first time with this group. I’ve taught English to immigrants many times before, so the experience itself was nothing new. There was the familiar excitement of meeting new people, learning where they are from and what brought them to the US. There was the camaraderie borne of communion, of sharing my own story, telling of my own experiences as an immigrant, an outsider.

It was a small class, with about a dozen or so students, all roughly middle-aged. Each volunteer was assigned a small group of two or three students. I was matched up with Ferdinand and Isabella (not their real names). The routine was pretty simple. No need for materials or a lesson plan. They had their citizenship booklets and workbooks full of US history and various writing exercises. We would work from those.

After introductions and the customary initial awkwardness, Ferdinand and Isabella seemed to loosen up. I started out with basic questions: what have you been working on in the class? Is there anything particular you’d like to work on? Both wanted to practise speaking. So we moved on to questions about them. Both are from a small Central American country. Both are divorced with children. Ferdinand has four from two previous wives. Isabella has two from her previous husband. They live in Europe. Isabella used to live in Europe with her sons but they’re grown now. I also learned that she and Ferdinand are married: he for the third time and she for the second.

Moving on to the more structured part of the lesson, I asked them both to write down a list of five things they liked about their country of birth. They talked about the weather (Isabella likes it hot), the food, the people, and the beach. Ferdinand said he likes the colors of the flag. I asked him what it was about the flag that he liked and he replied that as a kid in school, he’d have to look at the flag and pledge loyalty to it—just like in the US. Then he went to say that in his country of birth, you were allowed to look at the flag and maybe touch it. But you could not tear it or set fire to it. If you did, the army would take you away and . . . he made one hand into a fist and pounded it into the open palm of the other. Sometimes, a gesture speaks louder than words.

For the next part of the lesson, I had them ask each other questions about what they liked about the US. Isabella likes that there are people of many different nationalities. Ferdinand likes Atlantic City. And New York. He also likes the freedom, because he believes people should be able to express themselves without being pounded by the army. Isabella also likes that there are many opportunities here to have a good life. And she revealed that she would like to own a beauty salon someday. Ferdinand talked about how becoming a citizen would improve his chances of getting a better job. We continued to converse in this vein . . . while a realization slowly formed in my mind.

At several points in the hour-long lesson, I was deeply moved by this middle-aged couple, so different in so many ways yet so united in their belief in the potential of this country. He had come to the US as a young man in the ’70s but had chosen to return home, only to come back to the US six years ago. She had left her birth country at 15 and spent the better part of two decades in Europe, before making her way to the US. They had both lived elsewhere but had chosen to make the US their home.

And that’s when it hit me. This country’s strength, I realized, lies not in what it is, or even claims to be—lord knows, it falls far short of many of those claims. Rather, it lies in people like Ferdinand and Isabella, ordinary people whose desire for a better life gives them the strength to hope, the courage to follow their dreams wherever they may lead, and the determination to do whatever it takes to make them come true.

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Xenophobia clouds the mind.

Normally, I would not even bother responding to the racist and xenophobic drivel that spews out of Pat Buchanan’s mouth but I couldn’t resist the urge to weigh in and comment on his most recent contribution to the immigration debate. If you are a regular visitor to vdare.com (or a huge fan of Pat Buchanan’s) you need not continue reading as nothing I say will make any sense to you.

Showing the rhetorical skills for which he is famous, Pat Buchanan uses the Virginia Tech massacre as the launchpad for his latest bigoted diatribe. He starts out by criticizing the “mainstream media” for obsessing “over the fact the crazed gunman was able to buy a Glock in the state of Virginia” while virtually ignoring the fact that the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, was “not an American at all, but an immigrant, an alien.” Flawless execution! In one sentence, he conflates not being an American with being an immigrant and, worse, an alien. But he takes it even further. According to Buchanan, not American = immigrant = alien = murderer! Because—as we find out in his laundry list of murderous immigrants—the problem is not whether immigrants enter the country with or without the proper documentation; the real problem is that these “strangers” are being let into the country at all!! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

According to Pat Buchanan, the 1965 Immigration Reform Act let tens of millions of people into this country from all over the world. So what? you ask. After all, isn’t the U.S. population comprised of immigrants from all over the world? Well, you’d be right (except for indigenous Americans, of course) but that’s not really where Pat Buchanan is coming from. As he cleverly points out, the majority of those who entered the U.S. after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act came from “countries whose peoples have never fully assimilated in any Western country.” Logically, one can only assume he’s referring to people who are not from “Western” countries i.e., Africans, Arabs, West Indians, Asians, Latinos and other dark-skinned or non-Christian people. People from Europe (like his own Irish ancestors) are not included in this group. Interestingly, nor are the Africans who were brought to this country in chains, enslaved and then discriminated against by the more-recently-arrived-but-fully-assimilated “Western” immigrants. But I supsect this is something Mr. Buchanan and his ilk have no interest in discussing or even thinking about. Besides, I digress from my original point.

Pat Buchanan would have us believe that the 1965 Immigration Reform Act (by giving millions of people access to the American Dream regardless of skin color, national origin, religion or language) is the main culprit in the dissolution of “the bonds of national community” that was to take place in the 1960s. One has to wonder about the role played by groups like the Ku Klux Klan in creating and sustaining these bonds of “national community.” After all, he makes it sound as if, prior to 1965, the U.S. was an all-inclusive love-fest for everyone who found her/himself within the country’s borders.

OK, I could go on for ever picking apart the glaring omissions in Pat Buchanan’s tirade but I’ll focus on my original reason for posting. Buchanan goes through a long laundry list of heinous crimes committed in the U.S. against Americans by . . . gasp! . . . immigrants! The list includes everyone from John Lee Malvo (the teenage accomplice of the DC sniper) whom Buchanan derides as “flotsam from the Caribbean” (possibly a reference to boat people?) to mass murderer Juan Corona (Buchanan fails to mention that his victims were poor Latino farm workers, probably undocumented, whose disappearances often went unnoticed) to Sirhan Sirhan, infamous for his assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Implicit in Buchanan’s rant is the notion that a murder committed by an immigrant is somehow a worse, more serious offense than one committed by a person born in the U.S. After all, why else would he so brilliantly avoid mentioning native-born Americans who have committed heinous crimes. Absent from Buchanan’s list of villains are such good Americans as Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who earned a place in the history books for carrying out the largest act of domestic terrorism in the U.S. when they blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people. Also absent are the Americans who tied a rope around James Byrd‘s neck, attached it to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him until his head (along with one of his arms) was severed.

What Buchanan and other racists seek to do is conflate all immigrants with the deranged and violent few. He uses the Virginia Tech shootings (still fresh in the nation’s mind) as the starting point in attempting to accomplish this goal. In his mind Cho, Malvo, Sirhan Sirhan and other violent immigrants might as well be every immigrant, and vice versa. This is good old fashioned racist essentialization, which happens when qualities belonging to some members of a group are attributed to all members of that group. But whereas racists of previous generations used skin color, religion, or country/region of origin as the basis of their essentialization, today’s racists use having been born outside the U.S. as the criteria for relegating people to a despised group. Thus, Buchanan is able to include Arabs, Persians, Africans, and Latinos in his list of undeseriables in an attempt to demonstrate, through rhetorical sleight of hand, that because some immigrants have committed violent acts, all immigrants are bad for America.

Buchanan’s techniques rely on a leap of logic worthy of the most notorious exponents of racist theory yet, disappointly, he remains a mainstream commentator in American politics. I am deeply saddened that in this day and age, people still cling so strongly to—and so vociferously proclaim—such prejudice. But I am even more saddened when I think about the family and friends of the people murdered on the Virginia Tech campus. I wonder how they feel about Pat Buchanan using the deaths of their loved ones to advance his message of intolerance.

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