These days, there seems to be a lot of anti-immigration rhetoric moving across people’s mouths and through the airwaves. House Bill 318, called the “Protect North Carolina Workers Act,” from the General Assembly has been viewed as the most recent move against immigrants in North Carolina, and NC State students have been among those protesting its passage. The bill, which was signed into law Wednesday, has the potential to harmfully affect immigrants and their families, many of which make up the NC State student body. From the unabashed remarks of Donald Trump to growing hostility toward refugees fleeing fire and blood in the Middle East, the tension toward immigrants is palpable, although the terse feelings are nothing new. Enmity toward immigrants and “non-natives” reaches all the way back to the United States’ own beginnings.
After being forcibly immigrated to the U.S. to work in captivity, it has taken more than a hundred years for hostility toward black people to be quenched, and the bigotry still carries on. When the Irish poured over in droves as their home country starved from the great potato famine, they were met with violence and exclusion. Ironically, the Irish joined European Americans when Chinese immigrants next came to work essentially as slaves in the construction of railroads; both groups imparted violence on the newest countrymen from Asia. In our collective history regarding other incoming ethnicities, the only thing that appears to not have been discriminatory was our capacity to discriminate: we’ve done a bang-up job of spooning it out for all. And most recently, that hostility and political focus has been turned to newcomers from Latin America.
Have we really matured any over all the lessons we’ve learned from bigotry and nativism? What are the rationale and fears lying at the heart of these aggressive feelings, and will they ever be resolved?
It is unfortunate that many of us are so ready to turn a blind eye to the reality of the States’ birth rights. Pope Francis put it well in his address to Congress: “We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners … knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants.” And it’s the truth. “Americans” in the modern, narrow-minded sense held by many, were never the natives of the land that became the U.S.
Our nation was born from colonization by Europeans and the British; our founding fathers came on the same tide that brought other white people who were fleeing their own religious persecution. Ultimately through genocide, disease and dishonest deals, the abundant land America holds today was taken from the original natives. No wonder we’re fearful of strangers showing up to the party. Looking back into our collective memory, we may be worried that new arrivals may bring the same fate we delivered to the natives before us.
And the resentment is not without its fear mongering. Supposedly, immigrants bring to the country violence and drugs, although studies by the Immigration Policy Center show immigrant populations are the least likely to commit crime or be incarcerated. Still, fear and xenophobia are easy targets for politicians to seize on and so they do so year after year. Supposedly immigrants are here to take advantage of our healthcare, although the claims are largely not validated and both illegals and immigrants tend to use less per person than their citizen counterparts. Supposedly, immigrants are here to take our jobs or bust up the economy, but immigrants are largely responsible for lower costs of agriculture, construction and tourism. They often end up taking jobs for pay that many citizens would refuse even though just as many immigrants are recruited and bring education and expertise to high-skill jobs that America’s innovation and industry benefit from. Immigration tends to have a net positive effect on the economy as it produces more than it takes out, and studies have shown in the long run that it has a positive, though small, effect on native employment through expansion of industry and markets.
Supposedly immigrants threaten our culture, although arguably two of America’s most prominent cultural identities, plurality and diversity, have only widened the cultural heritage and richness of our country. Economic and cultural concerns are valid values, but the negative impacts on them by immigrants either aren’t supported or simply not true. However, politicians continue the fear mongering about immigrants because it seizes on a powerful motivator to attract voters: fear. As politicians try to draw support by presenting themselves as solution-makers to this “crisis”, it’s important to be informed on what the reality of immigration is, instead of politically skewed versions.
One valid pressing concern is how immigration will affect our population growth. Population trends are pointing to the reality that in another 10 years, immigrants and their subsequent generations will contribute more to U.S. population growth than the native fertility rate. As our country continues to stretch the limits on its natural resources including land, air and water, growing numbers will continue to strain that which is already strained. Managing immigration may in fact become a conversation of preserving the health of our natural resources, although those words may not come from the current and most adamant opponents to immigration as it would require acknowledging that the environment needs protecting.
The issue of immigration is often the result of survival. Few really want to leave behind their home country and family for no reason. We’re born into our circumstances and our citizenship defined by birth is a matter of chance and privilege rather than merit or right. Immigrants traveling to foreign countries often do so because of war, persecution or lack of economic prospects, and being born into those conditions was never a choice either. It would be productive and hopeful to see politicians discussing solutions to immigration in terms of foreign investment and developing the global economy, rather than in terms of deportation and taller fences. Because in reality, we are all human beings trying to thrive on a hostile planet that is largely underwater, existing in the latitudes between two frozen poles, trying to find a stable life on what little land is not swallowed by the sea. Until we can build a world where we don’t have to migrate to survive, we can try to move toward constructive solutions rather than violence, discrimination and apathy.
