Connecting the Dots ~ Fred Allebach

Fred Allebach Fred Allebach is a member of the City of Sonoma’s Community Services and Environmental Commission, and an Advisory Committee member of the Sonoma Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Fred is a member of Sonoma Overlook Trail Stewards, as well as Sonoma Valley Housing Group and Transition Sonoma Valley.

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Immigration tensions: inclusion or exclusion?

Posted on February 11, 2017 by Fred Allebach

Mark_Harris
The current immigration dust up has a lot of causal factors, one of which is a culture war between two different moral systems, one that values inclusion, and another that values exclusion.

What are some of the causes of migration? The world is populated by the human race, which has itself divided into nations, states regions, municipalities, cities and towns. When things get tough in one location, whether because of the age-old (or man-caused) vagaries of climate and resulting lack of food and water, or because of abusive, exploitive rulers and war, people are pushed to move. This exact same impetus to move was part of what led to the colonization (settlement?) of North America in various waves of immigration pushed by European war, famine, climate and overpopulation. New greener pastures always call, pulling those in trouble to move on and better themselves. Migration always has push and pull factors.

When the first waves of immigrants establish a beach head, they then start to want to exclude others, as further inclusion seems to dilute the pie on new opportunity. The first immigrants and their descendants forget what it was like, the need to move or die and suffer.

In the US, colonists needed Native help to start (Thanksgiving), bit this quickly turned to conquest, genocide and sequestering the remaining Indians on reservations.

This leads to how our peculiar cultural views may include or exclude other human beings? Do we see all people as universal members of the same family, or do we subdivide into hierarchies of civilization, nations, ethnicities, religions, and beliefs etc.? This opens up the Tower of Babel metaphor from Genesis in the Old Testament. Want to talk Western Civilization founding documents? There you go.

In this cultural myth, we got confounded by ethnic/ cultural/ language differences, when we were really all the same, because our heads got too big and we wanted to be like the gods. We needed to be cut down to size from the negative effects of our own hubris. This all sounds familiar, and brings us to what being a citizen may mean?

I look here to the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the assertion of universal, natural rights for all people. This is the foundation of democracy, for an inclusion of all, people who then have freedoms to pursue life, liberty and happiness. Of course, if this turns into an end in itself, to an every-dog-for-himself meme, we as a society risk ending up with tragedy of the commons outcomes, which we have already done in many ways as evidenced by human-caused climate change and the Sixth Great Extinction event. And so, all societies have had to put limits on people for the greater good, and part of this includes having control of a municipality’s borders.

The rub is the rationale given for why borders will be controlled. Will it be something like the Chinese Exclusion Act? Protestant judgement against Catholic Irish immigrants? Excluding Muslims specifically? Will it result in a Bracero Program, an allowance for highly educated tech workers? This process can be more or less gracious, calling to the dark side of human nature as much as to the light.

Here in Sonoma, local farmers complained, after implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act, that white labor was lazy and cost too much.

Living in groups of smart, intelligent, selfish, and compassionate beings means a lot of tensions have to be worked out. One of these tensions, and necessary limits on the common pie, has come about as the continuing choice to include or exclude immigrants. This pattern has re-merged over American and world history, open, closed, open, closed, more or less nativism.  Presidents rise to power in periodic populist waves of immigrant vilification. This draws together a base of voters whose primary concern is to circle the wagons, to assert the primacy of the in-group in currently in power.

Today in countries that have low birth rates and aging demographics, the only way to get economic productivity, to get services, and pay for the social security of the elders, is to allow more immigrants.

Today in the US we face a fascistic scenario of classifying people into good and bad hierarchies of value and equality. The people who will not be allowed to get theirs have less universal rights of man, if any. They will be second class citizens (Japanese Internment), or not be citizens at all. When push comes to shove, in-groups circle the wagons and fight against out-groups. Who is in and who us out becomes not really a matter of rights and law, but of pure Machiavellian power and control. Human legal systems are a prop for power and control, and a reflection of a society’s values. This is biological population dynamics as filtered through human culture.

Citizenship takes universal rights and ties them to being a member of a particular state society. A citizen is a member of that in-group, with that flavor. What state society a citizen may be a formal member of is an accident of geography.

If the Rights of Man are universal, and past colonialism and US/ Western European exploitation effectively made all people into de facto world citizens anyway, under the effects of the US and Western global hegemony, then what we get to is that all people are world citizens who suffer the consequences of human-race-level, world geo-political history and current crosswinds, and not all get to have a taste the gravy train. For the US business interests to take all the wealth, take the resources, pollute the atmosphere, soil and water, underpay the people, support dictators, and then say citizens of these countries who move to the US are “illegal”, and not refugees, or deserving of better from the US, is disingenuous. The basis of the original sanctuary movement in the 1980s was to call out US-backed political oppression in Central America. The US government refused to class Central American migrants as refugees.

What better example could there be of why they US has undocumented immigrants? As Jose Antonio Vargas said, “we are here because you were there.” The US colonized, made a relationship, took the goods, and now wants no responsibility? No ownership for the global fallout for colonialism?

What we seem to have now in the US and Europe is a situation of: we took all the world had to give, all the oil, the labor, the wealth, the resources, and then when it starts to run out, when we screwed it up with war, social dislocation, nukes, climate change, massive extinction, and played the local people out for pawns, etc., now we’re going to pull back and protect our own, and exclude all the poor people upon whose backs we came to live so comfortably upon in the first place?

The migrant issue is now part of a culture war, maybe global, where different moralities of inclusion and exclusion are up against each other. As world population creeps upward, how will the human race reach any kind of carrying capacity?  The sustainability movement calls for a rational addressing of the root causes of the current inclusive/ exclusive culture war, for a major redistribution of wealth, for conservation and less consumption. It seems in the current US, the policy is to be irrational, exclude others (even our own citizens), deny science, forsake our better angels and only look out for the bottom line of white male in-group top dogs. Can we all live and share a shrinking pie, having less each, as we need to do for actual sustainability in a world growing to 9 billion people?

What kind of crazy fantasy is this, let Wall Street have all the marbles so it will benefit Main Street, against all known evidence?

As per George Lakoff’s take, the moral inclusive/ exclusive conflict, the culture war, is one between conservative/ traditional strict father morality, and liberal/ modern nurturing family morality. This split goes right back to the original threads of Western civilization, the Judeo-Christian ethic; the angry old testament God versus the compassionate Jesus. It goes back to fundamental male/ female energies, yin and yang, the fabric of who we are as biological creatures.

The same pattern can be seen in a contrast between the inclusive universal Rights of Man and the exclusivity of American exceptionalism. And how did Americans get to be exceptional, and others get to be illegal? According to the strict father meme, if you are not disciplined and don’t obey, then you are and out-grouper, lazy and a taker, and thus all people who are poor and in need deserve to be excluded, even if the wars, structural exploitation and climate issues are far beyond an individual’s control, and that responsibility for such issues lays at the doorstep of US foreign and economic policy.

Latinos immigrants are caught in a bit of a paradox here, as mainstream Catholic culture is very strong on the strict father morality, and justifying the status quo. Latino immigrants may end up continuing to justify and obey forces that essentially exploit them. Catholicism does have some countervailing trends in Liberation Theology, and with the inclusive Pope Francis. Are Catholics in the modern world or the past? Between two worlds? What are the implications of this for Latino immigrants in Sonoma County and California? Steve Bannon is bypassing the Pope and looking to work with higher up strict father Cardinals in Rome.

The same between-two-worlds pattern holds for Protestants. This is why people in Kansas vote against their pragmatic interests: they are voting the strict father morality. That is their cultural in-group identification. As Jose Antonio Vargas said, “don’t bring facts to a culture war.” You’re not going to break the fever of strict father morality, and its fallout for immigration, with any facts, because facts are all subservient to the primary assumptions of the in-group narrative, and the narrative all boils down to parochial self-interest and control of resources. This is why human history is littered with wars and conflict, and why social gains only ratchet on slowly and incrementally through time.

The social gains, which boil down to inclusivity, are dependent on material prosperity, but with more people, less resources, maladaptive ideologies, and a suffering ecosystem, social gains will come apart, as we see proposed in the whole Trump agenda and cabinet.

The current culture war, and intractable political conflict, are themselves props for basic population dynamics control of resources of a shrinking pie. Face it, the US gravy train is over; the Western gravy train is finished. Now we are recapping the Fall of the Roman Empire. Make American Great Again? This is the last gasp of a ship going down. Trump et al are circling the wagons, and screw everybody else, no helping women and children into the Titanic lifeboats, no graceful acceptance of reality by continuing to play in the band, rich white men get in that lifeboat by hook or by crook.

The culture war, the conflict of morality, gets down to the proposition of: will we be able to plan ahead and have each human do with less, or will the “exceptional” go down fighting, and grasping until the very end to have the whole pie? Part of grasping for the whole pie is keeping immigrants out, immigrants who in many ways are coming here to the land of opportunity and the American Dream precisely because of past US actions and policies that created the problems that make immigration necessary to survive.

“We are here because you were there.”

This culture war incudes an assault on immigrants, and on the public sphere.  Republicans seek to defund and privatize all social programs. Immigrants s and all poor people are in the same boat here. Strict father morality says: Lazy undisciplined people, “takers”, do not deserve any help; they have not obeyed properly, they did not get up early enough in the morning and need to be punished. The threat to deport eight million undocumented supposed bad hombre immigrants has an upside for Wall Street, it creates space for private enterprise to have for-profit prisons. These inevitably end up way more corrupt as there is way less public oversight. Yet status quo wealthy “liberals” (i.e. the Clinton/ Obama  faction) have gone along for the ride, and do not call for the systemic, structural changes that would create more equity, and reduce their own Wall Street-generated wealth. In this sense, mainstream liberals are as much a problem as Trump and Paul Ryan et al.

Part of the culture war is inclusive multiculturalism and diversity versus excluding xenophobic nationalism; it is education and modernity versus ideology and traditionalism. We are facing an anti-modern trend, the dissolution of socially inclusive gains. This same pattern happened in the Italian Renaissance, when Savonarola’s populism took over in Florence, similar to Trump now.

“Traditional” culture has been upended by modernity, and now these guys want to go back to the 1950s., back to mythical halcyon days of white success. But that world was one where exploitation and discrimination of minorities and the colonized was the unspoken basis for white middle class success. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates has been saying about the price to pay in black and brown bodies. The nice, pleasant suburbia, and US, Western success in general, was built on the back of slavery and exploitation.

If “white” is not an ethnicity or a country, then the current set of immigrant issues seems to devolve to pure racism and religious intolerance. This pattern has common threads with some of the darkest chapters in human history. Looks like we’re in for a rough ride.

painting by Mark Harris

 



One thought on “Immigration tensions: inclusion or exclusion?

  1. Having just read my World Civilizations Course. There is a severe differenc we should remember.
    America was built in a Melting Pot. If the Immigration game holds that’ people don’t follow what has happened for Generations then, why should we be allowing wing it to happen

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