Fear Of Immigrants Quotes

The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.

Whoever he said he was, thought Marsh, he was not from the immigration department, and the web that he was convinced Walsh had been weaving was beginning to unravel with disastrous and dangerous consequences.

But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.

Here’s to the security guards who maybe had a degree in another land. Here’s to the manicurist who had to leave her family to come here, painting the nails, scrubbing the feet of strangers. Here’s to the janitors who don’t understand English yet work hard despite it all. Here’s to the fast food workers who work hard to see their family smile. Here’s to the laundry man at the Marriott who told me with the sparkle in his eyes how he was an engineer in Peru. Here’s to the bus driver, the Turkish Sufi who almost danced when I quoted Rumi. Here’s to the harvesters who live in fear of being deported for coming here to open the road for their future generation. Here’s to the taxi drivers from Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and India who gossip amongst themselves. Here is to them waking up at 4am, calling home to hear the voices of their loved ones. Here is to their children, to the children who despite it all become artists, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, activists and rebels. Here’s to international money transfer. For never forgetting home. Here’s to their children who carry the heartbeats of their motherland and even in sleep, speak with pride about their fathers. Keep on.

For as long as ours has been a nation of immigrants, we have been a nation that fears immigrants. Fear of the other is woven into the fabric of our American culture, and unscrupulous people in power have exploited that fear in pursuit of political advantage.

...despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.

God created every man to be free. The ability to choose whether to live free or enslaved, right or wrong, happy or in fear is something called freewill. Every man was born with freewill. Some people use it, and some people use any excuse not to. Nobody can turn you into a slave unless you allow them. Nobody can make you afraid of anything, unless you allow them. Nobody can tell you to do something wrong, unless you allow them. God never created you to be a slave, man did. God never created division or set up any borders between brothers, man did. God never told you hurt or kill another, man did. And in the end, when God asks you: "Who told you to kill one of my children?" And you tell him, "My leader." He will then ask you, "And are THEY your GOD?

As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.

Too rich to be relevant to the world's poor, [Europe] attracts immigration but cannot encourage imitation. Too passive regarding international security. Too self-satisfied, it acts as if its central political goal is to become the worlds most comfortable retirement home. Too set in its ways, it fears multicultural diversity

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I’m pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I’m also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now.

As I write this, we are in an especially divisive era in American politics. There are questions about who holds power, who abuses it, who profits from it, and at what cost to our democracy. It is a time of questions about what makes us American, of shifting identities, inclusion and exclusion, protest, civil and human rights, the strength of our compassion versus the weakness of our fears, and the seductive lure of a mythic "great" past that never was versus the need for the consciousness and responsibility necessary if we are truly to live up to the rich promise of "We the People." We are a country built by immigrants, dreams, daring, and opportunity. We are a country built by the horrors of slavery and genocide, the injustice of racism and exclusion. These realities exist side by side. It is our past and present. The future is unwritten. This is a book about ghosts. For we live in a haunted house.

Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.

When people say they are angry about “immigration,” in other words, they are not always talking about something they have lived and experienced. They are talking about something imaginary, something they fear.

Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book: When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we’re not perfect, we’re not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don’t have attention, sometimes people use words you don’t know. Sometimes people use languages you don’t know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they’re not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language. And what’s a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you’re not sure if it’s just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn’t have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What’s funny is, will Ramona accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and will greet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words what we’re comfortable with out in the outside world, we do not want to encounter in our books. So I’m constantly, people have come to me and asked me… is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I’m like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don’t understand, whether it’s the nerdish stuff, whether it’s the Elvish, whether it’s the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it’s the Dominican Spanish, whether it’s the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don’t get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can’t understand in a book aren’t there to torture or remind people that they don’t know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we’ve always needed someone else to help us with reading.

Người Việt Nam đẻ ra là tự động biết sợ ma, sợ mơ thấy lửa, sợ gò má cao, sợ nốt ruồi ở tuyến lệ, sợ ăn thịt chó đầu tháng, sợ ăn thịt vịt đầu năm, sợ hương không uốn, sợ pháo không nổ, sợ năm hạn, sợ tuổi xung, sợ sao Thái Bạch, vân vân và vân vân. Người Pháp không sợ vu vơ như vậy. Người Pháp gọi đó là mê tín dị đoan. Nhưng người Pháp học cấp một đã sử dụng trôi chảy các thuật ngữ: thất nghiệp, trợ cấp xã hội, lương tối thiểu, tiền thuê nhà, tiền trả góp, tiền bảo hiểm ô tô, hợp đồng làm việc ngắn hạn, dài hạn, thời gian thử thách, thuế thu nhập, thuế thổ trạch, thuế ngự cư, thuế vô tuyến truyền hình, thuế giá trị gia tăng...Người nước ngoài ở Pháp còn sử dụng trôi chảy thêm một số thuật ngữ khác: thẻ cư trú tạm thời, thẻ cư trú vĩnh viễn, thẻ lao động, hồ sơ tị nạn, hồ sơ quốc tịch, hồ sơ đoàn tụ gia đình, hồ sơ xin trợ cấp...

Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.

I never found out what happened to Chele, or to any of the countless others who were with me. I fear they died in the Sonoran Desert. This book is for them and for every immigrant who has crossed, who has tried to, who is crossing right now, and who will keep trying.

Lack of relationship is a breeding ground for fear. Fear and anxiety pervade the conversation about immigrants and refugees....fear is escalating isolation, which yields even more insecurity and uncertainty.

Every voter knew that the Family Party had come to power promising to deport Illegals, to manage its borders more efficiently and to ensure that people of traditional European stock weren't overrun in their own country.

He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by journey. Ohio was the first place he loved, for there at last he had been able to acquire poise --

Through the appropriation of public spaces and resources into the logic of the marketplace, individuals are dispossessed of many collective forms of mutual support or sharing. A simple and pervasive cooperative practice like hitchhiking had to be inverted into a risk-filled act with fearful, even lethal consequences. Now it has reached the point of laws being enacted in parts of the United States that criminalize giving food to the homeless or to undocumented immigrants.

They say there are strangers who threaten us In our immigrants and infidels They say there is strangeness too dangerous In our theaters and bookstore shelves That those who know what's best for us Must rise and save us from ourselves Quick to judge Quick to anger Slow to understand Ignorance and prejudice And fear walk hand in hand...

A man who build walls, is a man who fears building bridges.

The Klan capitalized on white fears of just about anyone they defined as nonwhite, non-American, and non-Protestant. For example, Klan members successfully lobbied for the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited immigration from select countries.

And that damned man in the White House doesn’t help things any. He represents the type of political hatred I’m talking about. Guys like him play to the worst fears of white men. Are you having a bad time of it right now? Lost your job? Having difficulty making ends meet? It’s not my fault or your fault. It’s the black man’s fault. It’s the Muslims’ fault. Blame a Mexican immigrant. Man’s got everyone lining up, taking sides, white people versus people of color, different religions arguing their way is the right way. This is a bad time in America. It’s an especially terrible time for a black woman to be taking on a white cop or the white establishment.

However they arrive, asylum seekers, immigrants, and refugees reach with outstretched hands toward safer, more promising shores. Welcoming these wayfarers rekindles our humanity and heals our broken parts. Only within the cords that bind us together do we find answers to age-old questions about despair and enmity, fear and alienation, justice and hope.

Why the Kikuyu, who personally have so little fear of death, should be so terrified to touch a corpse, while the white people, who are afraid to die, handle the dead easily, I do not know. Here once more you feel their reality to be different from our realities.

We live on stolen land,' I finally said, 'in a country built on slavery and reliant on the continued economic exploitation of other people. The oppressor always lives in fear of the oppressed. Americans have always been afraid-of those native to this continent, of Black people, or Japanese citizens they interned, and now of Muslims and immigrants. So the real question, I think, is who is next?

American capitalism needs a steady supply of immigrant labor, but it needs it cheap. By criminalizing the workers, the state helps to keep them uncertain, uneasy, disorganized, and docile. The attack on immigrants, therefore, is both “[p]olitically…an organic expression of nativist hostility and a very useful, rational system of elite-inspired class control”—“the primary product” of which “is… fear.

Not long ago I was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, with one of America’s most prominent atheists. Wearing my clerical collar, I realized that I stood out among his guests. So I decided to announce to Bill that I, too, am an atheist. He seemed taken aback, so I explained that if we were talking about the God who hates poor people, immigrants, and gay folks, I don’t believe in that God either. Sometimes it helps to clarify our language.

undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities. (There had reportedly been a raid at a grocery store the week before the news broke.) When President Obama declared a state of emergency, the National Guard was deployed to Flint, making undocumented people even less likely to open the door, since this time the canvassers were in uniform. Some undocumented Flint residents learned of the lead in their water only when family members from Mexico called them on the phone to ask about it. They had seen reports of the poisoned water on Univision.

And that damned man in the White House doesn’t help things any. He represents the type of political hatred I’m talking about. Guys like him play to the worst fears of white men. Are you having a bad time of it right now? Lost your job? Having difficulty making ends meet? It’s not my fault or your fault. It’s the black man’s fault. It’s the Muslims’ fault. Blame a Mexican immigrant. Man’s got everyone lining up, taking sides, white people versus people of color, different religions arguing their way is the right way. This is a bad time in America. It’s an especially terrible time for a black woman to be taking on a white cop or the white establishment.

All told, in the colonial period, Europeans increased their share of global GDP from 20 to 60 per cent, Hickel points out. ‘Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.’ The Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle sums it up: ‘We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them.

Instead of carrying out their jobs without fear or favour, police, prosecutors and journalists behaved as though their job was to mediate between the public and the facts.

Moral panics over drugs in America had tended to focus on street drugs and to play on fears about minority groups, immigrants, and illicit influences

the divide between haves and have-nots, fear and hatred of immigrants, white supremacist race hate, and antisemitism

Many immigrants fear that by embracing the culture of their adopted country, they are scraping away the defining contours of their heritage.

If you are white in America and feel you’ve been left behind and shut out of the prosperity afforded to others, it’s not because of Black people and immigrants. It’s because the politicians you continue to vote for stoke your bigotry and sense of grievance while exploiting your ignorance in order to keep you exactly where you are—disempowered, angry, and fearful.

The undocumented community in Flint has been affected by the water crisis in disturbingly specific ways. Flyers announcing toxic levels of lead in the Flint waterways were published entirely in English, and when canvassers went door-to-door to tell residents to stop drinking tap water, undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities.

The word multiculturalism has become a proxy for a ton of British anxieties about immigration, race, difference, crime and danger. It’s now a dirty word, a front word for fears about black and brown and foreign people posing a danger to white Brits. If you are an immigrant – even if you’re second or third generation – this is personal. You are multiculturalism. People who are scared of multiculturalism are scared of you.

The fear of the Black imagination was strong all throughout slavery. That was one of the reasons free African Americans posed such a problem and was one of the reasons the Texas Constitution prevented the immigration of free Black people into the republic. Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves. Making life as hard as possible for free African Americans, impairing their movement and economic prospects—even if that meant the state would forgo the economic benefits of talented people who wanted to work—was designed to prove that Blacks could not operate outside of slavery.

The land lives,” is how one young rancher put it to me. But now that the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area contains more people than Montana and the Dakotas combined, I fear that his attitude will prove incomprehensible to modern, urban Americans who live as if they have outgrown the land that feeds them, as incomprehensible as a similar reverence for the land among Native Americans was to the railroad barons, merchants, and immigrant farmers of a century ago.

You try to separate yourselves from history. You pretend its ugliness could never happen where you are. But it can...and it does, when normal people, en mass, allow worse and worse shit to go down because either they're too ignorant to understand or they're being corrupted by the powers that control the country. That's how this starts, that's how it gets too far. PLEASE see the signs. Please. This is human nature...to miss the boat out of fear or anger about others "taking what's ours" and so we allow (or cheer on) heinousness one step at a time until, before you know it, you're living in a nightmare of epic proportions and history sees you as the villain you became. DON'T BECOME A VILLAIN. BE THE VOICE THAT BREAKS THE INSANITY OPEN.

In the leadup to the election of 1876, swing votes were tied to the issue of Chinese immigration in the same way that immigration was a hot topic during this election cycle. Rutherford Hayes endorsed Chinese exclusion and won the election. In the following election, James Garfield also carried the torch of anti-Chinese immigration into office. (From those days to now, every presidential election has fanned the flames of anti-immigration. This, Henry, shows that hate and fear are reliable, predictable, and effective political tools.) All of this led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the entry of all Chinese immigrants to the United States except for those who were teachers, students, diplomats, ministers, or merchants. It also declared all Chinese totally ineligible for naturalized citizenship. This clause alone allowed the United States to join Nazi Germany and South Africa as the only nations every to withhold naturalization purely on racial grounds.

Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.

Given the choice between bedlam and a dictatorship, what do you think the American people will choose? Driven by fear of another attack, in a state of terror, they'll do the terrorists' work for them. They'll destroy their own freedoms. Accept, even applaud , the the suspension of rights. Internment camps. Torture. Expulsions. The liberal agenda, women's equality, gay marriage, immigrants, will be blamed for the death of the real America. But thanks to the bold action of a patriotic few, the white Angle-Saxon Christian, God-fearing America of their grandparents will be restored. And if they have to slaughter a few thousand to achieve it, well, it is war, after all. The beacon that was America will die, by suicide. Frankly it was coughing up blood anyway.

Contemporary trans-exclusionary feminism is animated by the fear of being ‘overrun’. And this fear is almost always sexualised: reactionary feminists have much in common with conservatives who claim that increased immigration will result in increased rape.

If it is not led by people of color and immigrants, if it is doesn’t have fighting racism and xenophobia at its core, and if it is not mobilizing white people to lead other whites to choose multiracial solidarity over fear and hate—then it’s not a revolution.

By the late nineteenth century, as British cities teemed with new inhabitants, crime rates rose and more established residents came to be afflicted with a new, urban, and distinctly modern anxiety. For the middle and upper classes, it centered acutely on the protection of property, coalescing in particular around city dwellers who were not members of the bourgeoisie. These included the working class, the poor, new immigrants, and Jews, all of whom were viewed increasingly as agents of social contagion - a threat in urgent need of containment.

The Youth Vote But there are not many people in Washington who take this motion of the "youth vote" very seriously. Not even the candidates. The thinking here is that the young people who vote for the first time in '72 will split more or less along the same old lines as their parents, and that the addition of 25 million new (potential) votes means just another sudden mass that will have to be absorbed into the same old patterns... just another big wave of new immigrants who don't know the score yet, but who will learn it soon enough, so why worry?

Why did you come to the United States?' That's the first question on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English. But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children's stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.

Rauschning’s testimony, in other words, was that the Nazi game plan aimed to disunite the United States by tearing at the weakest political and cultural seams in American society: the divide between haves and have-nots, fear and hatred of immigrants, white supremacist race hate, and antisemitism.

Two missed calls and you think your father is dead again. The conversation is rushed. Nuances of your new life are pushed into a speaker. They meet alien ears. At home; you are an old stranger. Away; you are a new one. All you have of your family is in a phone. And it is why you can never lose it.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades. Researchers point to anger and disappointment among some whites as a result of crises like rising death rates from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; the decline in available jobs for those who lack a college degree; and the ongoing myth that white people are unfairly treated by policies designed to level the playing field for other groups—policies like affirmative action. Other studies have pointed to the appeal of authoritarianism, or plain old racism and sexism. Political scientist Diana Mutz said in an interview in Pacific Standard magazine that some voters who switched parties to vote for Trump were motivated by the possibility of a fall in social status: “In short, they feared that they were in the process of losing their previously privileged positions.

Driven by fear of another attack, in a state of terror, they’ll do the terrorists’ work for them. They’ll destroy their own freedoms. Accept, even applaud, the suspension of rights. Internment camps. Torture. Expulsions. The liberal agenda, women’s equality, gay marriage, immigrants, will be blamed for the death of the real America. But thanks to the bold action of a patriotic few, the white Anglo-Saxon Christian, God-fearing America of their grandparents will be restored. And if they have to slaughter a few thousand to achieve it, well, it is war, after all. The beacon that was America will die, by suicide. Frankly it was coughing up blood anyway.

President Trump is a good listener, Mattis said, as long as you don’t hit one of his third rails—immigration and the press are the two big ones. If you hit one, he is liable to go off on a tangent and not come back for a long time. “Secretaries of Defense don’t always get to choose the president they work for.” Everyone laughed.

In no particular order, I read what I could, sometimes with Fadiman as my docent, sometimes not: Flaubert, Twain, Kerouac, Brontë, Kafka, Camus, Ibsen, James, Thurber, Shakespeare. But in the course of reading great books, something happened. My reading molded me, the tool hammering its hand into shape. By some miracle—and by miracle, I mean great teachers—I pushed past the shallowness and stupidity of my own motivations. I fell in love with the actual literature and the actual ideas of great literature. As an immigrant, as a Vietnamese kid, as a poor kid, I had collected so many scarlet letters of alienation that I connected profoundly to the great works. As I read, I began to understand that all the great works wrangled with big questions, important questions: our place in the world, the value of our experience, the fairness and meaning of our suffering, our quest for love and belonging. Universal themes bound these great works together, and they bound me to their oaky, yellowed pages like Odysseus lashed to the mast of his ship. I felt a connective and humanizing resonance in books: I wasn’t alone in my aloneness. I wasn’t alone in my longing for love. I wasn’t alone in my fear of being rejected, my fear of never finding my place, my fear of failing. The snarl of my journey was untangled and laid out clearly by books.

We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don't look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as subhuman or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people. Such language isn't new — it's been at the root of most human tragedy throughout history, here in America and around the world. It has no place in our politics and our public life, and it's time for the overwhelming majority of Americans of goodwill, of every race and faith and political party, to say as much — clearly and unequivocally.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recalls that the stories she wrote as a seven year old in Nigeria were based on the kinds of stories she read, featuring characters who were white and blue eyed, they played in the snow, the ate apples. According to Adichie, this wasn´t just about experimentation or an active imagination, because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. We learn so many things from reading stories, including the conventions of stories such as good versus evil, confronting our fears and that danger often lurks in the woods. The problem is that, when one of these conventions is that children in stories are white, english and middle class, than you may come to learn that your own life does not qualify as subject material. Adichie describes this as "The danger of a single story" a danger that extends to stories which, whilst appearing to be diverse, rely on stereotypes and thus limit the imagination

As children, the siblings believed Saul could answer any question they wished to know. But Klara and Simon grew to dislike his answers. They disdained his routine of work and Torah study, his uniform of gabardine slacks and trench and walking hat. Now, Klara has more sympathy for him. Saul came from immigrants, and Klara suspects he lived in fear of losing the life he’d been given. She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory—to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child. Ruby will come to Klara with questions. What will Klara tell her, with frantic and unheard insistence? To Ruby, Klara’s past will seem like a story, Saul and Simon no more than her mother’s ghosts

Inaction is not the same thing as patience. It is instead a kind of perpetual waiting room, a sterile holding pen for unlived desire, a negative sanctuary. You wait and wait, but the receptionist is very stern and, somehow, the appointment book always full. To make matters worse, crowded into the adjoining cell like so many desperate immigrants, and separated from you by nothing more than the thin permeable wall of your own fear, are all the anticipated rejections of your life. You would think it might be noisy in there, but you'd be wrong. It is totally silent. There's a small Plexiglas window through which you can study these things, this silence, if you have the inclination and the nerve. And eventually, if you have been a diligent enough student and not wasted your time in dreaming, you come to understand that it is not the rejections that make this a prison, not the defeats, but rather your own grim expectation of defeat; not life but its bodily outline drawn in chalk, where the body should be but isn't, where it once was, this ingrained cowardly pessimism, this relentless betting against love and instinct. This is where the silence comes from.

Displaced workers, along with others who fear for their livelihood, are fertile ground in which to sow anti-immigrant sentiment, since angry and frustrated people often seek some target on which to blame their problems. The right wing has organized and manipulated such anger and resentment, turned it away from corporations, and directed it against the government, decrying high taxes and the inability of the state to solve problems such as social deterioration, homelessness, crime, and violence. In addition to the target of “failed liberal policies,” immigrants make a convenient and tangible target for people’s anger. Racial prejudice is often an encoded part of the message…Right-wing populist themes are particularly effective at attracting working people disenchanted with the system.

On a broad level, speculative fiction is about encounters with the unknown, whether that takes the form of aliens or werewolf or eldritch creatures beyond mortal ken. Similarly, much of the diaspora experience is tied to uncertainty. You journey to a strange land you’ve only heard about in stories, one where the language is unfamiliar and the customs perplexing. You have a few things with you—a sword, a bow, a bag full of spells and paperwork for a Green Card application—but it’s still a terrifying experience. While part of that terror is necessarily tied to survival, another element is the fear of change—the literal change in environment and the ways you change in response. For both SFF protagonists and new immigrants, there’s the major question of how much you choose to fight against or welcome those change while maintaining vestiges of your previous self.

Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes.

In ‘Colonization in Reverse’41 (a famous poem much anthologized) the speaker is presented as a more or less reliable commentator who implies that Jamaicans who come to ‘settle in de motherlan’ are like English people who settled in the colonies. West Indian entrepreneurs, shipping off their countrymen ‘like fire’, turn history upside down. Fire can destroy, but may also be a source of warmth to be welcomed in temperate England. Those people who ‘immigrate an populate’ the seat of the Empire seem, like many a colonizer, ready to displace previous inhabitants. ‘Jamaica live fi box bread/Out a English people mout’ plays on a fear that newcomers might exploit the natives; and some of the immigrants are—like some of the colonizers from ‘the motherland’—lazy and inclined to put on airs. Can England, who faced war and braved the worst, cope with people from the colonies turning history upside down? Can she cope with ‘Colonizin in reverse’?

The years that followed Obama’s election would see two long-simmering racial movements burst to the fore of mainstream politics. The first of these was a nativist movement of white Americans that questioned the validity of the president’s citizenship, his Christian faith, and his fidelity to America itself. For his eight years in office, Obama would have no more consistent and persistent foe. This opposition was fanned by leaders on the political Right—many of them media figures, some of them elected officials—who preached a politics of racial agitation: fear of immigrants and Muslims, contempt for black public figures and elected officials, and rebellion against government attempts to address racial inequalities. This movement wielded inflammatory rhetoric to appeal to the real fear held by many Americans, of varying political affiliations, that the country had irreversibly changed in ways that left them unheard and underserved, exposed and vulnerable.

I believe we have reached a point where those of us who belong to this culture of la frontera in Ysleta and El Paso are not content to sit back and watch others tell us who we are. We know who we are, and we ourselves can tell others about what we love and what we fear and what we hate and what can save us. I believe our community has developed that confidence to step forward and start taking responsibility for the many images that are projected in the name of Ysleta and El Paso.

Frederick Douglass, so recently hopeful, was unhappy. The speech was “little better than our worst fears,” Douglass remarked. That the president continued to express respect for slavery where it existed was crushing; by pledging to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts, Douglass said, Lincoln had portrayed himself as “an excellent slave hound.” Douglass had been considering immigrating to Haiti, and he saw nothing in Lincoln’s inaugural address to change his mind—in fact, quite the opposite.

A more serious concern would be if the United States turned inward and seriously curtailed immigration. With its current levels of immigration, America is one of the few developed countries that may avoid demographic decline and keep its share of world population, but this might change if reactions to terrorist events or public xenophobia closed the borders. Fears over the effect of immigration on national values and on a coherent sense of American identity have existed since the early years of the nation.

After Kristallnacht, tight U.S. immigration laws were relaxed somewhat, allowing a trickle of people who wanted to leave Europe to enter the United States. Many of those given priority in a first wave of immigration were artists, writers, composers, and scientists, but even that very circumscribed immigration caused alarm. As late as 1939, 95 percent of Americans did not want any part of a European war.15 And, with the country’s economy still fragile, many people resented those fleeing it as needy hordes who would compete for scarce jobs and dwindling government support. Anti-immigration forces in Congress used fear as an excuse to deny foreigners entry. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in 1938 to investigate newcomers suspected of being communists or spies.16 Alarm and insecurity in some soon hardened into paranoia and hatred. In February 1939, twenty-two thousand people marched through Manhattan, giving fascist salutes and carrying U.S. flags as well as banners with swastikas, toward a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.

But there are not many people in Washington who take this motion of the "youth vote" very seriously. Not even the candidates. The thinking here is that the young people who vote for the first time in '72 will split more or less along the same old lines as their parents, and that the addition of 25 million new (potential) votes means just another sudden mass that will have to be absorbed into the same old patterns... just another big wave of new immigrants who don't know the score yet, but who will learn it soon enough, so why worry?

The main and frustration this boy must have endured his whole life. having thoughts and words he desperately wants to express but couldn't, fearing this might continue for the rest of his life. Whether you're an immigrant, you stutter, or have autism, aphasia/dyspraxia, Angelman syndrome---there are so many reasons why you might have trouble speaking, unrelated to the quality of your thoughts. ...our society's deeply ingrained assumption that oral fluency is equivalent to intelligence. Just because you can't speak doesn't mean you can't think or understand.

In the 1980s, administrations in Washington saw Central America through the totalizing prism of the Cold War. Over the next few decades, the fear of the spread of leftism morphed into a fear of the spread of people. A straight line extends between the two, pulled taut during the intervening years of forced emigration, mass deportation, and political expediency. Immigration laws draw sharp boundaries around citizenship and identity, casting this history aside. Politics is a form of selective amnesia. The people who survive it are our only insurance against forgetting.

Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States. When

On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--

The Sons of the Serpent - they want you angry. At the world. They need us all to feel like victims. And it's an easy get, because times suck. Every day is a battle. We all feel like we're on the wrong end of the wrecking ball. We feel at the mercy of forces beyond our control, and that makes us scared. And that's rocket fuel for S.O.B.'s like the Serpents. They prey on us when we're frightened. They tell us our enemies are the immigrants down the street, or the food stamp family next door. They encourage us to turn our fear into rage, and we fall for it because it's 'empowering.' Except it's not. We don't become 'empowered.' We become weaponized.

God loves my people and me. God also loves those whom I consider my enemies. Now what do I do? The spirit of truth does not see the world in either-or or binary form. Technologies are not always against nature. Human action and nature’s process are not always at odds with each other. Globalism and localism are not mutually exclusive. Immigrants and citizens do not have to be fearful of the other. Gay and straight are not enemies. Pro-life and pro-choice people are not necessarily adversaries. Men and women are not opposites. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.”1 In

For fear of upsetting Hitler, Roosevelt refused to allow Jewish immigration into America. He turned back a ship called the St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees, guaranteeing death for many of them. Roosevelt also refused to allow 20,000 Jewish orphans into America even though they all had sponsoring families through Jewish, Catholic, and Quaker aid organizations. Virtually all eventually died in Nazi death camps. Roosevelt’s refusal, according to historian Thomas Fleming, was the act that convinced Hitler that the world would not care if he pursued his final solution. And yet all that is easily brushed aside when historians judge Roosevelt to be a great president. Much is forgiven activist, big government

This is an ancient text that corrects an even more ancient text. And now we read this ancient text in our contemporary moment of deciding. Ours is a time of scattering in fear. We are so fearful that we want to fence the world in order to keep all the others out: –Some of the church still wants to fence out women. –We build fences to keep out immigrants (or Palestinians). –The church in many places fences out gays. –The old issue of race is still powerful for fencing. We have so many requirements that are as old as Moses. But here is only one requirement. It is Sabbath, work stoppage, an ordinance everyone can honor—gay or straight, woman or man, Black or White, “American” or Hispanic—anybody can keep it and be gathered to the meeting of all of God’s people.

wedding rings’, a safe adventure that united all newcomers. These were young families no longer fearful of getting into debt: avid consumers since they possessed almost nothing; children of poor Irish, Italian, Jewish and other immigrants convinced that all their dreams for the future were about to come true. Levittown and communities like it nurtured a social change that was to turn traditional America on its head: the start of the move to the suburbs, the end of the old city and the old countryside. Another beginning, an elderly American once told me, was the advent of new cars. For him it all started with the cars, or rather their colours. He traced it back to the autumn of 1954, when he noticed people thronging in front of local car showrooms. Something extraordinary was

From the colonial era to the Trump era, the “They Keep Coming” immigration myth has been used by xenophobes to demonize immigrants and lobby for immigration restriction. It has created a climate of fear and fueled discrimination and exploitation. At the same time, it has promoted a false and incomplete narrative of how immigration works. No part of the myth is actually true. Immigrants are not outsiders. “They” are “us.” Immigrants have not “kept coming.” They have been driven, recruited, lured, and incentivized to come to the United States, often with the direct help and encouragement of the US government and businesses. Only by fully understanding the origins, endurance, and contemporary relevance of the “They Keep Coming” myth can we begin to dismantle it and the xenophobia and racism that it fuels.

we know that America is a culture driven by fear. And when you explore the roots of that fear you find that they are rooted in concerns about scarcity. Fears that undermine our collective ability to create a fair and hospitable social contract. Fearing that jobs and opportunities are scarce we fret about immigration, fearing that the immigrant will take a job or opportunity away from us. Fearing that money is scarce we fret about wasteful government spending, especially spending upon those we consider to be undeserving. And fearing that safety is scarce we demand that walls be built along our borders and that our military police the entire world for threats. Just turn on cable TV and you’ll see the whole dynamic play out on a nightly basis. Fears rooted in a culture of scarcity undermine our ability to love each other.

In 1911, the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote the song “Where I Rest,” at a time when it was the immigrant Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews who were exploited in the worst jobs, worked to death or burned to death in sweatshops.[*] It always brings me to tears, provides one metaphor for the lives of the unlucky:[19] Where I Rest Look not for me in nature’s greenery You will not find me there, I fear. Where lives are wasted by machinery That is where I rest, my dear. Look not for me where birds are singing Enchanting songs find not my ear. For in my slavery, chains a-ringing Is the music I do hear. Not where the streams of life are flowing I draw not from these fountains clear. But where we reap what greed is sowing Hungry teeth and falling tears. But if your heart does love me truly Join it with mine and hold me near. Then will this world of toil and cruelty Die in birth of Eden here.[*] It is the events of one second before to a million years before that determine whether your life and loves unfold next to bubbling streams or machines choking you with sooty smoke. Whether at graduation ceremonies you wear the cap and gown or bag the garbage. Whether the thing you are viewed as deserving is a long life of fulfillment or a long prison sentence. There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same.

The irony, of course, is that not long ago, it was Trump’s own ancestors—German American immigrants—who were the demons of the day, as the United States fought two world wars against Germany. The only thing that saved Trump’s people from being rounded up and put in camps during World War II, like Japanese American families—as Trump lauded President Franklin Roosevelt for doing—was that their skin color happened to be white. Those who are so eager to stigmatize Muslims today should keep this in mind—next time around it could be them. That’s the way these American nativist, “know-nothing” uprisings work. One day it’s Catholics who are the reviled aliens, then it’s Jewish people, then it’s Muslims. If you don’t belong to one of these groups, just wait your turn—you could be next in line. We will always be subjected to these us-versus-them hysteria campaigns as long as people in power seek to divide Americans for their own cynical political purposes—whether it’s to whip up war fever, split apart working people, or simply keep the citizenry fearful and easier to manipulate.

Working-class whites are victims of the system, too. They have been tricked into voting against their own self-interest by a ruling class that has convinced them that allegiance to their whiteness is more valuable than health care or any other social programs that would lift them up. Superiority over Blacks, they have been told, just as the white laborers in the colonies were told, is more important than financial gain. Joining forces with the wealthy and powerful would be more beneficial symbolically, if not materially, than joining forces with the Black working class. Of course, none of that is true, but it's a compelling narrative, so much easier than facing the truth of your having been used and lied to. If you are white in America and feel you've been left behind and shut out of the prosperity afforded to others, it's not because of Black people and immigrants. It's because the politicians you continue to vote for stoke your bigotry and sense of grievance while exploiting your ignorance in order to keep you exactly where you are -- disempowered, angry, and fearful.

Frances Wright was a writer, founder of a utopian community, immigrant from Scotland in 1824, a fighter for the emancipation of slaves, for birth control and sexual freedom. She wanted free public education for all children over two years of age in state-supported boarding schools. She expressed in America what the utopian socialist Charles Fourier had said in France, that the progress of civilization depended on the progress of women. In her words: I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly. . . . Men will ever rise or fall to the level of the other sex. . . . Let them not imagine that they know aught of the delights which intercourse with the other sex can give, until they have felt the sympathy of mind with mind, and heart with heart; until they bring into that intercourse every affection, every talent, every confidence, every refinement, every respect. Until power is annihilated on one side, fear and obedience on the other, and both restored to their birthright—equality.

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

The banishing of a leper seems harsh, unnecessary. The Ancient East hasn’t been the only culture to isolate their wounded, however. We may not build colonies or cover our mouths in their presence, but we certainly build walls and duck our eyes. And a person needn’t have leprosy to feel quarantined. One of my sadder memories involves my fourth-grade friend Jerry.1He and a half-dozen of us were an ever-present, inseparable fixture on the playground. One day I called his house to see if we could play. The phone was answered by a cursing, drunken voice telling me Jerry could not come over that day or any day. I told my friends what had happened. One of them explained that Jerry’s father was an alcoholic. I don’t know if I knew what the word meant, but I learned quickly. Jerry, the second baseman; Jerry, the kid with the red bike; Jerry, my friend on the corner was now “Jerry, the son of a drunk.” Kids can be hard, and for some reason we were hard on Jerry. He was infected. Like the leper, he suffered from a condition he didn’t create. Like the leper, he was put outside the village. The divorced know this feeling. So do the handicapped. The unemployed have felt it, as have the less educated. Some shun unmarried moms. We keep our distance from the depressed and avoid the terminally ill. We have neighborhoods for immigrants, convalescent homes for the elderly, schools for the simple, centers for the addicted, and prisons for the criminals. The rest simply try to get away from it all. Only God knows how many Jerrys are in voluntary exile—individuals living quiet, lonely lives infected by their fear of rejection and their memories of the last time they tried. They choose not to be touched at all rather than risk being hurt again.

Jews, notably, were defined as a ‘people’, while others, not even identified, were referred to only as ‘communities’. It was an extraordinary phrase that echoes down the decades and explains why Balfour is remembered a century later by Arabs as the architect of perfidy and disaster.16 Zionists, for opposite reasons, revere his memory; Balfour Street in Jerusalem is still the site of the official residence of the Israeli prime minister. The reservation had been inserted in the text to meet the strong objections raised by Lord Curzon, the former British viceroy of India and, as lord president of the council, an influential member of the war cabinet. Curzon – reflecting contemporary perceptions about the map and identity of the region – had referred to the ‘Syrian Arabs’ who had ‘occupied [Palestine] for the best part of 1,500 years’, and asked what would become of them. ‘They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’, he predicted with the help of another then familiar biblical reference.17 The declaration’s second reservation – about the rights of Jews in other countries – was a response to the opposition of Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, even though he was not in the war cabinet. Montagu was a Jewish grandee who feared that an official expression of sympathy for Zionism in fact masked anti-Semitic prejudice and would undermine the hard-won position of British Jews and their co-religionists elsewhere in the world. However, it did not weaken his vehement opposition, any more than the words about ‘non-Jewish communities’ assuaged Arab fears. Over time, Jewish attitudes to Zionism would change significantly; Arab attitudes, by and large, did not.

The issue is not merely one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even election campaigns and spin doctors: the social media algorithms themselves encourage false perceptions of the world. People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics. The algorithms radicalize those who use them too. If you click on perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites, for example, these can lead you quickly, in just a few more clicks, to white nationalist sites and then to violent xenophobic sites. Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal. Even if social media is not yet the primary news source for all Americans, it already helps shape how politicians and journalists interpret the world and portray it. Polarization has moved from the online world into reality. The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of "normal" politics, "establishment" politicians, derided "experts," and "mainstream" institutions--including courts, police, civil servants--and no wonder. As polarization increases, the employees of the state are invariably portrayed as having been "captured" by their opponents. It is not an accident that the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Brexiteers in Britain, and the Trump administration in the United States have launched verbal assaults on civil servants and professional diplomats. It is not an accident that judges and courts are now the object of criticism, scrutiny, and anger in so many other places too. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.

What we have here is a war—the war of matter and spirit. In the classical era, spirit was in harmony with matter. Matter used to condense spirit. What was unseen—the ghost of Hamlet’s father—was seen—in the conscience of the king. The spirit was trapped in the matter of theater. The theater made the unseen, seen. In the Romantic era, spirit overwhelms matter. The glass of champagne can’t contain the bubbles. But never in the history of humanity has spirit been at war with matter. And that is what we have today. The war of banks and religion. It’s what I wrote in Prayers of the Dawn, that in New York City, banks tower over cathedrals. Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion. When I came back to midtown a week after the attack—I mourned—but not in a personal way—it was a cosmic mourning—something that I could not specify because I didn’t know any of the dead. I felt grief without knowing its origin. Maybe it was the grief of being an immigrant and of not having roots. Not being able to participate in the whole affair as a family member but as a foreigner, as a stranger—estranged in myself and confused—I saw the windows of Bergdorf and Saks—what a theater of the unexpected—my mother would have cried—there were only black curtains, black drapes—showing the mourning of the stores—no mannequins, just veils—black veils. When the mannequins appeared again weeks later—none of them had blond hair. I don’t know if it was because of the mourning rituals or whether the mannequins were afraid to be blond—targets of terrorists. Even they didn’t want to look American. They were out of fashion after the Twin Towers fell. To the point, that even though I had just dyed my hair blond because I was writing Hamlet and Hamlet is blond, I went back to my coiffeur immediately and told him—dye my hair black. It was a matter of life and death, why look like an American. When naturally I look like an Arab and walk like an Egyptian.

Even if there is no connection between diversity and international influence, some people would argue that immigration brings cultural enrichment. This may seem to be an attractive argument, but the culture of Americans remains almost completely untouched by millions of Hispanic and Asian immigrants. They may have heard of Cinco de Mayo or Chinese New Year, but unless they have lived abroad or have studied foreign affairs, the white inhabitants of Los Angeles are likely to have only the most superficial knowledge of Mexico or China despite the presence of many foreigners. Nor is it immigrants who introduce us to Cervantes, Puccini, Alexander Dumas, or Octavio Paz. Real high culture crosses borders by itself, not in the back pockets of tomato pickers, refugees, or even the most accomplished immigrants. What has Yo-Yo Ma taught Americans about China? What have we learned from Seiji Ozawa or Ichiro about Japan? Immigration and the transmission of culture are hardly the same thing. Nearly every good-sized American city has an opera company, but that does not require Italian immigrants. Miami is now nearly 70 percent Hispanic, but what, in the way of authentic culture enrichment, has this brought the city? Are the art galleries, concerts, museums, and literature of Los Angeles improved by diversity? Has the culture of Detroit benefited from a majority-black population? If immigration and diversity bring cultural enrichment, why do whites move out of those very parts of the country that are being “enriched”? It is true that Latin American immigration has inspired more American school children to study Spanish, but fewer now study French, German, or Latin. If anything, Hispanic immigration reduces what little linguistic diversity is to be found among native-born Americans. [...] [M]any people study Spanish, not because they love Hispanic culture or Spanish literature but for fear they may not be able to work in America unless they speak the language of Mexico. Another argument in favor of diversity is that it is good for people—especially young people —to come into contact with people unlike themselves because they will come to understand and appreciate each other. Stereotyped and uncomplimentary views about other races or cultures are supposed to crumble upon contact. This, of course, is just another version of the “contact theory” that was supposed to justify school integration. Do ex-cons and the graduates—and numerous dropouts—of Los Angeles high schools come away with a deep appreciation of people of other races? More than half a century ago, George Orwell noted that: 'During the war of 1914-18 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired.

It's hard to imagine which is worse, living with fear, or living without it in a fantasyland were consequences don't exist.

These SS men feared to return to their hometowns, yet felt safe in the DP camps where they easily obtained and lived with newly created identities, a luxury not easily available to them at home. Upon receiving their newly registered (= invented) names in the DP camps, many thousands moved to different cities in their home country. Countless numbers disappeared with new identities into South America, Canada and elsewhere. An inestimable number of them immigrated to and melded into the USA.

By the time Myron was forced to return, their clients were scattering into the night like kitchen help during an immigration bust.

For fear of upsetting Hitler, Roosevelt refused to allow Jewish immigration into America. He turned back a ship called the St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees, guaranteeing death for many of them. Roosevelt also refused to allow 20,000 Jewish orphans into America even though they all had sponsoring families through Jewish, Catholic, and Quaker aid organizations. Virtually all eventually died in Nazi death camps. Roosevelt’s refusal, according to historian Thomas Fleming, was the act that convinced Hitler that the world would not care if he pursued his final solution. And yet all that is easily brushed aside when historians judge Roosevelt to be a great president. Much is forgiven activist, big government war presidents.

An important distinction needs to be made in politics between allowing your values to guide you and keeping religion and government separate. Liberals are rightly concerned about government-established and government-supported religion, especially in our religiously polyglot society. But their unwillingness to engage on policy at the level of transcendent and timeless values, for fear of something too moralistic or religious, yields too much ground to the radical political right, which has come to claim Christianity in particular to advance a deeply non-Christian agenda. Theirs is a faith based on intolerance, a faith without compassion. Hating homosexuals and despising immigrants instead of hating poverty and despising homelessness seems to miss the point of a life of faithfulness.

What could be more American, after all, than being an immigrant and then, after a few decades, fearing immigration and reacting against it?