The recent tragic killing of 13 people at an immigrant center in Binghamton, N.Y., carries my mind back to college. I was deeply impacted by reading “The Stranger,” by Albert Camus. The book tells the story of Meursault, an alienated and delusional French man who kills an Arab man on the beach in French Algiers. Among the many lessons I took away from reading the book is the hope that the day never comes that I am not shocked by brutal, senseless, and remorseless murder.
Times of economic hardship can bring out the best in people and the worst. During this recent economic recession, we have seen many acts of generosity, compassion and kindness, such as Carlos Vasquez, the dry cleaner in New York City who offered free dry cleaning for customers going on job interviews. Competition for jobs, however, and increased economic insecurity greatly increases the opportunity for blame and intolerance to take root and blossom. When bad things happen we want to blame someone, and often people who appear to be strangers are a convenient target. I think a better use of our personal and collective resources is to examine why we feel so scared and vulnerable, rather than to identify an enemy.
The sad irony of an immigrant killing other immigrants who are taking a class on citizenship has not been lost in media reports on the Binghamton incident. Binghamton police have speculated that the killer, who was ethnically Chinese but was from Vietnam, was angry over losing a job and frustrated about his poor English skills. As shocked as I am by the killing, I am not surprised that this kind of incident has occurred. It is not a big leap to go from mocking, blaming and resenting immigrants to hating immigrants to wanting to destroy them. It is not a new phenomenon when the victim of that hate internalizes it and visits it upon those like him. It is an unfortunate part of our culture, and all too often even good people participate. I cringe when I think of all the times in my life that I have laughed at people making fun of how someone from another culture spoke, looked or acted, or said nothing while others did; that I watched television shows or movies with shameful, demeaning stereotypes in them, and just kept on watching.
There is space in our public discourse for legitimate concerns about the ability of the nation to acculturate and employ large numbers of immigrants, particularly the undocumented. However, if we allow a phantom menace to be created out of the issue of immigration, then we risk even greater civic and economic discord and upheaval.
Today’s media culture invests millions of dollars in making entertainment out of fanning the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment. We use terminology that demonizes people, like “illegal immigrants,” as if a human being can be illegal. In an attempt to achieve success and popularity, media demagogues fan the flames of hatred. Lou Dobbs on CNN laments that America is becoming a “third-world country.” According to Bill O’Reilly on FOX News, advocates of lifting some limits on migration “…hate America, and they hate it because it's run primarily by white, Christian men. Let me repeat that. America is run primarily by white, Christian men, and there is a segment of our population who hates that, despises that power structure. So they, under the guise of being compassionate, want to flood the country with foreign nationals, unlimited, unlimited, to change the complexion -- pardon the pun -- of America. Now, that's hatred, too.”
If you listen enough to these media know-nothings, the impression you’d gather is that all immigrants are parasites. And yet, ironically, many of these hate mongers are themselves the children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants. The hatred that was once turned upon their ancestors, they now turn upon others. The cycle of hatred, in all of its irrationality, goes on and on. As television host Geraldo Rivera has said, “The style changes, the accents change, the geographical antecedents change, but it's the same. You can track headline for headline the response to the Irish wave of immigration in the mid-19th century to the reaction of the Minutemen and similar radical anti-immigration groups today."
The perception that we need to compete for limited or scarce resources leads to the divisive “us versus them” mentality. Yes, the deaths in Binghamton were the result of the direct acts of one man, but the cultural mindset that surrounds them threatens us all.
Xenophobia blinds us to the new possibilities that emerge when we weave different languages, cultural traditions, and new ways of being and doing and knowing into our social fabric. The very greatness of our society is built on the notion that there is room for all of us at the table. That is the foundation of the great experiment that is America. That foundation is built on compassion; on an understanding that, like most of our ancestors, immigrants, both documented and undocumented, come to this country not to take away anything from us, but to build a life for themselves and their families, often weathering terrible ordeals and trials to try to make a home in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is room for intelligent discourse over how to best manage that desire. There is room for compassionate solutions, even when we decide we must decline an immigrant’s desire to come to our country.
There is no room for hatred and demagoguery.
