Anti-immigrant furies

Here is your semiotic quiz for the day: what is this very controversial Swiss poster saying?

Created by the Swiss People's Party, it shows white Swiss sheep kicking out a black (immigrant) sheep that they don't want.

The Washington Post headline October 10 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801464.html?wpisrc=newsletter is: Swiss Fury at Foreigners Boiling Over.

We spent a week in Switzerland last year with our son Chris, who had just completed a two year Mormon Church mission there. Many of the people he had talked with the most, some of whom we met, were immigrants from Iran, East Germany, Chile, etc. Typically pretty hard-working people who were trying to fit in and get ahead. Not people one could imagine getting angry about. It is also hard to imagine rage, real rage, in Switzerland -- a pretty comfortable, almost too satisfied sort of place.

So why do the Swiss rage, and why do they imagine this to be such a threat? For that matter, why do the Danes, an equally comfortable, secure group, with quite a bit more history of strong social concern for the welfare and equitable treatment of all Danes, have a strong anti-immigrant People's Party? And why do Americans have major political figures promoting things like building a wall between Texas and Mexico?

There are a lot of specific issues that feed in. People who pay high taxes to support strong health and school programs fear that foreigners who don't intend to work will take advantage of those programs. People fear that immigrants of other religions, cultures and languages won't try to fit into their cultures, but will change the host culture instead. Immigrants often are working class, even poor, and less educated, differing from the profile of increasingly middle class societies. All is exacerbated by the fact that the new people tend to look different racially and sometimes dress differently.

There are a couple of deep problems at work. Most industrial countries, even some developing ones, have aging populations that need to be supplemented by new immigrants since their birth rates are not producing enough people to sustain their economies. The immigrants are probably not going to look like the people who are already there. They will probably have different religions and customs.

The other is a deep political problem. Who gets to be a true citizen of a country? When you have Peoples' Parties that have a linguistic root in the Germanic idea of the volk (the real people of a country's national tradition), there is a strong, if implicit statement that only people of a certain ethnicity are real people who can be good citizens. (That is demographic suicide for much of Western Europe, Japan and several other places who function this way, if they keep going with it.)

The other classic model is that anyone who accepts the rules and language of a new country can be a citizen, even if they keep their religion, language, etc. from back home, too. Some people who study this call it the Roman Empire approach. Lots of people from lots of places, ethnicities and religions could become citizens as long as they were loyal to Rome, learned Latin and acquired enough of a layer of Roman culture to get along. The USA intends to have this model, but has been pretty inconsistent in the way it has treated different groups, mostly when they are visibly different in race.

I see a shipwreck coming for a number of cultures and nations of which I am very fond, including my own in the USA, if we are not careful in our own rising anti-immigrant rhetoric. Right now the USA is one of the few advanced industrial economies without a demographic crisis, which is to say that enough people are coming into the U.S. population to pay the retirement bill and keep the economy going after my generation retires and starts collecting pensions and receiving health benefits for typical elderly medical problems. In the USA, that is due largely to the fact of massive immigration of people from Mexico and Central America. Most of those people fit the Roman model of citizenship pretty well: they work hard, make sure that their kids learn English. They pay at least as many taxes as they collect benefits (if you look beyond the rhetoric to actual research done by economists on the issue), and acquire a pretty strong loyalty to the USA. (A disproportionate number, compared to other parts of the population, even fight for the USA in Iraq.) So where exactly is the crisis, one wonders?

To take a contrasting example, look at German history since the later 1800s. A little over a year ago, on my way to an academic meeting in Germany, I went through the Jewish Museum in Berlin. What struck me the most was not the Holocaust, but what happened 60 or 70 years before. Germans had to decide how to react to the German Jews. The Germans were in effect offered the talents and allegiance of several million of the smartest, most talented and productive people on the entire planet. And well before Hitler, they pretty much rejected them. These were people who largely looked like them, spoke their language, thought of themselves as German, and in many cases, had deliberately de-emphasized their own religion in order to fit in better. What panicked many Germans was in fact that the Jews were blending in, inter-marrying and becoming part of German society -- they feared it would literally dilute German culture and even German blood. What hit me then was the question, if Germany had a hard accepting those people, who were really so much like them: how in the world are they going to accept the people who are immigrating there now, who look much more different and are often more ambivalent about blending in?

Societies can do enormous harm to themselves with these kinds of reactions. Even before the horror of the Holocaust, Germany had already hurt itself enormously and benefited the USA enormously by pushing many Jews into immigration to the USA, to Latin America and elsewhere. Something similar happened in 1492, when Spain kicked out all of its Jews. So many went to the Ottoman Empire that the Sultan supposedly sent a message ironically congratulating Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain on strengthening him so much and weakening themselves so much by exiling so many talented people.

An American reacting angrily to Latinos or a Dane reacting emotionally to Arabs may not think they are looking at the father or mother of the next Albert Einstein. And maybe they aren't. But they probably are looking at the fathers and mothers of the people who will be paying their retirement and health benefits.