A New Immigration Policy (or: It Doesn't Take a Village)

 

According to the deep 'Thinkers' writing about the terrorist attacks by the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, we are all partly to blame for failing to properly assimilate them.  Well, excuse me, I’m not sure how an eight year old boy who has lost his legs – or any of the other victims - is to blame for some low-life slime who decides to set off a bomb.  Further, I’ve had enough of the Fabian, psycho-babble nonsense: we are supposed to assimilate immigrants better, AND we are supposed to celebrate diversity.  Which is it?

More to the point, why is it our problem?  Someone asks to come to the US – fine.  So, why am I supposed to bend over backwards and adjust for him?  Not to put to fine a point on it, but I already live here.

A tale told me a number of years ago is instructive: an Assistant Secretary of one of the Federal departments was traveling through the Balkans.  He and his small team ended up in a village and decided to have lunch at a local restaurant.  (Of note, the assistant secretary happened to speak a little Serbo-Croatian).  They engaged the locals in conversation.  As it turned out, there was a local fellow in the bar who was well into his cups.  As they talked he became more and more worked up and began to describe how the Muslims had killed his 'Grampa.'  (The particular word he used is an idiom and doesn't have a precise meaning, but is used to refer to grandfathers, great-grandfathers, etc., much as we might, as young kids, call our grandfather or great grandfather ‘Bumpa’ or some such term, and continue to call him that even after we had grown up.)  Over the course of a few minutes the man worked himself into a lather and got up and dragged them out of the restaurant to show them the spot where his 'Grampa' had been killed - right down the street, 'at this corner - right here!' – pointing at the very spot.

They all nodded and tried to express some grief, until finally one of them asked 'When did this happen?' fully expecting an answer along the lines of ‘last week.’  The man answered '1843.'

The assistant secretary said he was struck, as if slapped in the head, by the real problem, one that he had seen in detail a hundred times before, but now brought into sharp relief: that the very nature of the ‘village’ mentality fostered this behavior, of a small, emotionally isolated group of people who spend an inordinate amount of time nursing their own and their neighbors’ past injuries, who focus on the past and hope for some means to bring some sort of ‘deus ex machina’ judgment on those they perceive as their oppressors and wrong-doers, and waste valuable energy that might otherwise be spent improving their lives and building a productive future.

The problem is simple enough: despite what some simpletons might want to think, 'it doesn't take a village to raise a child,' it takes a village to raise terrorists and never-ending blood feuds and small minds that are trapped in the wrongs of the past.

The secretary was also struck by the solution that the US has always provided: the ‘Melting Pot.’  If we are to get beyond all this, we begin by burying this idiocy of diversity, and 'the village,' forgive AND forget, and instead of dwelling on wrongs done to people we never met, we learn from the past but look forward.  We have psychologists and politicians who have made a living of fighting over offenses none of us gave, against people who were not alive to be offended.  Let's ship those folks off to the funny farm, help society climb out of its diaper and put on its big boy pants, and press.

And don’t be misled; there are as many ‘villages’ in large cities as there are in the Balkans or the middle of Afghanistan.  Any place where people, and their demagogue ‘leaders’ actively insist upon isolating their culture, of drawing ‘us vs. them’ distinctions – whether racially based or based on their religion or any other distinction – we run the risk of making another village.  What we need are not people who want to be something different from us, who want to dwell on past injuries and wrong, we need people who want to be something new, who want to be Americans, who want to work hard and achieve and put that insanity behind them.

So, how about this: If you come here – or are already here, and you want to become an American, and not a hyphenated American (Irish-American, Chinese-American, Muslim-American, African-American, Martian-American), just an American, loyal to the US Constitution - then you are welcome.  You want to come here and work hard and realize the American dream, you're welcome.  You want to build a new future, an American future for yourself and your children, you’re more than welcome.  You want to come here and turn America into a richer version of the place you just fled, a newer and larger village - then go away; you truly are not welcome here.