Tune in. Turn on. Keep them out.
This is the catch phrase for the Unites States’ nationalistic culture of xenophobia. Self-deluded, misanthropic and doomed to fail, this anti-immigration sentiment has much in common with former Harvard professor Timothy Leary’s endorsement of a drug culture in the 1960s.
During his lifetime Leary dropped more than 5,000 hits of acid in his quest to discover a way of life and living that was better than what U.S. society had made of itself. He thought that use of LSD could be a productive way to become sensitive to our individual and collective human capacity, to attune ourselves with this harmonious potential, and to purge ourselves of artificial and involuntary social impulses and regulations.
The current movement against immigration is based on equally heavy doses of mind-altering “substances” – economic and racial power. We’ve all heard people dose themselves with these ideas on radio, in print, and in person. “They’re taking our jobs. They don’t even speak our language.” That’s all you need to espouse and believe to start trippin’ hard on a dangerous reality.
The more a person speaks like this, the more she or he is apt to assemble a version of reality that will support such views. Convinced that such a view is a viable reality, the more extreme and passionate a person is willing to argue that ‘this is the way it is.’
This is the state of mind you hear about when people are so high that they believe they can fly, so they leap from a building or bridge. But then gravity takes over and the consequences occur not in the mind’s hallucination, but in the hard physics of moving bodies. The economic fear and greed that feed xenophobia work like potent psychedelics, and the leap occurs when we allow or prompt our government to enact immigration and citizenship laws based on racial and economic factors.
We could concede that maybe, just maybe, anti-immigration advocates begin with an innocent attempt to make life better, but especially here in the United States, such an “ignorance-is-bliss” view is at least hypocritical and at worst nauseatingly immoral. According to the U.S. Census Bureau we are a nation that is 98.5 percent immigrants, and you can rest assured it is not the 1.5 percent Native American population that is drafting and enacting immigration laws, though they may be the only group logically entitled to do so.
Instead, current policies and tendencies are being endorsed by a United States citizenry that is continuing the centuries-old tradition of expansion and consolidation of the country’s political borders. The United States spent much of the 19th century occupying, invading, negotiating and annexing lands to form a contiguous territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific and this impulse for expansion is manifested in the 21st century as a compulsion to maintain security for this cobbled homeland.
Economics, land and race have never been separate concerns for this country – from a constitution that partitioned rights along lines of race and citizenship, to the displacement of native populations to reservations, to bureaucratic manipulations that denied citizenship and land rights to former Mexican citizens after the northern half of Mexico was lost to the United States by the 1848 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This desire to preserve “America for Americans” has been increased by current social fears.
Adding global economic volatility and the Wars on Drugs and Terror to our traditional national insecurity is like the introduction of freebased cocaine to our national psyche, or maybe like dirty methamphetamine cooked up in a motel bathroom – we are a paranoid country, determined to keep “them” out, and not willing to admit that we are them. We are the immigrants of past decades, who came to this land for the opportunities it is rumored to afford. Instead of seeking to mitigate the difficulties encountered by new immigrants entering this mongrel land, we are jealous of our citizenship.
Encouraged by fears of terrorism we are watching this country carry out a de facto militarization of our southern border, local governments are enacting laws requiring proof of citizenship to rent an apartment, and our federal government is unable to come to terms with the historical reliance upon immigrant population and labor, be it legal or illegal.
Laws are an unavoidable part of our social organization, but when we approve laws, we need to recognize the root impetus for their creation, as well as the ways that they can be manipulated and perverted. Measures ostensibly intended to protect citizens and citizen-workers’ rights may actually operate as systems of exploitation – refusing rights and protections to non-citizens, greatly based on racial and economic factors.
All these factors and movements are relevant here in Oregon, a state very proud of its 19th century ‘pioneer’ immigration that led to statehood in 1859. And as inheritors of this legacy, we have to recognize that most Oregonians, being non-Native American, are immigrants to a foreign land. Population statistics show that the state’s new immigrant population is growing and Oregonians’ individual and collective behavior in this time of change will demonstrate if we are deluded or not, if we are tripping on economic and racial power or not, and if we deserve to call ourselves citizens of this land.
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