The New Birthers

Europe’s growing minorities very much reflect the vast colonial holdings that once allowed Europe to dominate the world. They immigrated to the continent to better their lives, to live in the center of their universe to move from being part of providing Europe with cheap labor, raw materials and natural resources to the vastly more relevant “value-added” portion of the global economy: manufacturing. Colonies were often impoverished, lacking serious upward mobility and mired in local politics where old world families with European connections flourished while the masses just served, constantly reminded of their third class status in the eyes of their European masters. The poverty and the stifling local political realities became ingrained into the cultural realities of many of the colonies, particularly in Asia and Africa, especially in regions that were only able to break the yoke of European colonial rule in the twentieth century. The wounds were still fresh in those most recently liberated nations.

And so it is with the immigrants from those relatively recent “former colonies” that their resentment of their colonial masters and the lingering feeling of still being looked down upon by Europeans still drives a cultural wedge between these immigrants (even several generations later) and the general population around them. Many are regaled with the history of Muslim greatness when Europe was still in the Dark Ages, creating higher mathematics (“algebra” is an Arabic word), geography and modern medicine while preserving Greco-Roman literature that was being burned on the continent as heretical material… or of Asian monarchs whose conquests sent shudders down the spines of fearful Europeans. They long for a return of their cultural greatness, and secretly find joy that Europe must now pay dearly for her most basic raw materials, particularly Middle Eastern oil. The resent being treated and labeled as sub-class “rag-heads” or other pejoratives.

Today, many of these European immigrants are dark-or-darker-skinned players, many of whom practice a religion that is viewed as a threat to Western civilization. France has banned the trappings of Muslim conservatism on women, England and Germany are rife with tales of militant Islamist cells operating within their midst. A Norwegian maniac slaughters 77 people, mostly children, in the name of racial and ethnic purity. When you look at the next big European Union issue beyond irreconcilable debt problems, you see the EU grappling with the “immigration problem,” claiming that Europe can no longer support this flood of new minorities. Thus, Europe’s view on immigration is a major concern of admitting hostile enemies into their midst. Europe is also in that part of the Western world where nations are crowed in close proximity to each other, a short bus ride, plane trip or boat sojourn away.

Modern immigration in the United States, the area in the Western world where vast distances separate the United States from the more populated regions of the world and where we really have only two international borders with friendly nations, is driven primarily by economic betterment. Beyond the horrific slave trade that marked our nation until the middle of the nineteenth century, the driving force to coming to the United States has been opportunity. Our multicultural world has grown not from resenting minorities seeking to find reward in the colonial control center (still harboring resentment of colonial exploitation and third class status), but from human being genuinely believing in American freedom and our democratic form of government, that the level playing field allowed hard work and education to create upward mobility without regard to “status at birth,” and the powerful economic engine that grew not from colonial labor and raw stock in distant lands but from invention and ingenuity in the homeland. And where there is American resentment of immigrants, it is usually focused on job competition and fear of rising crime… and that good old racial and ethnic bias that once targeted Irish and Italians before their assimilation into the mainstream.

And so in these economically impaired times, where American opportunities appear to be on the wane and drug crime (the new failed “Prohibition”) has provided alternative sources of new wealth to minority communities, new anti-immigrant forces are at work. But we need educated engineers from Asia, cheap service labor (to become medical doctors and MBAs) from Latin America and additional well-educated contributors to our society such as the Persians who escaped persecution from fundamentalist Ayatollahs in Iran. Still our border and most of our immigration issues differ profoundly from the more generalized fear in Europe that immigration represents the admission of anti-European time bombs waiting to wreak revenge for centuries of colonial imperialism. Hard to worry about attacks from Canada or Mexico.

Immigration fears, heightened by a new economy lean on growth, are still fundamentally perceived very differently on each side of the Atlantic. Europe sees darker-skinned minorities successfully completing the equivalent of the Muslim invasion that was stopped only outside Vienna, Austria centuries ago, an attack that drove the Pope out of Rome. Americans are just worried about conserving the fewer economic opportunities for those who got here first (excluding, of course, Native Americans). Talk to Europeans about our rising “minority” population, which they feel moves the United States farther away from its European roots and our ties to them. Watch their eyes belie their view of ethnic immigration.

Which brings me to the headlines. The United States of America is no longer a nation where the majority of its people are going to be whites of European heritage. “For the first time in U.S. history, most of the nation’s babies are members of minority groups, according to new census figures that signal the dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority… Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian American or in other minority groups. That’s almost a full percentage point higher than the 49.5 percent of minority babies counted when the decennial census was taken in April 2010. Census Bureau demographers said the tipping point came three months later, in July.

“The latest estimates, which gauge changes since the last census, are a reflection of an immigration wave that began four decades ago. The transformation of the country’s racial and ethnic makeup has gathered steam as the white population grows collectively older, especially compared with Hispanics…Although minorities make up about 37 percent of the U.S. population, the District [of Columbia] and four states are majority minority — California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas.” Washington Post, May 16^th.

Are we resentful? Or can we recognize that the vast majority of this “minority” segment came to this nation to make it and themselves better? These folks aren’t creating sleeper cells determined to take us down; they represent much of the new blood, blended with the old blood, that might just bring the United States back up to the top. Our heterogeneity spawns new combinations of thoughts and ideas that define our innovative spirit.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as the Statue of Liberty reminds us, we are a great nation because of immigration and not in spite of it.