I’m an Indignant Immigrant!
Give me your Philadelphia roll, your K-pop, your Bebop yearning to breathe free.
Last week, music magazine Pitchfork, on which I have depended for years, got chopped up, pared down, and folded into GQ magazine. Total bummer. But as Ezra Klein delineated in the NY Times, Pitchfork’s fate is tied to a distressing trend:
Sports Illustrated just laid off most of its staff. BuzzFeed News is gone. HuffPost has shrunk. Jezebel was shut down (then partly resurrected). Vice is on life support. Popular Science magazine is done. U.S. News & World Report shuttered its magazine and is basically a college-ranking service now. Old Gawker is gone, and so is New Gawker. FiveThirtyEight was acquired by ABC News and then had its staff and ambitions slashed…Nor is it just digital journalism suffering. More than 350 newspapers failed in the first few years of the pandemic. That was the same pace at which newspapers were failing before the pandemic: a rate of two closures or so per week…The McClatchy chain filed for bankruptcy. Storied newspapers like The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun and The Dallas Morning News have been racked by layoffs, forced to become shadows of what they once were.
This is troubling for those of us who love and rely on great journalism and yet more troubling for all the great journalists out there pursuing truth or just burrowing in the nooks and crannies of modern life until they emerge with a fresh perspective to share.
But more than just troubling for readers and writers, this trend is dangerous to democracy. While I, like any reasonable person, am often critical of modern media, a lively media landscape with real journalists getting paid real money to do real work is indispensable to defending democracy.
With critically important elections around the corner in my country of origin (the U.S.) and in my country of residence (Germany), I am deeply concerned about the languishing media landscape*. In particular, I’m concerned about the role journalism could, but probably won’t play in creating a robust and nuanced marketplace of ideas around the topic that most divides the electorate in both U.S. and Germany: immigration.
Uggh. Immigration. I know, I know.
But I also know this. Chances are you don’t know jackshit about immigration. Alas, I have good news for you! After reading this missive, you’ll know even less. You’re welcome.
Sorry not sorry. It’s not your fault. Immigration in the age of globalization is labyrinthine and frankly, unless you are an immigration expert, it’s literally not your job to understand the intricacies of immigration. Your job is to drive a bus or teach math or lay pavement. We need you. Thank you. But you still don’t know jackshit about immigration.
And yet. Yet! You’ll hear a lot about immigration in 2024. And lest you, my dear reader, fall prey to the hokum, the tommyrot, the codswallop that will be foisted upon you this election year, allow me to share a few thoughts about immigration that might not drip from the pens of struggling journalists nor roll off the tongues of partisan politicians.
Last week I gave a talk on immigration to the United States during the Gilded Age (1870-1900), a version of which I shared on the YouTubes in the early days of the pandemic. But unlike the recorded version, the talk I gave last week was teeming with allusions to 2024. Then my students and I compared immigration in the Gilded Age with immigration the 2020’s before discussing the intersection of the narratives around immigration in Germany and the U.S. It was a challenging conversation rife with nuance and beset by a dearth of easy answers.
But politicians, particularly politicians running for office, are peddling a wide variety of easy answers. The muckraking journalists of the era might’ve called it for what it is: snakes selling snake oil.
In the maelstrom of imploding journalism, I’ll now share a few thoughts, not to rake the muck, but to muddy the waters of immigration.
Let’s start here. The prospect of open borders, while emotionally satisfying on some level, is impractical. I’ve read the literature on open borders and, try as I might, Pangea be damned, I’m not persuaded. Border walls, both metaphorical and literal, are emotionally satisfying to some but are equally impractical. It makes no sense to keep everyone out or let everyone in. That much is clear-cut. The rest is complicated, and not without reason.
The arguments against immigration that prima facie sound most decent and are most welcome in polite society are economic in nature. There are very real and sometimes valid concerns about the impact that mass immigration can have on an economy. But who among you readers can tell me at what point immigration bolsters the economy and at what point immigration sinks an economy? You can’t. Nor can most politicians. Having tired of his economic advisors proclaiming, "on the one hand, this" and "on the other hand, that," President Truman famously asked to be sent a one-armed economist.
In the realm of immigrants vis-à-vis economic growth, we should listen to economists, regardless of how many hands they have, even if they alone can’t solve the problem. While they may disagree on the numbers, reasonable economists have come to the reasonable agreement that modern economies tend to benefit from the influx of a certain, probably substantial, number of immigrants who can contribute to growing segments of the economy. Up to a point, immigrants help the economy, after that point immigrants hinder the economy. That’s easy enough. But it’s not that easy.
This simple framing ignores what governments can do to support immigrants’ efforts to contribute to an economy. Governments can and must be creative in fostering language and literacy programs, housing and integration programs, job training and retraining programs. Economists aren’t trained to consider the work that governments and QUANGOs and civil society can do to welcome immigrants, support them, integrate them, and benefit from them. Germany, for instance, has way too many foreign-born engineers delivering food and driving taxis. The discussion of how to leverage the energies and the skills of eager immigrants is conspicuously absent from the political debates.
With the economics of immigration being necessarily complicated, politicians provoke and spew pablum and do whatever it takes to get (re)elected and to wield power. And while it is overwhelmingly evident that the political right is more disingenuous and misleading about immigration, the left is hardly having an honest conversation.
Though this mealymouthed debate is evident both in the U.S. and Germany, American politics is really suffering from it. Texas Governor Greg Abbott can eat a sack of puckered buttholes, but his political shenanigans at the expense of real human lives are working. Point taken Governor. Let’s hope this act of political theater pushes Dems to get real on immigration.
But I’m not gonna hold my breath, in part because politicians running for office listen to political advisors committed to helping them win/keep an elected office. Politicians fighting for power rarely read the best immigration literature. They spout balderdash, not solutions, especially in election years.
Now I am wholeheartedly committed to democracy. How committed? I teach a semester-long class on how to create and sustain robust, liberal democracies. Here’s my opening lecture, again a pandemic product. But even in healthy democracies, elections are rarely opportunities for greater truths to emerge. Elections are usually convulsive, knock down, drag out affairs that do next to nothing to foster honest dialogue about complicated issues. The stakes of winning are so high that candidates are incentivized to bring their knives and clubs, not fine-tooth brushes and charts to the arena.**
And hey, who doesn’t love a brawl? When you’re fighting to win and playing for keeps, might as well keep the economists at bay and leave the charts up to the arugula-eating eggheads.
But there is a cost to all this. Let’s call that cost the truth.
Now I should stop there. Solid conclusion. But dammit, I’m an immigrant and now I’m all worked up.
So. If the economics are difficult, made more convoluted by the politics of immigration, there is a cultural argument made by the political right in both the U.S. and Germany that warrants attention. Broad swaths of Honky America are concerned about feeling outnumbered by people of color. In Germany there is similar, equally concerning debate over Leitkultur (the leading or dominant culture).
I have zero patience for this effluvium.
I’m hardly the most patriotic American, but American ethnoreligious diversity makes me want to put my hat over my heart and sing the Star Spangled Banner at the top of my lungs.***
This trend makes me a more proud American. Diversity is a source of strength. It makes countries and cultures better. I want Tex-Mex. Still hungry. Korean tacos, please and thank you. Taco Pizza? In principle yes, in practice nein danke. My daughter, whose favorite German food is döner kebab, knows perfectly well that if there is no barbecue sauce available, the least you could do is put Cholula on your wienerschnitzel.
Give me your Philadelphia roll, your K-pop, your Bebop yearning to breathe free.
Take your purity arguments and shove them straight up your Abbotthole™.
Cultural gumbo is where it’s at!
For most of American history, the predominant concern among those who would erect walls or close Ellis Island was that the Irish could never become real Americans. Their racial inferiority and mindless subservience to Rome would forever preclude them from fitting in. The Irish! Sip on your Shamrock Shake and ponder that for a cool second.
I want my country to look like this
Or this
Not this!
As immigration continues to plague political discourse, this immigrant wants you to tune out the noise and think seriously about the promise of immigration. Our politicians are increasingly cynical and disinclined towards honest engagement. Our journalists are fighting for survival. It’s up to you to read. Think. Create an honest, earnest, thoughtful, nuanced discussions about immigration. Fine tune what Ernest Hemingway called your built-in, shock-proof, crap detector. Pionering media scholar Neil Postman urged this decades ago, fearing that:
Every day in almost every way people are exposed to more bullshit than is healthy for them to endure, and if we can help them to recognize this fact, they might turn away from it and toward language that might do them some earthly good…Crap-detection is something one does when he starts to become a certain type of person…Sensitivity to the phony uses of language requires knowledge of how to ask questions, how to validate answers, and certainly, how to assess meanings.
If Postman thought that 1970’s America was drowning in bullshit, he must be lamenting this bullshit tidal wave from the grave.
And hey, if you’re too damn tired or preoccupied to keep your crap detector on high alert, I get it. I too have bandwidth issues. But I might beseech you to tap into what Abraham Lincoln called the better angel of your nature.
The most American of Americans, Lincoln proudly passed The Act to Encourage Immigration. He signed it in the midst of the Civil War, in 1864 when the nation literally was more divided than ever. Indeed, he signed it on July 4, the most American of days.
Best from Berlin,
DL
* If I’m being honest, I see myself as a Chicagoan (not an American), living in Berlin (not Germany). Both empires are fiction to which I cannot subscribe.
** Question: in our age of visual culture, would you support or refute the use of visual media in political debates? Imagine each candidate has a screen behind them upon which they can show whatever tables, charts, photos, political cartoons they want.
*** National Parks also make me wanna wave a flag.