Thanksgiving Thoughts of Migrants and Locals

Here is the news from today’s New York Times:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered American diplomats in Europe and in Canada, Australia and New Zealand to press their host governments to restrict most immigration and to file reports if the governments appear to be overly supportive of immigrants, according to a document sent to U.S. embassies and consulates.

Mr. Rubio told the diplomats to emphasize the effects of criminal acts by immigrants to encourage greater entry restrictions, according to the document, which is a diplomatic cable dated Nov. 21. The text of the cable, which was obtained by The New York Times, has not been previously reported.

Diplomats should “regularly engage host governments and their respective authorities to raise U.S. concerns about violent crimes associated with people of a migration background” and “any related human rights abuses,” the cable said. It said that those episodes were “widespread disruptors of social cohesion and public safety.”

The diplomats should send reports on crime linked to immigrants to State Department headquarters as well as analysis of how host governments handle the issues, including “policies that unduly favor migrants at the expense of local populations.”

Oh the lamentable irony of this report by Edward Wong and Hamed Aleaziz of the Times! And especially in this season. Thanksgiving we fantasize about a friendly feast of Pilgrims and Indians. December 25 through January 6 we will fantasize further of cow-friendly confines for the Holy Family, visited by generous magi, and making an excursion to Egypt and back. All the while we may feel more secure knowing the gates to our land are locked tight, and those nasty invaders are bombed out of the water or sent packing.

But the “violent crimes associated with a migration background,”  “related human rights abuses,” and “disrupters of social cohesion and public safety,” were all committed by our white, European ancestors who drove the native population of this continent out. Before he became our first President, Washington commanded these abuses and disruptions so as to empty lands so that they could be stolen by people like us. Later it would be wealthy land speculators and developers who would insure that this policy would be pursued from sea to shining sea.

Philip J. Deloria, himself a historian with Sioux Indian background, contributed to the recent Ken Burns/PBS documentary, “The American Revolution.” In the companion book by the same title, he notes that one of the chief complaints in the Declaration of Independence was that King George provoked Indians to attack patriots, but it would be much more honest to say the King dared to say “no” to wholesale robbery of Native lands. Deloria added that our founders liked to refer to those same lands as “frontier,” when really they were the scene of mass invasion.

Marco Rubio and the Trump administration are now not content to shut the gates on this stolen gated community called America. They want to bully every other developed nation into doing the same.

What are policies that “unduly favor migrants at the expense of local populations”? Can any local population welcome migrants at no expense? Can there be compassion without cost? And in the real world, where populations are always on the move, how do we distinguish the local from the migrant? In this dynamic world welcoming those who are most vulnerable BECAUSE they are unsettled in a homeland, comes always with cost. But the cost is worth it because this unsettled world is also a connected world. We always need each other.

Connie and I live on 43 acres of land once the farm and hunting land of Potawatomi, and before them the Miami, the Ho Chunk, the Fox, and many other tribes. Tribes once migrant became local, then became migrants again. All of them pushed beyond the Mississippi, and then onto reservations, and then into alcoholism and unemployment. Massive “disruption of social cohesion and public safety” caused by our migrant ancestors in the name of settling the vast, empty frontier that was, of course, never empty in the first place!

As Christians celebrating Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, Connie and I will strive to repent and resist. Repent of our own forgetfulness of things past and the ways we spin fantasies to assuage our consciences. We will strive to repent and resist what our nation is lately becoming.