Immigration, the Plutonium Seed of Othering, and a Parable

Having touched a live wire by mentioning the ICE protests in my last message, I intended to write about them in greater depth. We need a sense-making narrative neither Right nor Left, nor in-between, grounded in compassion and showing a path toward peace. But then last night I read that Israel bombed Iran. I literally got sick to my stomach. I wondered: Is there anything else relevant to write about?

A war between Israel and Iran will be catastrophic for every human being on earth. With Israel’s attack, the war-stallions have left the stable, and it will be very hard to call them back. But call them back we must.

Thinking about it last night, the continuity between the ICE protest situation and the war in West Asia became clear. The Trump administration carried the seed of both into office. The seed is called othering. It is like a grain of plutonium that creates cancer in any body it enters.

Othering refers to a worldview in which self and other are fundamentally separate. It is a worldview of winners and losers, in which your loss is my gain. It is a worldview of good guys and bad guys, friends and enemies, decent folk and the deplorable.

That seed has generated a cancerous mutation that has corrupted all the positive impulses that carried Trump into office. It may be hard for some to accept that the man has any redeeming qualities or that those who supported him have laudable goals, but to deny them, and to surrender advocacy of those goals to the right wing, perpetuates an irresolvable split among all those who strive for a healed society.

Here is how the plutonium seed has affected the issue of immigration. I’ll get to West Asia (AKA the Middle East) in a separate article.

The laudable goal here was to address the social disruption, drug trafficking, human trafficking, sex trafficking, and labor exploitation that accompany ungoverned immigration. The poison seed is the dehumanization of the migrants themselves, the vast majority of whom fled to this country from desperate circumstances—circumstances caused in large part by past US policies like economic imperialism, sabotage of labor and land reform movements in Latin America, neoliberal wealth stripping, support for death squads, dictators, and juntas, and in particular the global debt regime that compels countries of the Global South to export their resources and labor. It is a lot easier to blame the migrants for “not respecting our laws” than it is to countenance the real causes of illegal immigration. It is much easier to paint the migrants as cat-eaters, criminals, and grifters than it is to feel their misery and examine our contribution to it.

The anti-ICE protests draw from caring people’s revulsion at the dehumanization of immigrants and callous, dismissive attitudes toward them. The Right paints a picture of leftist NGOs with deep state associations coordinating and funding protests, paying protesters, duping well-meaning people to join them, placing pallets of bricks near protest sites, and ultimately operating the “color revolution” playbook with the end goal of causing civil unrest to bring down Donald Trump. There is some truth in this picture; this is indeed how color revolutions have been used to bring down governments the unfriendly to US hegemony around the world. However, the playbook cannot work without appealing to the legitimate grievances and moral outrage of the public, some portion of which must be willing to take to the streets.

If Donald Trump’s real motivation were to crack down on criminal gangs lurking among immigrant communities and preying on them, then he has made a big mistake in dehumanizing illegal immigrants in general. FBI Director Kash Patel says the ICE raids focus on criminals like human traffickers and drug traffickers. Whether or not that claim were true, it would have a lot more credence if it were not accompanied by dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants generally.

For all the high profile of Trump’s deportations, the actual number deported so far is not appreciably different from the rate under President Obama. Nor did either president do anything to address the root causes of illegal immigration. Until those change, immigration pressure will never let up. As it persists, tempers rise and people will be vulnerable to xenophobic ideas, and society will be a hotbed of division over an intractable issue.

* * *

It’s like this. Once upon a time there were two villages. One of them, North Village, was better armed and more technically advanced than the other. It levied tribute on South Village, payable in corn, potatoes, and lumber. It also commandeered the spring that fed both villages and diverted all the water, leaving South Village with only sewage. Soon, life in South Village became unlivable. People were starving. Armed gangs pilfered what remained of its scarce resources and terrorized the population. When the South Villagers revolted under a leader who vowed to stop paying tribute, North Village funded his opposition who deposed him in a coup.

Left with no recourse, the population of South Village began to flee. They pounded on the gates of North Village. They climbed over the walls. They took menial jobs at low pay—anything was better than in the south. They brought their own customs with them that sometimes offended North Villagers. Their numbers included members of their armed gangs. Well, this situation caused quite a controversy in the north. Some North Villagers reacted with hate and anger. “How dare those filthy southerners take our jobs, depress our wages, and disrupt our way of life?” Others reacted with compassion. “We must let these poor folk in. We must be kind to those less fortunate than ourselves.” Soon the North Villagers, too, were fighting in the streets.

Meanwhile, the ruling class of North Village, who kept most of the tribute for themselves anyway, looked on the riots with satisfaction. Everyone was so consumed in their moral debate and infighting that they paid no attention to the tribute system itself.

* * *

Those who demand to know “Do you support or oppose Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to quell the ICE protests?” are helping to narrow the issue into a continuing source of division that can never be resolved. It is not pusillanimous “both sides-ism” to call attention to a setup that corrals us into two warring camps while perpetuating the underlying status quo. Once the ground conditions of immigration pressure are in place, there is no good solution. Any policy will create harm to one party or another, whether to the immigrants themselves or to the societies they flood into.

To further disrupt the Left/Right divide on this issue, consider that immigration can actually be understood as yet another form of asset stripping. When a country has been stripped of its forests, its minerals, its soil, its pensions, its water, and its utilities, what remains to sell off to generate foreign exchange and service its debts? Its young people, that’s what. Most immigrants are young. Nations in the Global South are exporting their young people, their very future, in tribute to the imperium. This is an ancient phenomenon, mentioned in ancient Greek mythology. Tributary nations have always been compelled to send the flower of their youth to their conquerors. In the rural areas of the Global South—and many places in the United States too—the only people left are the elderly, the chronically ill, and the hopelessly addicted. Those places have given up their last export.

Both sides-ism is not pathological when each side indeed hold truth the other does not see. But the view I am advancing is closer to “neither side-ism.” It is what neither side talks about that is the key to unlocking the intractable immigration problem and the escalating rancor surrounding it.

Let us not fall into the trap of the wrong conversation, and pour energy into this latest political theater production that will help no one—least of all, the migrants—but only raise the temperature of the social hate-furnace to new heights. The two sides are locked into a vicious reinforcement loop in which each goads the other into fulfilling their worst expectations. The current arc will intensify and seal the narrative of each side. The most likely result is the mutual exhaustion of both, with enormous collateral damage.

OK, whatever the background, here we are now. What is to be done? I am not in the business of denouncing or endorsing, but I can confidently say that no good will come from deploying troops into the streets. Nor will anything good come from smashing windows and burning police cars. All of this simply confirms the worst expectations of the other side and props up the toxic narrative of us versus them. If by some magic I could dictate other people’s choices, I would say, stop making an irredeemable other of those with whom you disagree. To the Right: immigrants are fleeing terrible poverty and violence, and deportations add more suffering on top of that. Please, know what you do. Stop hiding behind convenient narratives that they comprise mostly criminals and ne’er-do-wells. To the Left: the veneer of compassion that liberal immigration policies present hides a reality of global economic exploitation, disruption of host societies, downward pressure on wages, exploitation of labor, drug cartels, and human trafficking, especially of children. And, your valid indignation at the treatment of immigrants, who are full human beings deserving of dignity, is easily exploited in service of the cynical political ends of a faction of the power elite.

So first, calm down a minute and listen to each other. Then, let’s start solving the problem, both from the immediacy of compassion and at the root level. Give a path to legal residency for migrants who have been here for years and have laid down roots. Keep families together. Temporarily restrict new immigration to family members. And then let’s change the conditions that drive people to flee their native lands in the first place.

My niece recently married a man, Marcos, from a poor village in Mexico. They are both farmers, and he was working on a guest worker visa near where she lives. They fell in love and now they have, in my unbiased opinion, the world’s cutest baby. Well, when my niece visited his family, she discovered that the village basically depends on the guest worker program (along with remittances from illegal migrants) to survive. That’s not because these people are lazy or stupid. Few people that I’ve met work harder than Marcos or have such a wide range of skills. His people’s poverty is no fault of their own; it is systemic. It is the result of a long-standing extractive and oppressive relationship between my country and his. On a deeper level, it is the result of an economic system based on interest-bearing debt. On a deeper level still, it is the result of civilization’s underlying mythology of separation.

That doesn’t mean we should withdraw from more proximate issues to philosophize about separation and its healing. It is, rather, to align practical actions with a deeper understanding. Practically speaking, the fastest way to solve the immigration problem is to annul the foreign debt of Global South countries and undo the apparatus of their debt servitude. People no longer flee South Village when its resources are available to its residents. In fact, when we allow local economies to thrive, many immigrants will want to return to their native lands.

Pressing as the issue of ICE protests and Trump’s response may seem, it is likely to soon be overwhelmed by the deluge of catastrophe that will result from escalation between Israel and Iran. I’ll write about that next. Here also did President Trump harbor a toxic seed, in this case blind support for Israel as the good guy, that is now destroying any laudable aspirations he may have had to keep America out of war and reverse the ascendancy of the deep state and the military-industrial complex.

No political revolution, whether of Trump or the Left, whether of a fascist or a communist bent, will alter the basic conditions of human affairs one little bit if it harbors the plutonium seed of othering.

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