This Land Is Our Land

by Suketu Mehta

  The Fox anchors claim they’re not anti-immigrant; they just want immigrants to come lawfully. The commentator Tomi Lahren often tweets imprecations at immigrants: “We are indeed a nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of laws. Respect our laws and we welcome you. If not, bye. #DACA.”

  An amateur genealogist named Jennifer Mendelsohn dug up a 1917 court case featuring Lahren’s great-great-grandfather, a Russian immigrant named Constantin Dietrich. He was indicted on two counts of “willfully, unlawfully, and knowingly” lying about a naturalization proceeding and forging a naturalization document “with a knife or steel eraser or other instrument unknown to the Grand Jurors.” He’d failed to file his application in time, so he forged it to make it appear that it had been executed two years earlier.

  “Migrant memoirs and other documents are full of examples of people who lied,” points out Hasia Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at NYU. “They lied about their ages, they lied about their occupations. The word went through immigrant ships and stations and ports of embarkation, to say that one had a particular skill. People lied to leave Europe, because they could be liable for military conscription.”

  One of the biggest fulminators against immigrants in the United States is the Fox TV host Tucker Carlson. From his perch, he goes after the weakest and most voiceless people in America. In March 2017, he ran with a story about two undocumented immigrant teenagers and their alleged rape of a fourteen-year-old high school student. He did multiple shows about the incident, whipping up mass hysteria against immigrants: “This is insanity, of course, a sign of a sick civilization at war with itself. A strong country enforces its laws and protects its citizens. That’s job one. In the U.S., too often we ignore our own laws and allow ruin to be visited on our own people.”

  Two months later, prosecutors dismissed the case. But Carlson never apologized for what he put the two teens through.

  Carlson likes to claim the populist mantle, but was born rich and stayed that way. His stepmother was the heiress to the Swanson frozen foods empire, and he was sent to a posh boarding school in Rhode Island. I looked up Tucker Carlson’s ethnicity. It is English, German, Scottish, one-sixteenth Swiss Italian, distant Dutch, possibly Swedish. In other words, he’s a mongrel. But a European mongrel.

  The most notorious immigrant-hater in the Trump administration is his adviser Stephen Miller, who grew up Jewish in California. His great-grandparents Wolf and Bessie Glotzer were refugees fleeing the pogroms in Belarus. They came over in 1903, without hindrance of extreme vetting or even an interview with the American embassy, with eight dollars in their pockets.

  “For Miller to say his family came to America ‘legally’ is simply a ruse,” the Jewish Journal points out. “There was no illegal immigration at the turn of the century, because all non-Asian immigration was essentially legal until the 1920s. Then, as now, angry voices fought to keep these immigrants out. They organized the Immigration Restriction League, focused on shutting the ports to swarthy Italians and Jews. ‘The floodgates are open,’ wrote one anti-immigrant newspaper editor as the Eastern European Jews docked in New York. ‘The horde of $9.60 steerage slime is being siphoned upon us from Continental mud tanks.’ Such sentiments led to the Immigration Act of 1924—which effectively shut the door to Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust.”

  As the article notes, “When an American Jew turns on immigrants, there is a whiff of head-scratching hypocrisy, if not something more clinical. It is taking the side of people who, in a historical blink of the eye, would have met your own great-grandparents at the docks with stones and spitballs.”

  Miller’s own uncle, David Glosser, posted a Facebook note: “My nephew and I must both reflect long and hard on one awful truth. If in the early 20th century the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.”

  Fear of migrants sells. Fox ratings have never been higher. The Springer newspapers in Germany, the Berlusconi papers in Italy, and The Sun and Daily Mail in the U.K. are flourishing, feeding their readers a daily diet of xenophobia.

  But the greatest facilitator of race-hatred against refugees isn’t a tabloid; it’s Facebook. Researchers at the University of Warwick recently studied every anti-refugee attack—3,335, over two years—in Germany. They found that among the strongest predictors of the attacks was whether the attackers are on Facebook. The social network aids the dissemination of rumors, such as that all refugees are welfare cheats or rapists; and, unmediated by gatekeepers or editors, the rumors spread, and ordinary people are roused to violence. Wherever Facebook usage rose to one standard deviation above normal, the researchers found, attacks on refugees increased by 50 percent. When there were internet outages in areas with high Facebook usage, the attacks dropped significantly.

  Facebook is today’s Radio Télévision Libre des Milles, the genocidal radio station that was the vehicle through which baseless rumors about Tutsis spread in Rwanda in the 1990s—rumors that roused Hutus to mass murder. In country after country—Myanmar, Germany, the United States—the social network has become the hate network, purveyor to a mass audience of the most outrageous falsehoods against migrants. And it is doing far too little to stop it.

  The conversation about immigrants in America, too, is approaching incitement to genocide. Not just restraining or detaining the undocumented, but murdering them en masse. Virgil Peck, a Kansas state assemblyman, offered a solution to America’s immigration problem in the legislature during a 2011 committee meeting on shooting wild hogs from helicopters: “If shooting these immigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a (solution) to our illegal immigration problem.” He later said that he’d been joking, that he was just speaking like “a southeast Kansas person.”

  These comments were mirrored in February 2013 by a conservative radio show host and former U.S. Navy SEAL named Carl Higbie. “What’s so wrong with wanting to put up a fence and saying, ‘Hey, everybody with a gun, if you want to go shoot people coming across our border illegally, you can do it fo’ free,’” Higbie said on his radio show, Sound of Freedom. “And you can do it on your own, and you’ll be under the command of the, you know, National Guard unit or a Border Patrol. I think stick a fence six feet high with signs on it in both English and Spanish and it says, ‘If you cross this border, this is the American border, you cross it, we’re going to shoot you … You cross my border, I will shoot you in the face. I will go down there. I’ll volunteer to go down there and stand on that border for, I don’t know, a week or so at a time, and that’ll be my civil duty. I’ll volunteer to do it.”

  What happened to this homicidal, hate-filled man? Four years later, Donald Trump appointed him to be head of external relations for AmeriCorps. After the comments came out in the wider media, he resigned.

  In February 2018, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) removed the phrase “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement. It will no longer secure “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants”; it will now merely “administer the nation’s lawful immigration system.” This was met with wide applause from anti-immigrant groups like FAIR and Numbers USA. The Peruvian-born head of USCIS, Lee Cissna, explained the change: that the agency now exists “to ensure people who are eligible for immigration benefits receive them and those who are not eligible—either because they don’t qualify or because they attempt to qualify by fraud—don’t receive them, and those who would do us harm are not granted immigration benefits.” In other words, a sort of immigrant monitor, ever on the alert for criminals, terrorists, rapists, malingerers, deadbeats, cheats.

  Even if it is observed more in the breach, these official catchphrases such as “nation of immigrants” mean something: what the country’s ideals are, what it aspires to. In changing the phrasing, USCIS removed even that aspirational ideal. It announced in no uncertain term
s its idea of America: a nation of immigrant-haters. The racists from my high school have grown up and they are celebrating. In Trump’s America, they think they own the streets. I got a taste of this personally one night before Thanksgiving 2017 in Hoboken, New Jersey.

  * * *

  My sister, visiting from California, says, “Let’s go to Hoboken for a drink. They just elected a Sikh mayor.”

  We park and walk down to the river. We cross an intersection and a beat-up black car pulls up with the windows open.

  “Did you hear what they’re yelling?” my sister asks.

  “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” a white man in the passenger seat yells out at us, grinning, rocking back and forth in his seat.

  I turn, put up my middle finger at him.

  The car is stopped at the intersection. He opens the door and walks fast toward us. He is dressed in a football jersey, in his twenties, heavily muscled; he would have beaten the shit out of us. There is a restaurant to our right, and my sister and I walk rapidly toward it.

  “What’s the problem?” my sister demands of the man coming at us.

  “He gave me the middle finger!”

  By now we’re in the restaurant, and he stays outside, yelling curses at me. “Wuss! Pussy!” Then he gets back into his car, and it speeds off.

  We sit in the restaurant and have a glass of wine. Then I decide to call the police, because the people in the car, amped up as they are, are probably looking for the next brown man to beat up.

  Two cops show up: an older white cop with whiskers covering his jowls and a rookie Puerto Rican cop. The white cop interrogates me about the incident: “Was he close to you? Was he yelling epithets when he was out of the car?” He’s trying hard to demonstrate that it couldn’t have been a bias attack; it was just drunk people in a car.

  “He was yelling ‘Allahu akbar’ at us,” I say.

  The cop is nonplussed. “What’s that mean?”

  “God is great.”

  He throws out his hands. “What’s wrong with that?”

  Then my sister explains that it’s something often yelled at Muslims, implying that they’re terrorists.

  “But you don’t even look Muslim!” the cop says. “If I’m looking at you, I’d think you were Indian.”

  I tell him that many Indians are Muslims.

  The cops run through the logistics of the attack. I tell him we were crossing the street when we heard the insults.

  “Did you push the crossing button on the signal?” he asks.

  I say I didn’t.

  “Then you went against the light,” the cop declares, triumphantly. The sleuth has found the real crime: jaywalking.

  “I pressed the crossing button,” my sister says.

  I turn to the cop. “What are you trying to get at?”

  He gets on his radio and calls in a sergeant, a burly African American man who turns out to be more sympathetic. “I want to offer my sincere apologies. As a community, we’re not like that.”

  We walk carefully back to my car. A black car pulls up next to us, and we’re both on our guard. The streets of Hoboken have never been so menacing.

  As we’re leaving, my sister says, “I’m getting the tiniest taste of what it feels like to be black in America.”

  * * *

  It could have been worse for us, much worse. Two Indian engineers were having beers on the porch of a bar in Kansas earlier that year. A white Navy veteran came up to them. “Where are you from?” he demanded. “How did you get into this country?” Other people in the bar shooed him off. The questioner came back with a 9 mm gun. “Get out of my country!” he yelled, and shot both of them; one of them died. He was thirty-two and left a wife he’d been married to just four years. She was waiting for her husband to come home so they could sip chai together in the backyard that unseasonably warm February evening.

  Every year, extremists murder people for their views. The Anti-Defamation League notes, “A majority of the 2017 murders were committed by right-wing extremists, primarily white supremacists, as has typically been the case most years. The white supremacist murders included several killings linked to the alt right as that movement expanded its operations in 2017 from the internet into the physical world—raising the likely possibility of more such violent acts in the future.” Between 2008 and 2017, white supremacists accounted for 71 percent of deaths in terror attacks in the United States.

  The researcher Lyman Stone calculated the ancestries of all 422 people charged with terrorism in America since 2001. More than half—227—have “no foreign citizenship, parentage, or identifiable ancestry of any kind.” That is, they’re Americans, in the generic sense. We have met the enemy, and he is us.

  13

  THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE MOB AND CAPITAL

  Of course, the resistance to immigration in the United States is not all about culture or race—at least not all the way down. It must be understood as well as an outgrowth of income inequality, which has been particularly grotesque recently. In the last three decades, there was zero income growth in the bottom 50 percent of American households. The income of the top 1 percent, meanwhile, leaped by 300 percent, and their share of the country’s total wealth grew from 22 percent in 1980 to 40 percent by 2017. The bottom 40 percent of Americans not only don’t have any wealth to speak of, but they actually owe an average of $8,900 as of 2017. This concentration of wealth also leads to a concentration of political power and the redirection of outrage against inequality away from the elites and toward the migrants.

  During the Trump campaign, Steve Bannon railed against Wall Street as loudly as he railed against immigrants. Soon after Trump won the election, riding a wave of immigrant-hatred, he stocked his administration with the very Wall Street elites Bannon had denounced—people like Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, and Gary Cohn. A cabinet of billionaires, the wealthiest in American history. And eventually, Bannon was shown the door. The administration, and the Republicans in Congress—including people who had said, “Never Trump,” during the campaign—then proceeded to enact a series of tax cuts and rollbacks on financial regulation that the wealthy had long dreamed about. It was a smart strategy. When the peasants come for the rich with pitchforks, the safest thing for the rich to do is to say, “Don’t blame us, blame them”—pointing to the newest, the weakest: the immigrants.

  * * *

  Who are the people who fall for this, and why?

  In summer 2016, I took an epic road trip with my son to drop him off at college in California. We saw the biggest country we’d ever seen. Endless mountains, endless roads. Cattle on the road, licking up water from the recent thunderstorm off the blacktop with their big fat tongues. Red sandstone ramparts on the Colorado-Utah border; who were these fortresses built for? What palaces adorned their summits? We passed small towns: Rachel, Warm Springs; nothing more than a collection of trailers and a motel, and maybe a general store. In the towns with more than one street, kids ran about in packs. On the road, trucks were piled high with bales of hay. These were not gentleman farmers.

  On my way back, I set my Google Maps setting to “Avoid Highways” and took a month to get back to New York. One morning, after driving through hours and hours of thick Allegheny forest in northern Pennsylvania, I found myself in Warren, a small town by a river. I was hungry and decided to stop for lunch. As I got out of the car, I noticed a sign saying “Blair Company Museum” on a three-story building. I walked in and found myself inside a clothing store selling casual wear. Behind the store was the museum, where I learned that the Blair Corporation got its start selling raincoats to undertakers in 1910. The exhibits told the story of the company’s beginning and steady rise. Business really took off during the wars, when the company supplied raincoats to the military. There was a waxwork of the company founder standing with his trench coat at the entrance to his personal elevator. There were photos of all the people who had worked for the company on the wall: as long as the photos were in black and white, there were more p
eople in the picture each succeeding year. The photos showed a prosperous, behatted, white America; men in cardigans swinging a golf club, women in long dresses and permed hair.

  The company prospered, making garments and selling them all over the country. When the photos entered the color era, sometime around the 1960s, the number of people in the pictures started dropping off. The company started seeing declining sales because of competition from China. The last of the executive portraits in the museum is of a plump-faced South Indian, who resigned as CEO in 2010. These days, the Blair Corporation is a mail-order supplier selling foreign-made garments, with a mixed record for quality: at least nine people died across the country when the chenille Blair robes they were wearing caught fire. In 2009, the company was sued, and the federal government ordered Blair to recall three hundred thousand garments made in Pakistan. It still employs a few hundred “associates,” but all its manufacturing in Warren, Pennsylvania, has ceased, and its ownership regularly changes hands as a subsidiary of larger companies and investment funds. There are no pictures of whoever owns the company today in the Blair Company Museum.

  I stepped outside the museum and walked around the ghosts of giant factories and down the main street with shuttered and abandoned storefronts until I found a store that was open, an antique emporium. Inside were stalls where the townspeople were, literally, selling their family jewels. Except there were no people in the vast emporium other than the manager and his assistant. I picked up a beautiful set of Depression-era glasses and tray for twenty dollars, and felt bad about paying so little.

  I chatted with the friendly manager, a white veteran who walked with a cane, about places to eat. He offered to personally walk me to the bar/restaurant that his friends ran. We stepped outside into the sunlight.

  “It’s a beautiful town,” I said.

  “It used to be,” he said, and sighed. “Nowadays the only industry left is the military or the drug trade.” There were very few people on the street this midday. Occasionally, I would see a young white man or woman who looked strung out as they stumbled along the empty streets, zombies in a ghost town. The whole scene reminded me of Harlem or the East Village in the 1980s, young junkies wandering among abandoned houses and stores—except these people here were all white. White people fled the cities to escape the inner city; the inner city followed them to places like Warren.