There's a wonderful song from the 1970's by Neil Sedaka that he wrote for his friend, the late John Lennon (yes, that John Lennon) called The Immigrant. Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about this song from time to time, so I wanted to share it.
Why have I been thinking about it?
Well, Ms. Rivers and I have what we call the "5-minute rule" at home. This basically states that we have about 5 minutes each day to talk about the crazy and sad stuff coming out of Washington D.C.. This is intentional, for several different reasons, including the fact that we don't want to buy into the whole intentional blitzkrieg of nonsensical madness from the current administration. This doesn't mean that we don't notice this stuff...it simply means that we try and notice what really is important.
One of the really important things to notice has been the on-going demonization of Hispanic immigrants coming into our country. Think "rapists, murderers" and the like. Never mind that the best data out there shows that immigrants (legal or otherwise) actually commit crimes at a lower rate than the population as a whole*. Anyway, why the focus on Hispanic immigrants in the first place? I have a theory: Dictators...real and pretend...always need a foil, a group of folks to demonize, so as to inflate their sense of self-superiority and distract their followers from reality. The current group being demonized fits the bill for two important reasons:
- If they are not citizens, they don't vote.
- They can look and sound different.
So, when the feds raid a meat-packing plant or church or school, how can they tell who to round up? Take a guess. I had this same conversation with two co-workers (one from Mexico, the other's family is from Puerto Rico), and when I posed this same question, both simply pointed to their faces. Sometimes a gesture is also worth a thousand words.
Now should we just ignore crime by illegal immigrants? Of course not. We have a criminal justice system for this sort of thing. My point though is this: No one should be suspected of being a criminal illegal immigrant based on how they look or speak.
I think I've used up my 5 minutes.
Anyway, I don't fear immigrants, legal or otherwise. Instead, I fear greedy people in power who lack the ability to understand the very concept of empathy. If you are reading this, well, you should too.
One final, and rather ironic, note: We are all immigrants or came from immigrants. And not all of us had ancestors that came here legally either. This is an inconvenient truth for some, but that doesn't make it any less factually correct.
(*) This is the part that will make some angry, as they don't want their emotional reaction to immigration to be blunted by facts, but so be it.
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/03/immigrants-are-significantly-less-likely-to-commit-crimes-than-the-us-born/
No comments:
Post a Comment