No Third Worlders Need Apply

Our current president has promised to “permanently pause” immigration from “third world countries.” He didn’t need to define “third world countries”—it was obvious that he meant countries where poor (often brown-skinned) people live. The idea that folks like that might yearn to improve the quality (or even the duration) of their lives by coming here is somehow repugnant to him (and his plutocratic backers). See “After D.C. National Guard Shooting, Trump Steps Up Immigration Crackdown,” in The Wall Street Journal, for details.

The announcement struck me as being profoundly un-American, in that it ignored the history of the country and (what, if the country was a corporation, would be) its “mission statement.” That mission statement, issued in the form of a sonnet by Emma Lazarus, concluded:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Our fearless leader—and his ilk—are not much for reading sonnets, and certainly not sonnets written by Poets of the Pinko Persuasion. They might try to pretend to admire its sound and democratic notions, but they have no trouble—in practice—demonstrating their utter contempt for any notions that might actually be noble and democratic.

We have just celebrated a uniquely American holiday, one that asks us to express our gratitude for living here. So, after hearing the fearless leader’s Thanksgiving message, I feel compelled to share some thoughts about the American experience.

Virtually everyone alive in the US is descended from someone who ran away from somewhere else—usually because they wanted something better than “what they’d become accustomed to.” Some of our ancestors were underprivileged individuals in “first world countries,” many more of them were from—you know—the kind of places inhabited by folks that plutocrats disdain.

The passage, below, is an excerpt from a book called Cenotaphs, a book about the almost universal urge to absquatulate—get up off one’s ass and GO. I posted it, in slightly different form, as a Substack post, back on June 8, 2022—but it has slipped behind a paywall, now. I’m reposting it here, today, for free.

On Black Friday, what deal is better than free? It’s almost un-American, right?

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Movin’ On

It’s a fundamental part of the American creation myth: the first colonists came to the New World in search of religious freedom. And it’s true.

For some of them.

A few of them.

In another tenet of our mythos—unlike what we left behind in the Old World—we are all equal. No one is better than anyone else because of the accident of descent from noble blood. That is until we—individuals who are proud that democratic freedom lacks the pretentions of aristocracy—discover that there might be noble (or even royal) ancestors in our family trees. Then we suddenly become puffed with a different, less flattering, kind of pride.

According to another thread of our American story, when confronted by difficulties, our forefathers always stood heroically to confront them, defeating them with our uniquely American pluck and ingenuity.

However, a much larger driver of the seventeenth century’s Great Migration was something else altogether.

Primogeniture.

We don’t, for the most part, have primogeniture—the rule that inheritance passes only to the first-born son—in the US. In the Old World, it was a fact of life. If a man happened to be born second, or third, or even later, he could expect to inherit none of the family fortune. There were only a few choices for such men (women were never eligible for that male wealth): the clergy, the military, or the trades. Noble cadets were particularly unprepared for the trades. The word “Work” wasn’t part of their family mottos.

There was one other choice, and vast numbers of them jumped on the opportunity. Get up and leave. Many Americans, today, descend from noble families; their ancestors had little choice but to run off to the New World. We love to focus on the destination those intrepid colonists sought, and laud their courage in facing the unknown perils of the sea and a wild continent. But the risk of unknown perils was easier to face than certain perils in the old country.

The seventeenth century’s migration was hardly unique. As American farmers exhausted the soil on their eastern farms, they got up and moved west—not stopping until they reached the Pacific.

The Irish potato famine of the 1840s, exacerbated by British mismanagement (to put the most generous spin on it), created in Hibernians a sudden need to emigrate to someplace more conducive to survival.

Jews facing pogroms in central Europe and Russia were not seeking religious freedom alone. Survival depended on relocation.

Jim Crow practices in the American south, early in the last century, led to another mass migration. Descendants of former slaves and sharecroppers abandoned farming altogether and headed north. They followed US Highway 61, along the Mississippi, running from the delta to Duluth, Minnesota. Most them turned east before the end of the road, and settled in Chicago—a city where country blues would find a new identity.

A more concise version of the American story is this: our nation of immigrants has thrived because we have been so good at running away from our problems and remaking ourselves in new form.

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Paid subscribers to these Substack pages get access to complete editions of two of my novellas. Noirvella is a modern story of revenge, told in the style of film noir. Unbelievable began as a rom-com that formed around a pompous guy who is conceited, misinformed, and undeservedly successful (it has since continued to grow as new stories about its anti-hero emerge). Both books are sold by Amazon, but paid subscribers get to read them for free. Also, substack pages (older than eight months) automatically slip behind a paywall—where only paid subscribers can read them. If you’re interested in reading any of them, you can subscribe (giving you free access to them), or buy them in book form should you prefer the feel of a physical book. Meanwhile, it is easy to become a paying subscriber (just like supporting your favorite NPR station). It’s entirely optional, and—even if you choose not to do so—you’ll still get my regular substack posts—and I’ll still be happy to have you as a reader.