immigration

What We Owe to Others

/ Steven Volk / 1 Comment

[NOTE: This is the text of the keynote address I gave on April 25, to AMIS, an immigration advocacy group in northeast Ohio]

On a snowy evening some weeks ago, I shared the stage of the Stocker Center of Lorain County Community College with David Bier of the Cato Institute. We were there to discuss Trump’s immigration policies. Bier, like the Cato Institute that employs him, is a libertarian, dedicated to the “principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.” I’m all on board with peace and can’t argue against “liberty.” In fact, Bier and I found ourselves in general agreement that the Trump administration’s policies toward immigrants were not just cruel and xenophobic, but a self-inflicted injury to the country’s future. But, unsurprisingly, we also disagreed on many issues, and the questions posed by our moderator guided us to address what stood at the heart of our differences.

“Do we owe anything to immigrants?” the moderator asked. “Do we have any responsibility to or for them?”

Bier’s unambiguous answer was “no.” Not only do we not owe anything to immigrants, we don’t owe anybody anything. As independent agents, jealous of our individual liberties, we should largely be free from government regulations, unbound by any mandates that would require our responsibility to others. For example, we should be able to hire whomever we want regardless of their immigration status; we should be able to fire anyone we no longer want, unbound by government restrictions. That’s the essence of a free market, he argued.

I disagreed and, in a few words, tried to express why I found his answer so disturbing. The question of what we owe to others, of the responsibilities that we must assume lest our world become even nastier and more brutish than it already is, seems even more important today, immersed as we still are in yet another war of choice which has already cost thousands of lives and will upend the future for millions in the region and around the world. Trump proclaims his right to end a “whole civilization,” Hegseth celebrates death and destruction, Vance lectures the Pope on theology, yet no one in this administration shows the slightest concern for the human suffering we leave behind. Only this week we learned that the administration is giving the Afghans who helped US forces during its interminable war in that country a choice: either return to face the Taliban or be sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Like Tom and Daisy in F. Scott Fitgerald’s The Great Gatsby, we have become the “careless people” who smash up things and creatures only to retreat back into our vast wealth while letting others clean up the mess we have made.

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Dancing Through the Darkness

/ Steven Volk / 1 Comment

On April 5, I gave a talk at the annual SEPA (Santa Elena Accompaniment Project) dinner in Oberlin. My talk was both inspired by the sermons of Rabbi Sharon Brous, the senior rabbi of IKAR, a nondenominational congregation in Los Angeles that my wife, daughter and I belong to, and “borrowed” in parts from her remarkable book, The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World.

Some years ago, after ICE agents carted off five workers in a raid on a local Mexican restaurant, an Oberlin College student, a neighbor active in the Salvation Army, and I collaborated on writing a resolution to bring to City Council. Its intention was to establish as city policy a measure that would prevent police, fire, EMS, or any other city service from asking for the citizenship status of any person who required assistance. The proposed resolution would also prohibit city police from requesting training to prepare them to act as immigration enforcers – something known as 287(g) training. We discussed the matter with city officials and the police but, as a formal resolution, we needed the positive vote of city council. This meant bringing it up for the traditional three readings at City Council before a final vote was taken. Before the first reading, the session where we would introduce it for discussion, so many threats were phoned into the city – threats to me would come later — that the city installed a metal detector for the first time to check those entering the building. I presented the resolution, and it ultimately would pass and be implemented. That resolution, with a few updates since its initial 2008 introduction, is still in effect.

Anyway, sometime after that, I received an angry email from a sender whose name I didn’t recognize. The emailer said she was from Painesville and had driven all the way to Oberlin to express her fierce opposition to the resolution at that first City Council meeting – even though they measure had nothing to do with Painesville. She wrote me incensed that at the meeting,I had accused her of being a “bigamist.” I found that strange, since I didn’t know her and hadn’t the slightest clue (nor any concern) as to whether or not she was a “bigamist.” I soon realized she probably meant to say “bigot,” not “bigamist,” and it was indeed quite possible that I referred to those opposed to the resolution we were introducing as “bigots.”

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Immigration and the 2024 Election: Misconceptions, Deceits, and Bald-faced Lies

/ Steven Volk / Leave a comment

What follows is an extended and revised version of two talks I gave recently in Oberlin. Feel free to use any part of this, or the whole thing, in your own presentations, classes, blogs, or door-knocking opportunities.

As I write this, the election is fast approaching and for candidate Trump, immigration has displaced the economy as the “No. 1” issue. “That beats out the economy. That beats it all out to me, it’s not even close,” he concluded in mid-October. And, while more voters rank the economy and the high cost of living as their most important issue, 82% of Trump supporters and a whopping 61% of all voters put immigration as the most important challenge facing the country.

This is odd, one could even say weird. Whatever you think about immigration, it is unlikely to directly impact most lives, certainly not to the extent that, say, health care or education does. And immigration hardly represents an existential threat to the nation’s future (unless, of course, you think that America’s future rests in its enduring whiteness). If we wanted to talk about existential threats, we would be talking about climate change.

But immigration has become a serious issue for our future – not because of who immigrants are or how many are here, but because of how we as a nation have responded to them. A recent poll found that more than 60% of Republicans and nearly one-third of all Americans agree with Trump’s denunciation that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. Let’s repeat that: 3 out of every 5 Republicans are in agreement with one of the central underpinnings of both Nazism and white supremacy: the ideology of blood purity. The conviction that our blood contains not just cells and plasma but race, nationality, and “purity,” is a fiction that led to the murder of millions of Jews in Europe and the perpetuation of slavery and Jim Crow in America. Trump has introduced this abomination into his campaign, and, it appears, a considerable segment of US voters is buying it.

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