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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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If Not Now, When?

/ Steven Volk / Leave a comment

In a recent New Yorker article, Susan Glasser wondered “Why aren’t we in the streets?” As Trump — who now refers to himself as a “king” and toys with the idea of serving a third term in the White House — and his co-president Elon Musk rip through the government, mocking legal barriers, scolding allies, and shredding the lives of millions, we remain, Glasser laments, “quiescent.” Perhaps we have simply been “overwhelmed by the unimaginable becoming real,” as M. Gessen suggested.

While the abysmal cruelty of Trump’s attacks on immigrants and the trans community is intended to isolate and terrify those vulnerable communities, his campaign to dictate what can and cannot be taught in our nation’s schools threatens to reinforce the structures of white supremacy and undermine the very purpose of education itself.  

Consider the email recently sent by the Provost of the Naval Academy, Samara Firebaugh, to her faculty. In it she instructed faculty to comb through course materials to extirpate such offensive words as “diversity,” “minority,” “belonging,” “bias,” “representation,” and “oppression.” “Do not use materials,” she commanded, “that can be interpreted to assign blame to generalized groups for enduring social conditions, particularly discrimination or inequality… Do not employ readings or other materials that promote the concepts of ‘gender ideology,’ ‘divisive concepts,’ ‘race or sex stereotyping,’ and ‘race or sex scapegoating,’ including critical race theory, intersectionality, privilege, patriarchy or other such theories.”

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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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