WALL OF SHAME

Jerry Harkins

“Walls work!”

                              –Donald Trump, 1/8/19 et al.

Actually, they don’t.  The storied Walls of Jericho did not crumble because of Joshua’s trumpets.  Assuming Joshua was a real person, they may have fallen to his army as they did to many other armies later.  By the time the Topless Towers of Ilium welcomed the Trojan Horse, their walls had  been breached at least thirteen times during the bronze age.  Shortly before that, the Trojans burned the Greek fleet by first burning the wall of beached ships that was supposed to protect the rest of them.  In the real world, none of the versions of the Great Wall of China could keep out the Mongol invaders.  Hadrian’s Wall worked only as long as the Roman troops stationed along it were able to resist the bribes offered by the Scots and the Picts.  Rome itself was ringed with walls which were regularly breached by Goths, Vandals, Huns and any other heathans who encountered them.  The walled cities of medieval Europe were overcome by catapults and other siege tactics or simply by starving out their citizens.  The Berlin Wall became a symbol of Soviet stupidity.  The Great Wall of Montreal has become a joke or an embarrassment depending on your point of view.

But we never learn.  Even when our poets try to make it clear.  Robert Frost, for example, famously wrote:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down. [1]

Oh, yes.  The artist Richard Serra likes to build steel walls which wind up being despised by almost everyone who encounters them.  His most notorious work was “Tilted Arc” which, after an acrimonious jury trial, was dismantled and moved to a municipal garage in Brooklyn and then to a warehouse in Maryland.  It was accused of making a federal plaza in Manhattan even uglier and more dangerous than it already was.  Walls try to separate people, compartmentalize spaces, restrain movement and hinder communication.  Which is why they are prominent features of prisons.  In 1642, the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace wrote to Althea, “Stone walls do not a prison make.”  He was writing from his prison cell but he was right.  Prison walls are not effective against a determined escape artist.  As this is written, you can make a bet in Las Vegas on how long the so-called Super Max prison in Florence, Colorado will be able to hold the drug kingpin El Chapo.

In spite of millennia of human experience, the government of the United States has been trying for several years to build an impenetrable and insurmountable but beautiful wall along its border with Mexico.  It is an article of faith among Republicans that Latin American immigrants are mostly drug dealers, rapists and welfare cheats intent upon taking jobs from decent American workers.  Of course this is not true but truth is not a concern of the Republican faith at present and xenophobia is.  It’s the damndest thing.  Xenophobia in American life runs in cycles.  It began shortly after the Revolutionary War and manifested itself throughout the former colonies.  In 1790, Congress passed the Naturalization Law which provided a path to citizenship only for free white persons of good character.  In 1806, Northampton, Massachusetts hanged Dominic Daley and James Halligan before an audience of 15,000 citizens for the crime of being Irish immigrants.  (The trumped-up charges involved a murder of which they were officially exonerated 178 years later.)  In 1875, the Page Act denied entry to Chinese women.  Men were excluded in 1882.  Representative Page (Republican of California) said the objective was to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” 

In 1939, the United States refused entry to more than 900 Jewish escapees from Germany who had arrived in Miami on the good ship St. Louis.  The reason given was that the United States was not listed as a port on the ship’s manifest.  They were returned to Europe where a third of them were exterminated in the camps. When she learned of the rejection, Eleanor Roosevelt vowed that it would never happen again and the following year when more than 100 Jews on the Quanza were prohibited from entering the port of New York because the State Department said they were “undesirable,” she intervened and the decision was reversed.

Between spasms of hatred, however, America welcomed immigrants in vast numbers.  This was memorialized in 1886 when the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor.  In 1903, a plaque bearing Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet was installed on Lady Liberty’s base.  You will recall the often-quoted sestet that concludes the poem:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "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!"

She was dead wrong about the “wretched refuse.”  Many were surely poor and homeless but they were also the bravest, most determined, most talented among Europe’s huddled masses.  They were the ones who set out to create a better life and more opportunity for themselves and their children.  And they succeeded.  They established the new order of the ages, the Novus Ordo Seculorum promised in the Great Seal printed on every dollar bill.  We were lucky to have them.  They lived heroic lives.  Their children prospered and their grandchildren entered the national pantheon.  The Irish who came after Daley and Halligan dug the Erie Canal and joined the freed slaves and the Chinese to build the railroads.  A couple of generations later, all three groups were winning Nobel Prizes.  The slaves, involuntary immigrants, had already contributed the cotton that fueled the Industrial Revolution and the music that remains America’s greatest contribution to world culture.  The Volga Germans settled in the Midwest, bringing with them the scientific agriculture and strains of wheat that made America the world’s breadbasket.  The Jews manned –– actually womaned –– the factories that turned the cotton into garments and blessed us with so many of the scientists, mathematicians and physicians who defined progress in the twentieth century.  And just when these groups were climbing the social ladder, along came the Russians and the Asians, the Japanese, a new wave of Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese.  Still later we witnessed the arrival of Latin Americans, mainly our fellow citizens from Puerto Rico, Cubans and Mexicans, Jamaicans, Brazilians, Peruvians and Columbians.  And many, many more from every corner of the earth.  There is a high school in New York City that has students from homes where 104 languages are spoken.

But the success of the immigrants is only part of the story.  And the discrimination each group encountered is only another part.  The most interesting phenomenon is that the story of the immigrants is everywhere and always the same.  It is a process of learning to balance assimilation with ethnic pride.  The tools they employed were hard work and education.  And as poor as they were, there was always a nickel a week for burial insurance so as not to be a burden, and another nickel to send the children to the movies on Saturday so they would learn English.  They  started out in occupations their predecessors had abandoned, selling food and sundries from pushcarts, taking in wash, collecting rags and peddling newspapers.  The second generation entered the civil service, joining the police, fire and sanitation departments and becoming teachers, politicians, musicians, actors, writers, journalists and entrepreneurs.

Not all members of the first generation were restricted to typical careers.  Among thousands of them who broke through ceilings of one sort or another, a random dozen would include Irving Berlin, Sergey Brin, Levi Strauss, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger, Yo Yo Ma, I.M. Pei, David Ho, Oscar de la Renta, Bob Hope, John Kenneth Galbraith and Henry Belafonte.  Among those born in the United States to immigrants were Colin Powell, Jonas Salk, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and Ray Kroc.

It is tempting to romanticize the saga of immigration but there was little romance in the lives they led.  Their living conditions were often an improvement but still they struggled against the concomitants of poverty and discrimination.  And they made and still make easy targets as scapegoats for the failures of others.  Republican ideology has recently degenerated to truly depraved levels where families of asylum seekers are separated.  Children are placed in locked cages and get lost for months in the bureaucratic system in defiance of court orders and common decency.  We are told that immigration is illegal unless the immigrant manages to navigate a witch’s brew of bureaucratic obstacles.  We are told that the law or merely the whim of a single addled politician is sacred writ that must be enforced even brutally when necessary.  We are also told that we haven’t got enough room for more immigrants or more jobs or enough medical resources.  Such claims are odious examples of the Big Lie technique.  It is true that the American economy has to evolve to accommodate new realities and that the evolution will not be painless.  It is also true that economies have always had to evolve and have always done so.

If there is one certainty in the immigration debate it is that immigrants are the best hope we have of restoring the American Dream and the commitment it represents to the future.  To deny that is a rejection of the Declaration of Independence.  It is un-American.  It is an ignorant denial of history and it is immoral because it is only one step shy of Auschwitz.