I received
an email newsletter from a friend entitled "The Camel's Nose is In the
Tent". The title refers to the 19th
century fable, in which an Arab miller allows a camel to stick its nose into his
tent, and then other parts of its body gradually follow, until the camel is
entirely inside and refuses to leave. His point was in reference to the large-scale
US government sponsored migration of Muslims to the Michigan cities where
American workers had fled in the wake of the collapse of the Auto industry and
Detroit in general. Apparently, the feds not only moved large numbers of Palestinian
and other Middle-Eastern refugees to the area, but also met them practically as
they came off the plane with welfare applications thoughtfully printed up in Farsi.
The poster objects to targeting a potentially hostile group of immigrants for
special treatment.
Another
individual shot a note back to the group saying we should be more compassionate
with our immigrant brethren and that it was a shame that ethnic hatred is so
close to the American heart. While I do think both
posters have a point, I don't think that ethnic hatred is "close to the
American heart". Neither do I think
that most Muslim immigrants are part of an Islamic plot to take over the United
States.
Every
wave of immigration into this country has been met with some fear and distrust
which, over time, dissipates. The Irish were despised when they flooded
Boston. Now they are considered a vital part of Bostonian heritage and they hold
a giant St. Patrick's Day parade there every year. It's been the same with
every new wave of refugees we take in. Fear and mistrust of things new and
foreign is sort of an instinct with human beings anyway. It's an ancient
survival mechanism, that helps us identify potential threats to our security.
People don't like change much. It's in our nature. If you don't believe that,
move to Saudi Arabia and try behaving just like you did when you lived in the
US. You will find that, Americans aren't so full of ethnic hatred as you
thought they were. Better yet, try living in Serbia or Boznia if you want to
see racial intolerance. Those people have made hating each other into a fine
art for over a thousand years.
I think what the first poster was getting
at is that there is a problem with how this wave of immigration is being handled.
When the Irish came to New England, we did not meet them at the boat with a
welfare application in Gaelic. They, at first, clustered in neighbourhoods which
proper Bostonians gave over to them, but over time they infiltrated the city at
all levels and became a part of it, changing and changed by it. In like manner,
the Italians, Eastern Europeans, Jews, Greeks nor Chinese were not met with
translators and government subsidies. They were either met with jobs that
needed doing for the most part or created their own jobs.
With
previous waves of immigrants, Americans did not try to become like them, nor
did we take special effort to keep them contained in clusters. Some clustering does occur,
but millions left the "old neighbourhood" and struck out across
America looking for their dream.
We didn't even consider granting my
forefathers the right to live by Irish law, Scots Law, English law, Chinese law
or Jewish law. They were expected to live by
American law, they were expected to speak English and they were expected to work
hard to achieve some kind of success.
Did
all of them assimilate? No. In
Boston and Chicago, there grew to be an Irish mob presence. The Italian mafia claimed control of territory
within the Italian ghettos of New Orleans, Chicago, New York and other large
communities where Italian immigrants clustered.
In San Francisco, there were Chinese gangs. In LA, Chicago and New York,
Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Hispanic gangs and all sorts of criminal
organizations sprang up around cultural and ethnically monolithic communities. This
happens because when people flee a country, the government there always takes
the opportunity to ship out their criminals while they are at it, so that someone
else will have to deal with them.
We
treat these criminals like criminals as is right and proper, because they are
criminals, not people we must understand. The
ethnic criminal class is most active in its own ethnic communities because these
kinds of criminals already know how to bully and intimidate their fellow
countrymen. It is made worse when we allow immigrants to be shoved together
into ethnic ghettos. Immigrants feel
isolated and vulnerable in their enclaves and hesitate to reach outside the
confines of Little Italy, Little Puerto Rico, Little Havana or Little Mexico
for help controlling the criminals that prey on them.
We
have too often tiptoed around the issue, refusing to point out the criminal
predators because politicians fear offending "groups" of people who
might vote for them as a block. So the immigrant
gets stamped, labelled and filed away in an ethnic group to be issued a voter
registration card by politicians and to be preyed upon by criminals, gangs and
even big business.
The
majority of immigrants in our past, however, moved out across the country to
become Americans -- not hyphenated Americans, but simply Americans. The problem with the recent wave of middle-eastern refugees,
however, is that too many arrived, not under their own steam, but on the US
government dime. They were moved into abandoned areas of Detroit and other
failed communities where union thuggery and greed, government interference and
corporate shortsightedness had collapsed one of the greatest of the world's
industrial cities.
And
did we meet them as they got off the plane with jobs? No. We met them with welfare applications in Farsi. The same thing
happened in Europe where a burgeoning Muslim immigrant population has gone on
the dole en masse and turned vast areas of Europe into semi-autonomous Islamic welfare
states within states - Muslim strongholds that siphon off the economic strength
of the nations in which they are established. Mosques, instead of places for
people to freely worship according to their conscience, too often become
centers of sedition and terrorism where worshipers are counselled to disobey
and undermine American law and where terrorists are recruited. The United
States government has encouraged this attitude by its open fear of offending
Muslims. By doing so the government teaches Muslim immigrants that their new
homeland will not defend them from retaliation by the thugs that have followed
them to the New World.
This
is unfortunate for honest Muslim immigrants who merely wanted to escape the
horrors of their homelands. I sympathize with them.
I've long advocated that we open our nation to those Muslims who are unhappy in
their homeland and who could bring talent and energy and a strong work ethic to
our nation. Many did come and have
contributed to our economic strength as previous immigrants did - yours and
mine included.
This
government, however, in its fear of terrorists, has sought to feed the
crocodile in hopes it won't eat us. I think that is
disrespectful and patronizing toward the Middle-Eastern immigrant community. Instead
of following our own immigration laws and protocols, we've tried, instead, to
pacify the beast we fear with welfare payments. Moving non-union workers into
Detroit might be a good idea, if what you want to do is rebuild the workforce
and revitalize the industrial base there. But moving welfare recipients into
the area only continues a long-standing policy in Detroit of force-feeding a
dead horse. The city of Detroit has received more federal dollars in the past
30 years than almost any other city in America and look at the results.
It
is not more government money to support immigrants on welfare that Michigan
needs. If federal "investment" actually
worked, Detroit wouldn't be the half-dead, collapsed and bankrupt wasteland it
is today.
We
don't object to the camel any more than we object to all the other escaped beasts
of burden that have come to our shores seeking opportunity and freedom. Our forefathers all worked hard to give their descendants
opportunities that they never had. That's how it works. In that respect, camels
are a useful addition to the national enterprise. What we do object to,
however, is to allowing the camel into the supply tent where it may destroy our
reserves and drain our economy to no useful purpose.
Just
feeding livestock is only useful if you plan to slaughter them for food. Of
course, we would never do that. There is no profit
in that. Unless, we change some rules to free up American free enterprise to do
what it does best (put people to work) and unless our government is willing to
be tough on those who abuse their newly found freedoms, then all we're doing is
feeding increasingly fat camels to no purpose.
This
is not a slur. I'm not calling Muslims camels. I'm going with the metaphor from
the original post's subject line. That is all. The
same principle applies to donkeys, horses, elephants, mules and oxen. Unless
whatever you are feeding is willing to work toward self-sufficiency and to pull
its share of the load, then these individuals are merely a drain on our
resources and we are wrong to encourage their continuing dependence, especially
when these people used to fending for themselves.
I do
not trust a government that uses our finite resources to pay off groups of
people to show up at the polls and vote for the status quo every couple of
years. I don't trust a government that thinks it
can tax and regulate its way to prosperity. We are sending the wrong message to
a group of folks whose culture has for millenia respected strength above
all. The quickest way for a ruler in an Arab
country to fall is to look weak. Ghaddafi found that out as did Hosni Mubarak.
When we look weak and accommodating, we invite the disdain and disrespect of
the Islamic culture, even those whom we have taken in and blessed with our
largesse.
When the leader of the strongest nation
in the world bows to lesser leaders, even in an attempt to show politeness, we
make ourselves weak in their eyes.
Japan thought we were weak and it got us Pearl Harbor. Al Quaeda thought
we were weak and it got us 9/11. Russia
thought we were weak and tried to "bury" us and we got an expensive
"Cold War" that lasted four decades.
Muslims
are thoroughly confused by us. George W. Bush looked strong when he took out
Saddam Hussein. Iraqi babies were named after him in the wake of the Iraq war.
Obama, on the other hand, looks weak and indecisive. Now the Iraqis are confused. Is America
strong or weak? They have no respect for
a weak America, whatever weapons it may possess. A small woman may hold a gun,
but has she the will to use it?
In
this volatile world where weapons of mass destruction are everywhere, it is a
dangerous thing to look weak. Our government's
ingratiating itself to the Muslim immigrant population is a serious mistake.
Theirs is still a "strong man" dominated, almost tribal culture. Yes,
treat them with respect as the government should with all its citizens and
legal immigrants. But don't try to use a
Neville Chamberlain conciliatory style of diplomacy and governance with them.
It sends the wrong message and threatens our security.
I
think with respect to the issue of immigration that it is always a mistake to
create designated areas in which to place immigrants. Far better to spread them throughout the culture than to bunch them
up in areas. We should never treat immigrants to America as groups, but should
work with them as individuals, encourage them to blend with the mainstream
rather than to create subcultures and ghettos. We've seen the destructive
results of isolating new Americans into ghettos and enclaves. They quickly
develop a siege mentality, feeling surrounded by a culture they do not
understand and hardly participate in. To those outside the immigrant
communities, these ethnic enclaves assume the look of invading armies.
They
speak a different language because they are in a place where English is not
required, further isolating them from their American neighbours. When immigrants fail to become part of us, they not only miss out on
the good things about American culture, but we also miss out on the
contributions their culture can make to the American experience.
We
have focused so much on our differences through multi-cultural programs and
sensitivity training for Americans that we have neglected providing training
for incoming Americans to teach them about American culture. In my home state of Texas we learned that if we offered
Spanish-speakers the opportunity to learn English, they flock to the classes
because knowing English is seen as the key to prosperity by immigrants, both
legal and illegal. We taught classes, sponsored by local banks in money management
and how the financial system works in America and we saw family incomes rise
and increased investment in the communities in which they work. We saw family cohesiveness improve; crime and
gang activity decline.
We
see greater participation by immigrant Americans in small towns and culturally
mixed communities as opposed to mono-cultures in the colonias. Instead of pumping government
money into the colonias, we ought to be moving folks out of the colonias and
into mainstream communities where they can more easily be seen for who they are
rather than as an invading army that speaks differently and has different
traditions. We need a return to the
melting pot rather than making our nation into a big sampler tray with each
ethnic, political and cultural group tucked neatly into its little corner of
the tray where they can be more easily identified and "handled" by
politicians.
The
melting pot gives us common goals, dreams and aspirations. That is what makes America strong. The tragedy of the Muslim
migration is that we keep putting them all in tight groups that protect their
identity as strangers in a strange land rather than scattering them amongst us
all and making them our friends and neighbors.
Tom King
© 2013
