I didn’t link to brownfemipower’s amazing post about la familia and immigration, because I wanted to say something. I wanted to argue for open borders. Then I thought that when I get round to writing about open borders then those comments should stand alone.
brownfemipower covers so much in her post including transience:
In Michigan, it’s different. Detroit, Flint or Saginaw may have established Mexican communities–but in the community I grew up in, there wasn’t one single family that had grandparents or even parents who had been born there. All of us whose families had settled in the neighborhood had multiple friends that disappeared after a year–their families moved back to Mexico or Texas or over to other farming states for work. Two of my best friends as a child left Michigan in the second grade. Only one wound up coming back to Michigan–when we were both in high school.
And as somebody who worked in the fields–I can remember falling in love with a dark-skinned, lightly muscled boy who smiled at me every time I walked past. He was there for one season and I never saw him again. A common happening in migrant work.
These disappearances were very upsetting to me, but I lived–just like I know the people who disappeared lived as well. We’re all used to it, and we’ve learned to accommodate shadow figures, shadow relationships into our lives.
Go read brownfemipower now.
I imagine your motives are different, but it’s odd to hear you calling for the same thing (open borders) that the most fanatically libertarian and capitalist right-wingers support.
Well, western Europe has had open borders within itself for awhile now and has expanded east incorporating poorer eastern Eurpean countries. It is also considering allowing Turkey a large, relatively poorer, Muslim country to join the EU, which IMO would be very positive on a lot of levels. And last I checked Europe, while capitalist, is hardly fanatically right wing.
The left should support the free movement of human beings, and in particular labor. There are considerations however for the economic well-being of the 1st world workers. I think that’s where the rub is.
Different kind of open borders, I think.
Well, what France especially and other European countries are finding is that open borders are causing them all kinds of problems; it turns out that “multiculturalism” is (in some cases literally) blowing up in their faces. A lesson we should take heed of here in the U.S.
Ron– The EU’s open borders has nothing to do with France’s social unrest. The rioting youths are French, 2nd or 3rd generation children of immigrants who came long before EU’s open borders. These immigrants were imported because 1. France wanted their labor 2. they were seen as more docile and less willing to strike than native French workers. The French youth who rioted, acted against being denied the fruits of French society (aka socioeconomic conditions) not for some Islamist cause as a couple of pundits tried (and failed) to suggest.
Perhaps I stand corrected then. But that does lead to some questions. How are they being denied access to the fruits of French society? Is part of it a denial on their part that they should conform to French society instead of France being expected to conform to their expectations? I sure don’t have a lot of sympathy for any viewpoint that ends up being expressed by rioting and arson.
There’s a lot of this kind of thing going around throughout Europe; imams preaching for the destruction of Western society and imposition of sharia law. There’s not a lot of attitude that it’s an immigrant’s duty to adopt/adapt to the culture of their new society these days, it seems.
So, we won’t have problems with this generation of docile helots, it’s the grandchildren who’ll cause trouble. Good to know!
I’m asking you all to stop commenting on this thread.
I’m fairly certain that none of you have read brownfemipower’s post, and if you have, that this is the way you respond offends me.
Ron, with the understanding you can’t respond here, I challenge you to read the post, and then see if you can understand why this is so offensive:
*
I don’t feel I have a lot to contribute to the conclusions of bfp’s post, because I don’t understand international economics that well. Or well at all. Or at all.
But I thought the post had a brilliant and thoughtful cultural and personal analysis, written beautifully. I’m very glad you linked it.
I was kind of hoping that this would turn into a complicated conversation about open borders, since I don’t understand them, but alas, I guess I’ll have to do my own research rather than getting the crib notes version here.
Just for the record, that was Rob you quoted, Mandolin, not Ron. (Also, Rob is not the same poster as Robert).
Oops!
Amp, thanks for the correction, and for the record I repudiate Rob’s comment. Maia, I accept that I was participating in a thread hijack and I’ll stop.
After I commented, I did read the original post. I even left a comment there, which I thought was on topic but that no one responded to:
“A question this raises to me is, how do you measure the health of a family, or loyalty to it? In an extended family, does covering up/ignoring/excusing the actions of an abuser strengthen the family or weaken it? Is it really loyalty to let it continue?”
To expand a bit; it seems to me that accepting abuse in such a family structure is seen as maintaining loyalty to the family, which is superior to taking care of oneself by involving the authorities. But as has been well documented elsewhere, that also tends to perpetuate the practice in future generations on the part of both genders. On a long-term basis (if not a short-term one), that seems to me to weaken the family structure, not strengthen it.
Of course there’s another factor at work; if various members of the family are in the U.S. illegally, engaging the authorities’ intervention can end up with disruption of the family structure by loss of income and deportation of at least some of it’s members, leaving the rest to determine whether they will go back to Mexico or whatever country they are from (this is a problem in the Irish community in Chicago – we’ve got plenty of Irish illegals here as well as Latino) or accept the split in the family so as to maintain residence in the U.S. and the concomitant economic, educational, etc. advantages.
But I wonder how much of this acceptance of abuse is due to their immigration status and how much of it is due to cultural factors? What happens in the areas these folks come from in such a situation?
That’s all right, Mandolin. My guess is that in the post author mis-identification race I’m still ahead of you by a couple.