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WORLD
POLICY JOURNAL
| CODA:
Volume XIX, No 4, Winter 2002/03 |
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Slouching
Down Xenophobe Alley
The symptoms
are unmistakable. Across America in December, throngs of male foreigners
frantically swamped federal offices, where they were grilled, fingerprinted,
and digitally photographed. Those aliens whose work or student permits
were somehow deemed wanting were liable to be handcuffed and herded
like felons into lockups. This was the result of a hastily prepared,
ill-publicized order signed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who
initially ordered the fingerprinting of all alien males 16 or older
who were native to Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Sudan. Responding
to a justifiable outcry over this selective list, the Justice Department
expanded the order to include 12 other Islamic countries, plus North
Korea, but revealingly continued to omit Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Faced with further protests, the Justice Department then added both
countries and (inexplicably) Armenia— only to provoke a roar of
mystified anger from politically influential Armenian Americans.
Armenia was dropped from the list.
Thus did the
United States slouch down a familiar path, marked Xenophobe Alley,
whose ultimate destination is likely to be Remorse Avenue and possibly
Reparations Square. Granted, Washington does contend with a serious
security problem in locating Osama bin Laden’s sleeper cells, or
any other terror gang. Granted as well that U.S. colleges and universities
have been careless monitors of foreigners bearing student visas
who fail actually to enroll—almost as careless prior to 9/11, one
hastens to add, as the FBI, the CIA, and the Immigration and Naturalization
Service. But Attorney General Ashcroft’s response is like that of
a zealous citizen who sets off false alarms throughout the city
to arouse people to the danger of fire.
Like certain
strains of influenza, or like insatiable locusts that hibernate
for 14 years, xenophobia seems to recur in cycles. The first outbreak
in the young American public was directed at suspected Jacobins,
and gave birth to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Then came
the harassment of the Popish Irish, before and after the Great Famine
of 1846–47, an antiforeign movement that found its lasting symbol
in the Know-Nothing Party. After the Civil War, there was the Yellow
Peril, fanned by the yellow press, that led to the enactment in
1882 of the Chinese exclusion law. But the true precursors of the
present campaign were the Red Scare of 1919–20 and the drive in
the 1930s to close the gates to Jews and others fleeing Nazi Germany.
I have in my
library a little blue book, The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty,
by Louis Post, who was assistant secretary of labor from 1913
to 1921. Spurred by an outbreak of terror bombing, including a lethal
blast on Wall Street, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer ordered the
wholesale arrest and deportation of thousands of suspect aliens.
Louis Post was himself responsible for key deportations, and his
book constitutes a mea culpa. In stirring this American delirium,
he writes, the chief agency was the Department of Justice, whose
secret service viewed radicals as "moral rats" whose depravity
warranted illegal. searches and arbitrary detention. He goes on:
The records
of accusation and evidence for which the Department of Justice
made itself responsible through its secret-service auxiliary,
and which are now in the files of the Bureau of Immigration by
the thousands, would disgrace the judgment of any lawyer who dared
cite them in vindication of the epidemic of arrests to which they
relate. Only slightly more than a third of all the aliens arrested
were legally deportable upon the evidence submitted.... Except
for the membership clauses of the deportation laws there could
hardly have been, out of the thousands of aliens charged with
deportable offenses, more than a canoe load of deportees.
It is mercifully
the truth that nothing so awful has yet happened on Attorney General
Ashcroft’s watch, but then suppose there is another terror attack,
comparable in horror with September 11. In Los Angeles just this
winter, among the many unreasonably detained on technical charges
was an Iranian-born Israeli citizen who fled from his birthplace
after the 1979 revolution. As the New York Times reported
(December 17, 2002): "He spent all of Tuesday in the federal
building lockup in Los Angeles, where he said he saw dozens of men
in similar circumstances. He was then taken by bus to a jail in
Pasadena, where he spent the night. He was later taken to a detention
center in Lancaster, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles, where
his father-in-law put up $1,500 bail to get him out on Thursday
afternoon."
"This
was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me,"
the man said. "I am very respected in the business community
here and I was just trying to do the right thing [by turning up
to register], to help solve the problem this country has with
terrorism." He added: "We were treated like animals
in Iran and all I want is for my kids to grow up and say they’re
proud to be Americans. But until the day I die, I’m going to be
a foreigner in this country, because of the way I look and my
accent."
What America
Gained
As
to the 1930s, an interesting perspective is to see the period through
the ingratiating memoirs of Walter Albert Eberstadt, Whence We
Came, Where We Went: A Family History (published by W.A.E. Books,
Whitehurst & Clark, 100 Newfield Avenue, Edison, N.J.). Eberstadt’s
story is typical of many German Jews who were able to escape the
Nazi furies, and who reciprocated their adopted countries generously.
In his case, young Walter went first to England, where he attended
Oxford, served in the British army from 1940 to 1946, commanded
an infantry platoon in Normandy, and then ended up as a military
control officer in Hamburg, where he had spent much of his boyhood.
After an editorial apprenticeship as a financial writer with the
Economist in London, Eberstadt sailed to New York, and rose
to prominence as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers and Lazard
Frères.
Here let me
confess an interest. Walter is no stranger to this journal, or to
the World Policy Institute, or to New School University. That said,
what commends his memoir is that it so exactly reflects that mixture
of humor and melancholy that make him so inspiriting a figure as
the chairman of our institute’s advisory board and a trustee of
the university. This sample well expresses his outlook:
Much commends
dying where you are born, but had I not left my homeland, I would
have missed out on a wonderfully varied and interesting life.
I have been able to draw on three countries, at various times
home, both loved, and hated. Most of us need and want to belong
somewhere, but if you don’t totally belong to any country or creed,
you become gun-shy of too much nationalism and religion. Flags,
national anthems, hymns, the emotions they stir—and the pain they
can inflict! I am far from immune to their spell but try not to
be swept off my feet.
Had we been
Gentile rather than Jewish Germans, I have no reason to assume
we would have belonged to the courageous minority of Nazi opponents.
I like to think we would not have been attracted to dictatorships,
but then tolerance is probably as much a matter of glands and
temperament as of character and principles. Those who seemingly
on principle champion unpopular causes, or who are against the
government of the day, tend to be contrarians by temperament,
bile, and disposition as much as reason. They are contrarians
in the stock market and contrarians with their spouses.
And as with
many refugees, Eberstadt also tasted the malicious absurdities of
officialdom. During the Battle of Britain, he was briefly detained
as an "enemy alien," along with many hundreds of other
German Jews. Still, this occurred at a moment of mortal peril in
an isolated Britain braced for an imminent invasion. Nowadays, so
it seems to me, the real peril for the United States is not an invasion,
but its opposite—the fruitless quest for total security, at the
cost of scuttling the very principles for which Americans are fighting.
One recalls that during the Third Reich, Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels famously vowed to wage "total war," and in the
end perished with his Führer in total defeat. For this reason,
the newborn Department of Homeland Security gives me a certain quiver.
It has an unhappy resonance. As rendered by my wife in Nazi-speak,
it would be Das Heimatverteidigungsministerium.
A Parental
Voice
It
is now a commonplace that the United States benefited immensely
from the European political and religious exodus in the 1930s, which
among other things denied Hitler the scientific brains that could
have given his armies the atom bomb. Yet at the time, the refugee
influx was the focus for bitter attack, so much so that the liberal
Roosevelt administration granted visas to as few as possible. It
happens that my father, Ernest L. Meyer, himself the son of German
immigrants, fought hard to keep the gates open. He summed up the
matter in his daily column for the New York Post on October
12, 1940, which now seems unexpectedly topical. Its title was "A
Land Without Aliens."
Orange, Tex.
Chairman Martin Dies of the House Committee Investigating Un-American
Activities said that if Congress permits the committee to continue
its activities the investigation will result in deportation of
7,000,000 aliens. – News Item.
Now it happened
that Martin Dies rubbed the magic lamp, and the genie appeared,
and the genie said: "What is thy will, master?"
And Martin
Dies answered: "It is my will that straightaway all the aliens
in America be exiled to some distant and most inhospitable spot,
and there do sufferance for their sins."
And the genie
said: "Truly I can grant thy wish, master, but there is a
law in my land which says that whosoever is sent into exile shall
be allowed to take with him whatever he has created by his own
efforts. This is, I think, a just law, and if you abide by it,
I can grant your desire."
And Martin
Dies said: "Indeed, your law is quite just. Let the aliens
be deported, and let them take with them what they have created,
for surely they have fashioned nothing but dissent and plots and
radical heresies and sins and sabotage, and to these they are
welcome."
And the genie
said: "So be it master." And he uttered a few words
of strange power, and a miracle happened.
It followed
in that very instant that a vast fleet of barges and boats was
fashioned, and into them, millions upon millions, flocked the
aliens, and they took with them what they had created in America.
They took
with them highways hewn out of the wilderness by Sicilians and
Slavs, and great rafts of lumber felled in the forests by the
Irish, Swedes and Norwegians, and many millions of square miles
of earth made fertile by the Germans, the Danes and the Dutch,
and billions of garments woven by the Jews, and mountainous masses
of coal and iron and copper dug from the pits by Italians and
Finns and Poles, and whole cities of skyscrapers and subways and
railroads and mills and marts wrought by the sinews of many aliens
from the earth’s four quarters.
And they
took with them also their alien culture, their music and their
songs, their languages and their literature, their books and their
Bibles and their cookery, their piety and their passions, their
ideals and philosophy and folk-dances and fun which had been woven
into the rich and multi-colored fabric of America.
Now all this
happened when the genie granted the wish of Martin Dies, when
the aliens left with all their works, and a great want followed,
and a great and strange silence. And in that silence there was
naught to be heard save the frightened whimpering of Martin Dies
crying: "Genie, genie!" But there was no answer, for
the genie, an alien, was on the boat to Baghdad, and after that
there was nothing and the night.
Finally,
a Correction
Due
to an editing error, the article in our fall 2002 issue by Tadeusz
Swietochowski, "Azerbaijan: The Hidden Faces of Islam,"
grossly, if inadvertently, understated the number of people internally
displaced in the 1992–94 war over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Instead of 100,000, the total of those displaced was well over ten
times higher. The consensual figures can be found elsewhere in this
issue in an article expressly on the plight of IDPs, or internally
displaced persons, in the South Caucasus, which we hope makes partial
amends. •
—Karl
E. Meyer
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