I once saw a wonderful poster showing a sour-faced Geronimo standing on a hillside and clutching a rifle. “Defending homeland security since 1492,” it said. Well, if that really were the case, he didn’t do a very good job of enforcing it.
However, I am sure that Geronimo and Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse would have regarded all of us as illegal immigrants, if they’d had that term. Since they didn’t use documents, we couldn’t very well be undocumented people. They did clearly think it was their land, they’d been there for centuries, thought they had a right to it, and wanted us gone.
But we had bigger and better weapons. There are few if any pure-blooded Native Americans left, and we don’t know which tribes first came over the Bering Strait millennia ago.
What we do know is that each new wave of immigrants has added to the rich cultural mix that is America. However, human beings are hypocrites, and each new set of immigrants had tended to believe that their ethnic group and the boat that brought their family should have been the last ones allowed in. During the 1930s, too many of us regarded Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler the way we regard Syrian refugees today. One of the more shameful episodes in our recent history happened in 1939, when America refused to give asylum to hundreds of such refugees crowded aboard a ship called the St. Louis. It returned to Europe, and many of its passengers perished in the Holocaust. But in recent years, descendants of Holocaust survivors and Jews who themselves fled the Soviet Union have disgraced themselves by protesting against Syrian refugees.
Trying to prevent new waves of immigrants from settling here is not only narrow, inhumane and un-American: It is profoundly stupid, from an economic sense alone. Immigrants don’t take jobs away from those whose descendants have been here for centuries. Those who are undocumented tend to do the jobs no one else wants to do, for little pay.
Those whose status is fully legal create jobs. According to a study by Global Detroit, immigrants are three times as likely to start a business as someone born here. Immigrant-owned businesses employ over 150,000 people.
Immigrants in Michigan are behind a majority of the high-tech patents awarded every year, and contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to our economy. That’s true, even though a smaller proportion of Michigan’s population is foreign-born than any other state except Louisiana. Those who oppose immigrants tend to do so out of fear, or to score cheap political points, as when Brooks Patterson pledged to stop a mythical “Syrian refugee village” from coming to Oakland County during his last reelection campaign.
Yes, we cannot allow everyone in the world to move to America, and yes, we have to do some screening to keep terrorists out. Yes, some immigrants do commit crimes, though they are generally less likely to do so than those who were born here.
But I am convinced that the best thing that could happen to Detroit would be to settle 50,000 immigrants in the city, in return for their agreeing to live here for at least five years.
Everything I know suggests that they would transform the city for the better. Immigrants have been creating and recreating America for five hundred years.
We shouldn’t allow ourselves, or our leaders to forget.
