Somebody once challenged me to be honest, and answer this question: “Aren’t you sometimes afraid of immigrants, especially when they travel in packs and don’t speak English?”
I told her that she had her terminology wrong. Creatures that travel in packs and don’t speak English are called wolves. I added that the people who scared me were unhappy white males in their early 20s who were born in this country. Those included the assassins of President Kennedy and John Lennon and the would-be killers of President Reagan and George Wallace, as well as many of those responsible for the mass shootings at places like Sandy Hook.
That made that woman unhappy and she went off in a huff, but I didn’t much care. I should have cared, and I should have tried harder to reason with her.
People who think as she does don’t realize how much we owe to immigrants, that rather than taking jobs they are much more likely to create them. Think of Yousef Ghafari, or the late Heinz Prechter, founder of the American Sunroof Corporation, or any number of others.
Immigrants have been adding to this country and helping it grow, and adding to our rich cultural mix for as long as America has existed. Jazz has been called the one uniquely American music, a multi-layered art form filled with influences from across the world and from over the centuries, a music born out as many different threads as can be imagined.
Spencer Barefield, of course, knows more about that than I or most of us ever will. But what I know is that our music and our culture, our literature and our politics will continue to be enriched by immigrants and what they bring to our tables. America will continue to grow in every way, in terms of prosperity and an ever-more vibrant culture, as long as we remain open.
Otherwise, we will slowly decay, ossify and shrivel. Detroit has always been undervalued as a center of culture by the nation’s critics, who largely reside in New York, Washington or Los Angeles. To them, we were a one-trade town which did manage to create a subspecies of rock called Motown, something that grew out of racial tensions and the auto industry.
Well, yes, both of those things were shaping influences on our culture and art. But they were only two of many threads. Think of all the different peoples who poured into this town to make the cars a century ago, people that took Detroit from a small city of 285,000 in 1900 to more than a million and a half thirty years later.
If you don’t think Detroit was making its own unique contribution to music and culture long before Diana Ross was born, listen to Victoria Spivey’s amazing blues classic Detroit Moan, recorded in 1936. Go look at the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Look at the different cultural influences, from Marxism to fantastic Hispanic dream-like imagery, all combined with and transformed by this assembly line town. Diego Rivera was, of course, a Mexican and a Trotskyite, and it seems safe to say Donald Trump never would have let him in. But he gave us a gift to last for the ages.
Spencer and Barbara Barefield have been continuing and deepening that tradition, as have the people saved by Freedom House and helped by Global Detroit. Yes, there is something wrong with immigration and this country: We need a lot more of it. See you next time.
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