By Kos for Daily Kos
Daily Kos Staff
As a society, we’ve spent decades arguing the morality of immigration, the value of asylum, the economic impacts, and the racism and fear of “replacement” that drives much of the anti-immigrant campaign. Republicans in the U.S. have endlessly demonized immigrants south of the border, culminating with Donald Trump’s overt racism. Similarly in Europe, far-right white supremacist parties are gaining popular support by railing against African and Middle Eastern immigrants.
Yet this simple tweet and photo really captured the essence of the debate:
Part of that debate is the othering of those desperate immigrants, painting them as criminals or opportunists—malicious actors hoping to take advantage of the hospitality of others to somehow harm their new country.
The data is clear that immigration bolsters host country economies. Rather than rehash the numbers, one only needs to point to Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis’ radical election-season anti-immigrant law is decimating the state’s agricultural sector. A couple of weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal painted a bleak picture for both agricultural and construction employers in the state:
“The employee who wants to work on the farm is not available anymore,” said Hitesh Kotecha, owner of a produce packaging facility in South Florida who leases land to farmers. “How are we going to run the farms?”In Miami’s booming construction market, developers, construction companies, and construction workers say the change happened as soon as DeSantis signed the legislation this spring. Workers at several construction sites in South Florida say a quarter to half of their teams are gone, exacerbating an already challenging labor shortage across the industry.
Ironically, the construction and agricultural sectors are heavily Republican, as is rural farm country. The cognitive dissonance leads to this farmer despairing over the law, but stressing that he thinks Trump is “the best president in my lifetime” and DeSantis “is the greatest governor.”
Hating on immigrants is fun and easy for these demagogues as long as they reap the political rewards, giving the impression of “doing something” as their own anti-government rhetoric and actions decimate their core base in rural America. The same dynamics play out in Europe, where such rhetoric takes hold in economically distressed regions like eastern Germany. It was the key driver for the United Kingdom’s disastrous Brexit push to leave the European Union in order to better control its border against undesirable outsiders.
Yet that tweet paints a different picture of the issue.
People don’t leave their homes on a lark. They don’t say goodbye to everything they know, the people they love, and the communities they belong to for funsies. They don’t get on rickety boats to cross the Mediterranean, like the one that recently sank and killed over 600 Pakistani, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Syrian migrants, simply because they want a higher-paying gig. It is always an act of desperation.
Kamiran Ahmad, a Syrian teenager, a month shy of his 18th birthday, had arrived in Tobruk, Libya, with hopes for a new life. He had worked with his father, a tailor, after school. His parents sold land to pay smugglers to take him to Italy, praying that he would make it to Germany to study, work and maybe send some money home [...]
They were part of a group of 11 young men and boys from Kobani, a mainly Kurdish city in Syria devastated by more than decade of war. The group stayed in dingy, rented rooms in Beirut, Lebanon, then flew to Egypt and on to Libya.
The youngest, Waleed Mohammad Qasem, 14, wanted to be a doctor. When he heard that his uncle Mohammad Fawzi Sheikhi was going to Europe, he begged to go. On the flight to Egypt, the two smiled for a selfie [...]
Waleed Mohammad Qasem, the 14-year-old who wanted to be a doctor, drowned. So did his uncle, who had posed with him for a selfie [...]
Near the end, Kamiran Ahmad, the teenager who had hoped to study in Germany, turned to his cousin Roghaayan. From the migrant center in Greece, the older cousin remembered his words: “Didn’t I tell you we were going to die? Didn’t I tell you we were already dead?”
Both went into the water. Kamiran’s body has not been recovered.
The people making these trips are just as desperate as the Latin American immigrants who brave the gauntlet of thieves and rapists, a dangerous river, and a blistering hot desert on the American side full of even more bandits, plus right-wing militia nutbags. Parents will send their children into danger because gang and drug violence at home is even more dangerous.
So let’s ask that question again: Who would you rather live next to? The people who risk everything to come work, to find a better life and send money to their families back home, or those who would steal water left for migrants in the desert, point guns at them, and vilify them for their desperation?
We can’t choose where we’re born; it’s all luck and happenstance. But we can choose how to behave toward those who didn’t start their lives with all the advantages.
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