Give us your rich, your white Your Euro-Christian Corporate billionaires No Blacks, no browns, no Muslims, no poor For these my lamp is dark for now and evermore.
-“The Newest Colossus” envisioned by Donald Trump
In the 2007 drama The Visitor, Walter Vale walks robotically and without apparent enthusiasm through his life as a Connecticut College economics professor. He shows little respect or tolerance for his students, to whom he has not given the syllabus well into the new semester for a course he has taught for the past 20 years.
When not at the college, he pretends to read a book that he is not even close to finishing. He occasionally takes piano lessons in an effort to retain a part of his late wife, who was a classical concert pianist and recording artist. He just fired his fifth piano teacher.
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Charles, his department chair, requests that he present a paper at a conference at New York University since Walter’s coauthor cannot attend. When Walter declined by stating that he only gave nominal input into the paper while admitting that he had not even read the completed manuscript, Charles sternly insisted.
Walter reluctantly drove the relatively short distance, and upon entering his Manhattan apartment that he and his late wife maintained for decades, he noticed several unfamiliar objects. “Hello,” he called out with no audible response.
He opened the bathroom door to the terrifying screams of a young woman soaking naked in the tub. As he quickly turned around, a young man grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and threw him violently against the wall.
“I live here. I live here. This is my apartment,” Walter tried to get out the words. The man reluctantly released him and stated that an acquaintance sublet this apartment where he and his girlfriend had been living for the past two months. As tempers cooled, the young couple realized they had been swindled.
Tarek explained to Walter that he is an immigrant from Syria, a musician who performs on a Palestinian-Syrian drum known as a djembe, and Zainab is a Senegalese jewelry designer and street vendor. They both came to the United States for a better life, and they met and fell in love in New York City.
Though they packed their belongings to leave, Walter decided to allow them to stay until they had time to ask Zainab’s sister if they could stay in her cramped apartment.
Over the next few days, Walter developed a friendship with the couple, whom he found out had entered the country undocumented. As they traveled around Manhattan together, Walter saw the city again with fresh eyes through the excitement of his new young friends who showed him things he had never noticed before, cultures that were right in front of him.
Tarek taught Walter how to play the drum, and the two of them ventured to Central Park on various occasions to join an ongoing drum circle. While on the subway platform, Tarek tells Walter of his dream one day to perform there underground as travelers enter and leave the trains for their destinations. A sense of joy and youthful wonder returned to Walter’s spirit, something that had seemed to have died with the passing of his wife years before.
On their way back to the apartment from the park, Tarek’s drum case gets caught in the subway turnstile, and police arrest him mistakenly for attempting to enter without paying. They discover he had entered the country illegally and incarcerate him at a detention facility in Queens for deportation back to Syria.
Feeling uncomfortable staying alone with Walter and fearing the police may come for her as well, Zainab moved in with relatives in the Bronx. Walter hired an immigration lawyer to free Tarek.
After being unable to contact her son for some time, Tarek’s mother, Mouna, traveled from her home in Michigan and appeared at the apartment. Distressed by the news of Tarek’s arrest, she hesitatingly accepts Walter’s invitation to stay at the apartment while the legal process is underway.
Mouna and Walter soon develop a close friendship. She related her family’s difficult life in Syria, where her journalist husband died while serving a long prison sentence for challenging the dictatorial regime in his writing. She is fearful for her son and for herself if they are deported since she also entered the United States without proper documentation.
They created a comfortable domestic relationship with Mouna cooking for Walter and Walter treating Mouna to a night on the town at a Broadway production of The Phantom of the Opera, a favorite of hers ever since Tarek sent his mother the cast recording.
Unfortunately, the lawyer’s efforts to keep Tarek in the U.S. failed, and without any notification, immigration officials deported him back to his native country. Now without any family remaining, Mouna decided to reunite with her son in Syria. During her final night in the United States, Mouna joined Walter in bed for a comforting and calming embrace.
The next day, Walter took his new friend to the airport. They shared a poignant moment before Mouna boarded the plane. Leaving the terminal, Walter entered the subway tunnel, took his drum from its case, and played on the platform as commuters traveled on their way.
As it turned out, the “Visitor” in the film’s title was actually Walter. Tarek, Mouna, and Zainab enriched, excited, enlivened, and reinvigorated Walter’s perspective on the world. They showed him his own country in ways he never could have imagined if left within his previously monocultural and monochromatic world.
Like Dorothy’s black-and-white Kansas landscape that changed to living color when she was transported to Oz, Walter’s new friends, through their backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, gave him the means to transport his life from drab to beautiful technicolor. In microcosm, they exemplified the lifeblood that brings sustaining and enhancing cultural nutrition to the U.S. body politic.
Like all organisms, nations will wither and die unless they continue expanding their perspectives on how they view this ever-changing world. The United States stands today as one of the most, possibly the most, innovative nations in the history of humankind, and that is only because of its sustained influx of innovative ideas and solutions to problems coming from its continuing immigration populations.
When Donald Trump first occupied the Oval Office, he signed an executive order (royal decree), which partially took effect, that banned entry of residents from six majority-Muslim countries into the United States and suspended admittance of refugees from Syria.
His actions posed not only Constitutional issues but also positioned the United States across the world as a discriminatory nation acting contrary to its own ethical and moral standards by stigmatizing entire groups of people based on their country of origin and religious beliefs.
Now in advance of his second term, Trump has threatened to mount a massive deportation effort of approximately 11 million people using the United States military to execute his order.
Politicians and most other residents of the United States from every rung of the political spectrum generally agree on one issue: Our immigration system is severely broken and needs fixing. Seemingly insurmountable gaps in political solutions to repair the system – along with Congressional inaction, primarily in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, to the point of blockage – have brought the country to the point of crisis.
This year, a bipartisan committee constructed a compromise immigration reform bill that could have gained bipartisan approval in Congress, but Donald Trump asked that the bill be pulled so he could continue his attacks throughout the 2024 presidential election against the Democrats for their supposed “open border” policies, which were, in fact, never the case.
Though politicians and members of their constituencies argue immigration policy from seemingly infinite perspectives and sides, one point stands clear and definite: Decisions as to who can enter this country and who can eventually gain citizenship status generally depend on issues of “race” and U.S. immigration systems reflect and serve as the country’s official “racial” policies.
“Pluralism” comprises the philosophy whereby one adheres to a prevailing cultural norm in public while recognizing, retaining, and celebrating one’s distinctive and unique cultural traditions and practices in the private realm.
The term “Cultural Pluralism” was coined by Horace Kallen (1882-1974), a Jewish American of Polish and Latvian heritage who believed that ethnic groups have a “democratic right” to retain their cultures and to resist the “ruthless Americanization” being forced upon them by segments of the native white Anglo-Protestant population.
Social theorist Gunnar Myrdal traveled throughout the United States during the late 1940s, examining its society following World War II. He discovered a grave contradiction or inconsistency, which he termed “An American Dilemma.”
He observed a country founded on an overriding commitment to democracy, liberty, freedom, human dignity, and egalitarian values coexisting alongside deep-seated patterns of racial discrimination and white supremacy.
If we’ve learned anything from our legislative history on immigration, we can view the current debates as providing a great opportunity to pass comprehensive federal reform based not on “race,” nationality, ethnicity, religion, or other social identity categories, but rather, on humane principles of fairness, compassion, and equity.
While the diversity of groups in any nation poses great challenges and great opportunities, the way we meet these challenges will determine whether we remain in the abyss of our history or whether we can truly achieve our promise of becoming a shining beacon to the world.
With the recent election of Donald Trump, that possibility appears dead on arrival.
While I concentrate here on the case of the United States, how each nation constructs its immigration policies has direct implications on its standing on the continuum from “Vibrant,” “Revitalized, and “Expansive” on one end to “Static,” “Stagnant,” and “Devolving” on the other.
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