Thread by @Noahpinion

1/I haven't written a thread about immigration in a while, so here's a random thread about how my immigration attitudes were shaped by a misheard lyric from my childhood. 😊

2/When I was a little kid, my dad would play me folk music. One of my favorites was a singer named Taj Mahal. I remember listening to a song called "Annie's Lover", about a contemplative farmer who walks around admiring nature.

3/In the song, the farmer is identified as "an African man". This probably just meant he was Black, but as a kid, I interpreted it literally. I assumed he was an African immigrant who came to the U.S. to farm.

4/So I guess it was a misunderstood lyric rather than a misheard lyric.

But anyway, I was really struck by the idea that someone from far-off Africa could just decide to come to America and start a farm, and have all this beautiful land to contemplate!

5/At that time, my hometown wasn't very developed, so it was full of big empty fields. To me it seemed like there was plenty of space in America for anyone and everyone. I enjoyed contemplating nature; why shouldn't everyone in the world be able to do the same?

6/At that time, Ronald Reagan was president. My parents despised Reagan. But even as a kid I was a contrarian, so I watched (or maybe read?) Reagan's final speech in which he talked about immigration being the source of American greatness.

I liked that.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

7/Growing up at that time, there seemed to be a bipartisan consensus that immigration was one of the pillars of America's greatness.

Cutting that off, it seemed to me, would be like tearing up the Constitution or repudiating the Declaration of Independence.

8/Immigration fit into a patriotic story of America that no one person ever articulated, but which I absorbed from a thousand random sources. That story included valiant feats like defeating the Nazis and the Confederacy, establishing human rights, and inventing modern democracy.

9/To me these things seemed to be just various aspects of a single whole. America, I believed, was a country with a mission, and that mission was human equality. Democracy, freedom, and global immigration all seemed like ways of carrying out that mission.

10/Patriotism, which is a polite word for nationalism, is a form of identity politics. It's the illusion that everyone in your country is on your team. "Nation of immigrants" rhetoric was the idea that all Americans are on the same team because we're all immigrants.

11/Recently, I've been reading a lot of books about immigration, and the "nation of immigrants" idea keeps popping up again and again as a powerful motivating force, both for immigrants and for the Americans who welcome them.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1109524617675235329?s=19

12/When I hear alt-right people claim that immigration is a plot to submerge the white race, or Republicans claim that immigration is a plot to import Democratic votes, I have to laugh.

Those people just do not understand the power of the patriotism that immigration generates.

13/Now, plenty of people will point out that the "nation of immigrants" story is a gross oversimplification. Native people were not immigrants to the U.S., nor were slaves. And U.S. immigration policy has never been open to anyone. It has often been racist and brutally exclusive.

14/But all motivating stories, all stories that create identity and passion, contain some lies. Yes, including whatever stories *you* believe in.

What matters is that the "nation of immigrants" story had power, and that it drove us to live up to that ideal a bit more.

15/Trump, and the nativist movement he represents, presents a huge problem for those for whom immigration is a source of patriotic identity.

It's one thing to have racist nativism in America's past; quite another to have it define our future.

16/Some, like me, have reacted to Trump by seeking to depose him, repudiate his ideals and those of his followers, and reestablish the "nation of immigrants" ideal as a fundamental principle of American identity, rhetoric, and policy.

17/Others have reacted by repudiating the "nation of immigrants" idea, looking to America's history for reasons to believe that Trump's racism was actually America's founding principle and core organizing idea.

18/Can the "nation of immigrants" ideal ever be reestablished? Can it ever again be the source of the patriotism that I felt for most of my life? Can the young generations be taught to love the idea of America for the same reasons I grew up loving it?

I don't pretend to know.

19/Maybe Trump represents the unlearning of something that can never be re-learned. Like finding out that the farmer in the Taj Mahal song probably wasn't an immigrant.

20/Then again, Taj Mahal incorporated African music - and music from all over the world - into his own style.

So who knows where he meant the farmer in his song to come from!

Maybe he didn't even know.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_Mahal…

21/Maybe the idea of America as a nation of immigrants, and of American immigration as a pillar of human equality and freedom, isn't dead.

Maybe one day it can return, and we'll all say it was true all along.

(end)