Fending off the influx from ‘Barrytown’

[Editor’s Note: Yes, Morbo sort of retired a few weeks ago, but he suggested he might come back on occasion, when he has something to contribute. Thankfully, today is one of those days. Enjoy. -CB]

Guest Post by Morbo

Back in 1974, the band Steely Dan recorded a really cool song called “Barrytown,” which is an interesting rumination on personal prejudices. (The song was covered by singer/pianist Ben Folds in 2000.) The song begins:

I’m not one to look behind, I know that times must change
But over there in Barrytown they do things very strange
And though you’re not my enemy
I like things like they used to be
And though you’d like some company
I’m standing by myself
Go play with someone else
I can see by what you carry that you come from Barrytown

I thought about “Barrytown” recently after reading a piece by John B. Judis in a recent edition of The New Republic. Judis traveled to Arizona in an effort to find out way so many people are upset about Hispanic immigration.

The usual answer is that Mexicans are stealing jobs that rightfully belong to Americans. Judis made short work of this. Employers are begging for applicants in Arizona. Even unskilled workers, he notes, “are constantly in demand.” Judis interviewed one owner of restaurant/resort facility who said, “Even though we pay larger than average and full medical and dental, we cannot find enough employees.”

Everyone agreed on this point. The state simply does not have a job-shortage problem. In fact, many positions are unfilled.

Some anti-immigrant leaders told Judis they were concerned that Iraqi terrorists were using Hispanic networks to slip agents into the country. It’s an interesting assertion, but it has one drawback: There is absolutely no evidence it is happening.

So it isn’t work after all — at least not in Arizona. And it’s not terrorism. Why, then, are so many people upset about Hispanic immigration (legal and otherwise) to the point that some actually join vigilante groups patrolling the border?

Judis interviewed several anti-immigrant activists, and soon the truth came out: “[T]hey invariably became most animated, and most candid, when talking about what they see as the unwillingness of Mexican immigrants — legal or illegal — to assimilate into American culture,” Judis wrote.

Dave Wagner, a former newspaper reporter who is writing a book about Arizona politics, put his finger on it when he said, “Mexican and Mexican-Americans have their own culture and stores. It is possible if you are Spanish-speaking to disappear into that culture. That scares the hell out of some people.”

Could it really be this simple — that some people are afraid that immigrants have their own culture and their own shops? Apparently so.

The irony is, most of us are here because of immigrants who did exactly the same thing. Why do you think so many large cities have ethnic neighborhoods? A first-generation immigrant in early 20th century America from, say, Poland, could settle in a large city, shop at a Polish grocery, read a Polish-language newspaper, live in an area with other Poles where Polish was the lingua franca and enjoy familiar food, games, traditions and customs brought over from the old country.

Some of those foods, games and customs leaked out of the Polish community and were adopted by others. That experience enriched the culture; it did not degrade it. And while first-generation immigrants were often satisfied to live in an insular community, their children were not. They learned the dominant language and engaged the wider culture.

In short, Hispanic immigrants are doing pretty much what immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Lithuania, Germany and so on did 100 years ago. Why are some people so upset about that today? My guess it has more to do with the color of a Hispanic person’s skin than the content of his culture.

To quote “Barrytown” again:

Don’t believe I’m taken in by stories I have heard
I just read the daily news and swear by every word
And don’t think that I’m out of line
For speaking out for what is mine
I’d like to see you do just fine
But look at what you wear
And the way you cut your hair
I can see by what you carry that you come from Barrytown

It’s not just the past 100 years. American anti-immigrant feeling goes back at least to the early 18th century when there was enough of a “native” population to be threatened by the indentured servants coming over from Great Britain. It took 50 years for the Irish to be accepted in America, never mind they dug the Erie Canal, laid most of the railroad tracks in the east and worked as hard as the Chinese on the Transcontinental Railroad.

What happened that improved their life is what is happening today in places like Los Angeles, where political power is changing. Immigrant life in eastern cities became tolerable when immigrants supported the political machines. Did they really get everything they wanted? Not hardly. But if you want to know why there are so many Irishmen working as cops and firemen in MYC and Boston and all over, it goes back to their ancestors being beaten by the police and their homes burning down because the fire department wouldn’t come.

The sons and daughters of the previous waves of immigration have always looked down on the newcomers. Ask any Jew today whose background is the family having come from Poland/Russia, and they still don’t like the German Jews going back to when the German Jews who had come 20 years earlier than the Polish/Russian Jews were among the biggest critics of the “strangers” back then.

The lady in my life comes from a Lithuanian family who came here after WW2 as “displaced persons” and she can tell some pretty awful stories of how the Irish kids at the Catholic School in South Chicago treated the “DP kids”.

It’s always ironic that a nation of immigrants always puts down those who come after.

BCinAZ is right about immigrants being used by politicians to whip up the hatred of those who aren’t “making it.” That was done back in 1840 with the Irish, and done most thoroughly in the South after the Civil War with the populist “revolution” making poor whites afraid of the competition with freed slaves.