The Floods of Immigration
[an op-ed piece I submitted, unsuccessfully, to our local newspaper, the Register-Guard]
The United States is a nation
of immigrants, which nonetheless has long held ambivalent views toward
immigration. The fear and hostility Donald Trump expresses toward Mexicans
resembles that aimed at Irish immigrants in the late 1700s, Italians and
Bohemians in the mid 1800s, and Chinese toward the end of the 19th century.
The power and danger of
immigration has often been expressed in terms of water, as a flood or a wave of
immigrants. To quote from an anti-immigration book by former Colorado governor
Richard Lamm, ''There is a flood of people rising right outside our door,''
suggesting that to open the door to let anyone in--or out--would bring
immediate disaster. The image suggests that American citizens are passive,
innocent victims of a deluge, a malevolent force of nature, not a population of
other humans.
These hydraulic metaphors are
not inherently racist; they can flow in many directions. In the nineteenth
century Anglo-Americans including Henry David Thoreau wrote proudly of a wave
or current of Anglo-Saxons flowing across America, drowning out the native
Indians. Native Americans in the Northeast, whose origin myths tell of a
primordial flood like the Noachian deluge in the Bible, may have also spoken of
the dangers of a flood of Europeans invading their land.
Donald Trump has boasted that
he will build a wall along the U.S. Mexican border, and make Mexicans pay for
it. Long stretches of wall have already been built along the border in Southern
California and Arizona since the 1990s. Before then the border was nearly all
unfortified. Illegal immigration has risen and fallen over the decades in
response to economic and social forces, and migrants and the coyotes who
exploit them appear little troubled by the walls. A ladder, a tunnel, a
blowtorch or even a pile of rocks can
easily get people past the wall, which is much less effective in reality than
in political rhetoric. The wall is as much a metaphor as the flood of immigrants.
The steep mountains, sandy arroyos, and meandering Rio Grande River of the
American Southwest cannot be sealed off by any wall, no matter how many
billions of dollars are spent in the effort.
To imagine a wall on the U.S.
border holding back a flood of aliens is to portray the entire U.S. as if it
were like New Orleans, a city founded in 1718 (by French and Canadian
immigrants) on natural levees alongside the Mississippi River. Since then New
Orleans has expanded into bayou swamps that have sunk below sea level. As all
America saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a fragile system of
dikes, dams, and pumps is needed to protect New Orleans, and the storm surge
from a hurricane can overtop the levees.
The wall politicians want to
build aims to keep out a metaphorical flood of immigrants. They walls
politicians ought to build are needed to hold back real floods of water. The
world’s oceans are rising due to rising temperatures, melting glaciers and
ice-caps. The Atlantic has risen six inches in the last century along most of the
East Coast, and is forecast to rise three to four feet by 2100. A three foot
rise would displace 4.2 million Americans from their homes in cities like New
Orleans, Miami, and Newport News, Virginia. These climate refugees would become
domestic immigrants, forced to seek housing, jobs and welfare in other
communities. They cannot be deported.
Will levees and sea-walls
protect our nation from the flood tides of the future? The recent experience of
Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy shows that expensive new infrastructure is
urgently needed. The steeper coast of Oregon faces less risk from a small rise
in the ocean, but a three foot increase would affect Portland itself. Some
areas cannot be protected. In South Florida the bedrock is porous limestone, threaded with caves
and tunnels. Walls along the shore there will not hold back the higher tides.
Walls make nice
political slogans, but like many politicians’ promises, they are riddled with
holes. To protect America from these floods, real and figurative, we need to
address root causes: rising temperatures worldwide, and wars and violence in
Central America.
Gordon Sayre is
Professor of English at the University of Oregon
