If I were an immigrant (and no one is safe from becoming one; no one is immune to ruin, crisis, dictatorship; no one is safe from having to pack their bags and start their life over in the middle of nowhere), I think condescending charity would offend me almost as much as racism and xenophobia.
With a racist at least you know where you stand, but those who defend immigration with the argument that they help fund their pensions or will wipe their asses when they are old are convinced they are being kind and understanding. It is much more difficult to point out to them their egotistical arrogance, classism, and enslaving conformity than it is to denounce racists — who can be dismissed with no more than a couple of insults and a healthy dose of contempt.
The idea that immigrants are necessary because they do our dirty work is so widespread, and expressed with such gusto, that it needs to be carefully dissected to reveal its profoundly discriminatory and violent nature. Let’s try.
Immigrants fleeing poverty and arriving in wealthy societies are employed in the hardest, dirtiest, most degrading, and most undesirable jobs. It is an injustice they endure, like so many others. No one crosses an ocean out of a calling for servitude. No one is born with the dream of scrubbing toilets.
They resign themselves to it, bearing the hardship in the hope that it will be temporary. They console themselves with thoughts of what they are saving, the education their children might receive so they won’t have to clean toilets, or the bullets and hunger they are avoiding while scrubbing with a scouring pad. But that is not their mission. No immigrant thinks: how lucky I am to compensate for the falling birth rate and the overproduction of graduates in these rich societies that lack the human resources to polish the toilet bowl. They simply imagine ways to stop scrubbing aforementioned bowl, or to prevent their children from having to scrub it when they grow up.
It is like defending slavery by pointing to the pyramids
Just like millions of Spaniards did when they had to scrub toilets in Munich, Zurich, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Havana.
Defending immigrants by talking about pension funds or the shortage of construction workers is like defending slavery by pointing to the pyramids. «We need slaves», the free Egyptians would say, «because we’re not going to start stacking stones ourselves. Without slaves, there would be no pyramids».
Human rights over convenience
It is striking that so many self-proclaimed progressives and democrats sing these odes to slavery without pausing to consider the grotesque nature of their arguments, which erode the very foundations of human rights. According to them, immigrants are not worthy of attention or care simply because they are human beings: Their value, instead, lies in their usefulness, in tasks like cleaning cars meticulously or ferrying children to swimming lessons.
The only progressive approach to migration is a humanitarian one. Exoduses have been a constant since the existence of rich and poor societies. The most daring or desperate people from the latter seek to improve their lives in the former. Countries of immigrants shaped by internal migratory flows such as Spain should be clear about this.
If we genuinely sympathize with the plight of the Earth’s outcasts and starving populations, we must demand that our leaders uphold the human rights charter they are obliged to enforce. The first step is to tackle the humanitarian crisis: to provide shelter and dignity to those fleeing hunger, and to do so because they are human beings who need care that any European state can easily provide. Excuses about saturation, lack of infrastructure, or limited resources are petty and untenable when weighed against per capita GDP and general budgets.
Inequality, not culture, threatens stability
The next step is to give substance and meaning to the idea of citizenship. Before we were inundated with hyper-patriotic and racist rhetoric, the European Union was an experiment in transcendent citizenship extending beyond the constraints of the nation-state. For instance, allowing EU citizens to run for mayor in cities where they reside — and to vote there, even as foreigners — enabled citizenship to move beyond rhetoric and into everyday politics. Progress in this area has been timid, and there is no reason to expect that, in the future, citizenship will become a universal condition that guarantees rights anywhere in the world, regardless of where one was born. But we must never lose sight of the idea.
Without formal equality, liberal democracy ceases to exist
In the meantime, those concerned about the issue of migration must stop focusing on pensions and birth rates, the temptation to empathize with the borderline racist fears of «lifelong» locals bothered by a bar run by Chinese proprietors. The arrival of immigrants produces inequality, not cultural disruption. Rich societies are destabilized not by new customs or new languages that are incorporated into everyday life, but by the percentage of the population that lacks citizenship rights, which begins to be incompatible with democracy. The solution is clear: grant them those rights. Without formal equality, without individuals equal before the law, liberal democracy collapses or morphs into plutocracy or census democracy.
This is what happens in small, very wealthy countries. In Switzerland, for example, more than 30% of the population cannot participate in democracy: they cannot vote, run for office, or enter the public forum. This perverts civil liberties and reduces deliberative democracy to a system resembling the Athens of Pericles: only a few are citizens. The rest are metics and slaves.
This division must be avoided, urgently, for both moral and practical reasons, to protect an already weak and fractured democracy. To honor human rights and the notion of citizenship, immigrants arriving in Europe must be assimilated into the general population as quickly as possible. This is precisely what neither racists nor those fretting over who will change their diapers in nursing homes want. The former, because of their stupidity and backwardness. The latter because they fear that citizens equal to them will choose (as they and their own children chose) more comfortable and better-paid jobs. And here the so-called good Samaritans fail: They say, immigrants, yes — but only to clean toilets.
We progressives must say: immigrants, yes, like us. Equal and free.
This content is part of a collaboration agreement of ‘WorldCrunch’, with the magazine ‘Ethic’. Read the original at this link.