Immigration
I suppose I am a snob. I am a white Anglo who went to NE boarding school, an Ivy League college, seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent my career in four churches that were in WASP enclaves. Never mind that I always felt like an outsider, like I was there because of a series of accidents. I went to boarding school because my father had a job in the Philippines so I needed to come to this country for high school and board. I went to Penn because my friends did (this was 1959). Going to seminary and getting ordained in this days - today it is an onerous process I could never survive - was pretty easy if you were even remotely "normal." Meaning fit the old mold.
Still, at least to all outward appearances, I belonged. And I liked it that way. But I never quite got comfortable, always felt as if I was posing.
One day a woman came for pastoral counseling because she just knew she would never be in the in-group in the community. During the course of the conversation she poured her heart out about all the secret dreads and indiginities she secretly suffered mingling with those "to the manor born." As the conversation closed she told me she would give anything to be like Alice Alexander whom she envied for so comfortably and easily fitting in among the privileged few.
A half hour after she left, Alice Alexander came to talk to me about her feelings of not belonging.
The national debate we are having about immigration has focused on the economic issues. Are the illegal immigrants taking American jobs and taxing our health and education systems, impoverishing our nation while reproducing faster than us?
Important questions. But what we aren't looking at is our fear of being changed. It's an odd, off-beat concern for we Americans because none of us are more than a few generations from being immigrants ourselves. We talk about this country being a Christian nation but it turns out most of the first immigrants, though they may have been believers, were looking to form a nation in which there was no pressure to conform to any particular belief or church.
Whether it is essential that we all speak English or all aspire to backyard barbecues I doubt but don't know. For over 200 years the United States has been the place one could go when either times were tough in one's native country or one was too different to be tolerated there. We have every sort and condition here and that has been our strength.
But we are human and so we are insecure, seeking assurance that we belong. And that desperation can lead us to despise and want to exclude the stranger.
Still, at least to all outward appearances, I belonged. And I liked it that way. But I never quite got comfortable, always felt as if I was posing.
One day a woman came for pastoral counseling because she just knew she would never be in the in-group in the community. During the course of the conversation she poured her heart out about all the secret dreads and indiginities she secretly suffered mingling with those "to the manor born." As the conversation closed she told me she would give anything to be like Alice Alexander whom she envied for so comfortably and easily fitting in among the privileged few.
A half hour after she left, Alice Alexander came to talk to me about her feelings of not belonging.
The national debate we are having about immigration has focused on the economic issues. Are the illegal immigrants taking American jobs and taxing our health and education systems, impoverishing our nation while reproducing faster than us?
Important questions. But what we aren't looking at is our fear of being changed. It's an odd, off-beat concern for we Americans because none of us are more than a few generations from being immigrants ourselves. We talk about this country being a Christian nation but it turns out most of the first immigrants, though they may have been believers, were looking to form a nation in which there was no pressure to conform to any particular belief or church.
Whether it is essential that we all speak English or all aspire to backyard barbecues I doubt but don't know. For over 200 years the United States has been the place one could go when either times were tough in one's native country or one was too different to be tolerated there. We have every sort and condition here and that has been our strength.
But we are human and so we are insecure, seeking assurance that we belong. And that desperation can lead us to despise and want to exclude the stranger.
posted by Blayney at 2:31 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home