1. How do they think current immigration waves in North America and Europe differ from previous waves (gastarbeiter in Europe, the turn-of-the-century wave in North America)?
2. What do they think are the particular dangers or problems of the current waves?
Many responses ensued. One thing that I think it important to note though, both the perception of difference and the objective reality of difference are important, and it is in the first area that there are wide similarities (between periods and countries), and in the second area that there might be salient differences (between this age and that age, this country and that country).
An easy way to illustrate what I’m talking about is to imagine a person, John, who has two neighbors move in at the same time. John is a fundamentalist Protestant Christian. He believes that only those who accept Jesus Christ as their Lord & Savior can be accepted into heaven, and he has a narrow view of who “Christians” are.
The two neighbors can be described as follows:
Brian, a family man from a Roman Catholic background, and Abdullah, a family man and a person of Muslim background.
John’s first reaction to the newcomers is suspicion, discomfort and a mild level of animosity when his neigbhors move in. He tries to “witness” to them, and they react with irritation. Over time, one could imagine that John would become more comfortable around his neigbhors. He would see their kids play, he would see them water their lawn on the weekends and they would invite him over for barbecues, etc. His conceptions of them as “in the darkness” might be ameliorated by inter-personal experiences, and he would realize that their faith really isn’t that different from his, in some ways.
But wait…I suspect over time John would realize that though there were important doctrinal differences, Brian really wasn’t a non-Christian, that the Pope wasn’t some malignant force, and that they both espoused the same Nicene creed. On the other hand, there is only so much common ground John can find with Abdullah. Yes, one can finesse some issues, but the reality remains that ecumenical feelings are much more difficult between a fundamentalist Protestant and a Muslim than between the former and a Roman Catholic. While two Christians have a concrete connection through the histories of their churches, John and Abdullah have to make recourse to mythologies of the unity of the Abrahamic faiths (that is, we don’t know Abraham existed, Arabs almost certainly took on the label of Ishmaelites later one, etc. etc.).
Now, it is important to note is that human beings are only capable of a finite level fear & revulsion. Even though initially, “objectively” Abdullah had a faith that was more at variance with John’s fundamentalist Protestantism than Brian’s, John viewed them both as “non-Christians” in his rather Manichaean conception of the Order-of-Things. The tendency to view the world in black-or-white tends to result in oversimplifications, and perception quickly defines reality. As a greater level of nuance is attained, orders of magnitude make themselves apparent, and John realizes that Brian shares more elements of his faith than Abdullah does (of course, John knows rationally that Roman Catholicism has similarities with his faith before “first contact,” but I am suggesting his sense of alienation has already “maxed” out at that level of difference, so that Abdullah doesn’t elicit much greater emotional distress).
So, back to Randy’s question, how does this apply to various waves of migration? Since perception is a large part of reality, the equivalent social tension induced by the immigration of the “Other” is similar in various periods when “nativism” flairs up. On the other hand, there are differences, and there are differences, Italian Americans for example have integrated more seemlessly into the fabric of American life than Jews, because the former, for all their swarthy Mediterranean a”Otherness,” were fundamentally Christians, and often of a mild anti-clerical variety, so intermarriage with native white Americans occurred when familiarity was common-place. In contrast, Jews are axiomatically set apart from gentile society because of the very nature of who Jews are. Granted, by the mid-20th century American civil religion began to be defined by the mythology of Catholic-Protestant-Jew (as if the first two did not cluster together in reference to the third), but this inclusion of Jews, and the use of the term “Judeo-Christian,” simply masks an underlying real tension that exists between Jews and Protestants & Christians. This tension flair up during controversies having to do with attempts to convert Jews, or when high school graduating classes attempt to agree upon an ecumenical communal prayer.
The common analogy with Irish-American and Italian-American communities misses the reality that these enclaves are rumps, remnants of ethnic groups that have in large measure been absorbed into the fabric of white America. On the other hand, there is a fear among Jews about the interrmarriage statistics, which are risen sharply since the 1960s. This is a reflection of the objective differences between Jews and Christians.
The analogy with Muslims and othe religious minorities and immigrant groups is obvious: they might be perceived as no more alien than the Roman Catholics from Poland in 1900 in 2004, but in reality, there are salient differences of kind that are more difficult to paper-over in the creation of a common identity. More radical elements of the Muslim community believe Christians engage in shirk, while more conservative Christians are not shy about calling Muhammed a false prophet. Roman Catholics and Protestants can appeal to a larger set of intersecting core beliefs, and the reality of a shared history, rather than having to conjure of a distant mythological past.
This does not mean that I believe that the human mind is not ingenious enough to paper-over differences and formulate some sort of ecumenical integrity to the American civil religion. I am just asserting that it might be more difficult, invariant of time and place, between certain duets as opposed to others.
Addendum: More topical analogy: I would not be surprised if conservative Americans view “gay marriage” with about the same revulsion as segregationist Americans viewed “interracial marriage” (the rhetoric that this will lead to bestiality is rather cognate with diatribes I have read from white nationalist quarters). But, I do think there is a difference, in that “interracial marriage” has been much more common-place historically than “gay marriage.”
Afterthought: Speaking of remnants, the modern Jewish population is also a “rump” so to speak, in that Jews were likely some of the most enthusiastic converts to Christianity during its early years, and the process continued well into the modern period (the old observation being that Germany’s Jewish population was being asborbed at such a rate that sans the Holocaust, there would likely still be very few self-identified Jews left in Germany circa 2000).
Posted by razib at 02:22 PM