Today has been billed as "no immigrants day", when large numbers of immigrant workers in the US are expected to withdraw their labour in demonstration of their necessity to the economy.
Xenophobia, fear of the other, seems to be an unfortunate hangover from our biological past. It may have favoured survival to see the world in terms of "me and mine and the centre of things – and even mine are expendable at a pinch", but it's not a useful response in the modern world ... and it's certainly not an attractive or moral one.
Every industrial society seems vulnerable to the same specific delusional variant: that whatever we deem ourselves to be short of (housing, work, money, security, success with the opposite sex, health care – feel free to insert your own hobby horse) would somehow come to us if only it wasn't stolen by immigrants ... the same immigrants who (as those in the US are seeking to remind us) often staff the services upon which we rely to maintain our lifestyles at the levels we currently enjoy.
In Britain this attitude has its figurehead in Enoch Powell, MP, deceased. He organised the mass immigration of West Indies migrants to fuel economic expansion (and upward socioeconomic mobility for the indigenous population) on the back of low immigrant wages, and then spent the rest of his career fulminating (rivers foaming with much blood, etc etc) on the dangers of immigrant communities. The BNP (British National Party – a far right fringe relative of the National Front with, thankfully, no parliamentary representation as yet but a few seats in local government) still flogs this horse, but since the last phase of EU enlargement we have started to mutter about "the Polish plumber" instead.
Germany has a similar need/resentment relationship with Turkish gastarbeiten (literally "guest workers" - a phrase with resonance in policy proposals discussed within the US); Austria is using legal provisions to delay as long as possible the entry of citizens from the expanded EU areas in general, Slovakia in particular. The US is far from alone in its paranoias.
Today I also, by a serendipitous conjunction, happened to read Tehanu[1], the late fourth addition which Ursula K le Guin added in 1990 to what everyone had for a quarter century gotten used to calling "The Earthsea Trilogy"[2]. I don't quite know why it has taken me 16 years to catch up and read this fourth volume, because I admire le Guin for her writing (especially the short fiction), her intellect and her courage (also much of what she has to say, even if I sometimes differ profoundly on particular points) and have always had a copy of the "trilogy", rereading it several times since 1990. Whatever the reason, I am glad to have read Tehanu now. (Memo to self: now catch up on The Other Wind[3] and Tales of Earthsea[4]...)
What is the connection between Tehanu and immigrants? I had two in mind, actually ... one metaphoric, one literal.
To take the metaphoric first: many ardent fans of le Guin herself or of "The Earthsea Trilogy" reacted violently to the arrival of Tehanu – and still do. Sometimes this was a response to the mild feminist questionings in Tehanu, but there was (and is) also a resentment of disturbance to the established order of things: Tehanu was, in effect, an immigrant to the existing community of Earthsea books.
And the literal? On page 98 of my copy (New York, 2004, Pocket Books) I found this exchange:
"[...] they say there's a king in Havnor now," the sheep buyer went on, with a sidelong glance."That might be a good thing," said Tenar.
Townshend nodded. "Might keep the foreign riffraff out."
Tenar nodded her foreign head, pleasantly.
Le Guin has always been a political writer; her world of Earthsea may be fantasy but is acidly similar to our own in many ways – including the small mindedness to which Tenar the immigrant, despite having saved the very existence of Earthsea, must turn the other cheek in order to survive. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
I wish "no immigrants day" well, and hope that it achieves its aim without bringing triggering a backlash.
[1] Le Guin, Ursula K. Tehanu: the last book of Earthsea. 1st ed. 1990, New York: Atheneum.
[2] The novels of the Earthsea trilogy, for those who have somehow managed never to have heard of them, were: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore. They can be found as separate books or as collected volumes with or without Tehanu, such as The Earthsea Quartet, Harmondsworth, 1993, Puffin Books, ISBN 0140348034.
[3] Le Guin, Ursula K. The Other Wind. 1st ed. 2001, New York: Harcourt.
[4] Le Guin, U.K., Tales from Earthsea. 1st ed. 2001, New York: Harcourt.
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