The White Peril 白禍

I've been kind of distracted from the news this weekend, but it's been hard to miss the reports about the demonstrations in favor of illegal aliens.

I'm not one given to ambivalence, but I'm of two minds about what the best approach is to illegal aliens at this point. I'm a proper-channels kind of guy--which helps to explain why I like Japan, obviously--and find that the minute someone starts blaring about "rights" in connection with people who used unlawful means to enter the country, I want to grimace and turn away. And irrespective of whether Mexicans themselves are likely to be terrorists, porous borders and slack enforcement of immigration laws are security risks. At the same time, I'm not unsympathetic to the it-takes-two-to-tango argument: US de facto policy has made it possible for millions of people to live and work within our borders without documentation. Many of them come from corrupt countries in which scrupulously obeying the law is a great way to be played for a sucker. It's not difficult to believe that many people who were desperate enough to enter the country illegally are essentially honest and hard-working once they get there. I don't like the idea of an amnesty program that would reward illegal immigration for those who happened to get in under the wire; but neither do I like our cozy relationship with the al-Sauds, or negotiations with the thugs who run the DPRK, or the nice-making we have to do to conduct trade with PRC enterprises. Unpalatable compromises are sometimes necessary, and while it's good to reflect on how we got into this situation, we still have to deal with it. It may indeed be more humane and less wasteful for all concerned if we give those who already have established lives in the States a chance to get documentation. To avoid a run on green cards by people hoping to get in under the wire, we'll have to tighten the borders at the same time in a big, bad way. And if we're being all generous-minded toward non-citizens who want to live responsible lives within our borders, we might include the long-suffering foreign spouses of Americans who exist in a living hell thanks to the vagaries of the INS. For the future, as long as they're scrupulously enforced when enacted, I don't see why more liberal immigration laws would be a problem.

However.

If the purpose of the demonstrations over the last few weeks was to win over Middle America, I'm thinking there were some serious miscalculations. Waving the Mexican flag or painting your face in its colors is a poor way to indicate your loyalty to the US. And thronging the streets of LA in the hundreds of thousands is...I mean, only the Blue City liberals who recall 60s-era demonstrations fondly as opportunities for The People to Speak Truth to Power are likely to be moved to sympathize, and they're already on the side of illegal aliens, anyway.

Mass rallies are less likely to make the average television viewer be like, "Gosh, just look at all the clean, presentable undocumented workers already living responsible lives in this great land right now!" than to provoke a reaction of "Imagine if all those people did decide to rampage! The cops couldn't do a blessed thing. Yet there they are today monitoring and protecting them instead of protecting American citizens from crime. And even if only 0.5% of those people are terrorists, they can just melt away into the crowd, and no one will be the wiser!" Maybe that's fair, and maybe it isn't--there were plenty of supporters marching, presumably, who aren't illegal aliens themselves--but it strikes me as the most likely response. Given how long this has been a hot-button issue (it predates 9/11 by quite a bit, of course), it will, if nothing else, be interesting to see how it plays out given that this is an election year.

Here's Eric with more about the political strangeness of our shared state of birth:

One of the things I hate about the damned "red state"/"blue state" argument [with you there, honey!--SRK] is that I live in a red state that's blue.

Or is that a blue state that's red?

He has graphics. My home county (still my place of residence for electoral and tax purposes) is Lehigh, which is at the northwest tip of the blue region to the southeast of the state, where metropolitan Philadelphia shades upward into the Lehigh Valley.

I realize that the vast majority of us live in places which are varying shades of purple. But that's not sexy. Nor does it appeal to the us-versus-them, energize-the-base party activists. This is not to deny that there is real geographical (at least demographical) tension in this country. But it's more along the lines of "Big Cities" versus "The Rest." It is not the country which is blue; it is the cities which are blue. For the most part, the cities aren't even purple, the way the rest of the country is; Philadelphia is about as blue as it's possible to be.

Right. A lot of the red counties are solidly conservative, but they have more elk than people. (Yes, that's a mischievous joke, but I'm not being derisive. I'm a city person through and through, but there are plenty of times--morning rush hour on Monday, usually--when I understand why a lot of people aren't.) The cities, where most of the reliable voters are concentrated, may be heavily Democratic, but they're still parts of different population and cultural belts.

Philadelphia, Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, and Wilkes Barre-Scranton--despite their differences--are all BOS-WASH metro areas. They're part of the Northeast Corridor, oriented toward New York and DC. Pittsburgh and Erie are CHI-PITTS cities, more Midwestern in outlook. To people from the big Western states, Pennsylvania is pretty tiny, but the divide is real. The eastern and western halves of the commonwealth don't spend all their time throwing water balloons at each other over Penn State at University Park, or anything; but there really does seem to be a tacit feeling that the number of pols from each half should be roughly equal. And yes, obviously, part of that is because of the symmetrical tug of big contributors in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but it's also the way a lot of friends and neighbors will report voting.

Whew. Fever-pitch week. Friend whose boyfriend dumped him a few weeks ago decided to break Rule #1. He--not making this up, guys--showed up at our hang-out looking for my friend. Found him. Proceeded to tell him, "You know our friendship is very important to me."

"It's not that I don't care about you--you know that, too, right?"

"I miss having you around."

"You have no idea how hard it was for me to break up with you."

You can imagine the rest. I showed up about halfway through this particular scene and took a post on the opposite side of the bar until it became clear that it was Intervention Time. I put on my best clueless-American-being-heartily-friendly act and wandered over. "Evan! [blink-blink] Have you been here the whole time? I just got here ten minutes ago." I gave him the chance to give me the look that says, "Now isn't a good time" and got the look that says, "Help!" Luckily, he's a strong-minded guy, so he just needed an hour or two of being listened to. I still entered the weekend kind of drained.

Luckily, Atsushi was here, which always improves things. When we went out for dinner last night, we were, purely by chance, given a private room at the restaurant. That was not only nice but also useful, since when the waiter brought our lamb ribs, he deposited moist handtowels next to the plates and said, in that gravely expressionless waiter voice, "To enjoy it to the last morsel, you'll have to pick up the bones and eat the meat off them." So Atsushi and I got to sit on opposite sides of a table and watch each other hungrily sucking meat off bones. Put me in a very...you know...primal mood.

Speaking of primal--or rather, atavistic--I also polished off While Europe Slept. Yet another reason to be glad Atsushi was nearby, since reading deeply disturbing stuff like that is always easier when your man is reassuringly at the other end of the sofa. And it was disturbing, though a lot of the reportorial details are familiar if you've been paying attention to the news over the last several years. Some passages also seem to be adapted from this essay of Bruce Bawer's a while back (not that that's a problem). In a way, the flat-out atrocities and terrorist acts weren't as rattling as, say, this passage on p. 57, which made me snarf my Earl Grey:

In many Western European countries, indeed, some laws are different for natives than for immigrants. For native Swedes, the minimum age for marriage is eighteen; for immigrants living in Sweden, there is no minimum. In Germany, an ethnic German who marries someone from outside the EU and wants to bring him to her to Germany must answer a long list of questions about the spouse's birth date, daily routine, and so forth in order to prove that the marriage is legitimate and not pro forma; such interviews are not required for German residents with, say, Turkish or Pakistani backgrounds, for it is assumed that their marriages have been arranged and that the spouses will therefore know little or nothing about each other.

I live in a country in which there are different rules for natives and foreigners, but here--quite justifiably, as far as I'm concerned--the laws favor, you know, the natives. (I try to hold out hope that the normally-exacting Bawer is misinterpreting something in the German legal code, but the phrasing he uses neither is ambiguous itself nor seems to refer to the kind of policy that could easily be misrepresented.) Sheesh. (See also this by the Grand Stander.)

Added on 6 March: My parents and I kind of have an arrangement whereby they treat Atsushi like one of the family but we don't discuss gay stuff head-on. I'm amused, though, by the way their Christmas present to him always manages to seem subliminally racy. Here's this year's:



Yes, yes, "Intercourse, PA" is a cheap schoolboy joke. But still, my parents live at the edge of Pennsylvania Dutch country. Every town significant enough to have a crossroads has some little collective of farms that makes jelly and relishes. There's nothing easier than NOT choosing the ones made in, of all places, Intercourse.

Of course, my thinking is probably affected by last year. This was what arrived for Atsushi for Christmas 2004:



As I said at the time, to the extent that I could form words while laughing, "I would call this a coded message of approval for our relationship, but I'm guessing there wasn't quite that much subtext intended."