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 Editorials | February 2006 
From Mexico to Middle East, it All Goes Back to Immigration
 Georgie Anne Geyer - Yahoo News
The papers indicate an extraordinary recent increase in the violence along our border with Mexico, with more and more Mexicans (not to speak of the Mexican government) taking the position that they have the right to come here.
In the next column, story after story illustrates the cartoon crisis - an Islamic world gone utterly wild with rage against the very countries that they CHOSE to emigrate to. Many of them take the position that they have a further right - to impose their principles upon the countries that allowed them a new, free, productive life.
If you dig a bit deeper, you'll find immigration problems that are not so well-covered - the Togans in the Ivory Coast, the Sudanese seeking refuge in Egypt, the Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan. As a counterpart, you read of the howls and hand-wringing emanating from the American Congress and from European leaders over what to do about it all: Guest worker programs? Immigration limits? Keep future Muslims out entirely, or try to reason with them, ala the "European Way"? They don't have a clue.
Just about everyone who watches these trends recognizes a sea change in the attitudes surrounding immigration and culture, in only the last months and virtually across the world.
Mexico? "There seems to be a new, overtly political aggression by Mexico," Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), commented to me. "Something dramatically has changed. This is a country that, only 15 years ago, declared it would not interfere in our immigration policies, and now ... every day ..."
Indeed, every day there are stories about the Mexican military crossing into the United States, for unknown but surely aggressive purposes. The last fiscal year, ending on Sept. 30, saw 778 drug-smuggler attacks on Border Patrol agents, up from 374 in the previous year. And there is a deeper philosophical doctrine behind the trouble there.
"The basic concept is that the Mexican nation goes beyond the borders that contain Mexico," Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, head of the Institute of Mexicans Abroad in the Foreign Ministry, explained to me last fall in Mexico City. "For the first time, we are exporting our politics. Many Mexicans now live 'transnational' lives, with one foot in one country and one in the other."
Strangely enough, that kind of self-indulgent assurance that they are right is not unlike what we are seeing in much of the Islamic world in the Danish cartoon crisis.
Two factors are at work here: 1) Many Muslims in Europe really believe that Islam is the one true way of life and cannot adapt to the tolerant, Western liberalist cornucopia of ideas. And 2) at the same time, they feel dismally inferior to the West, an inferiority expressed in their heinous violence.
It is one of the great curiosities of the late 20th and early 21st century that advanced and educated Europeans have allowed this happen to them in their own homes. But they bought into open Islamic immigration from the 1960s onward, for the same reasons the U.S. bought into it: cheap labor that "would go home again," and liberal and tolerant utopian ideas that these very different people would immediately choose to become nice, tame Danes, Dutchmen and German burghers.
Another crucial factor is often missed: In virtually all of these cases, and from the Middle East to Latin America to further afield, the paranoid responses (for that is what the cartoon riots really are) are fed by the memory of European colonialism - and now, a new, at least perceived American colonialism.
These are post-colonial wars being fought by men and women who not only had the humiliation of being colonized for decades or centuries but who cannot, worse yet, keep up with the former colonizers. Even sadder, they could have kept up in terms of intelligence and capacity, but their paranoia refuses them the capacity to grasp the Western attitudes necessary for modern advancement.
Egypt was British-controlled; so were Iran and Iraq; Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia belonged to France; Mexico dwells even today, with numbing focus, upon losing the Southwest to the United States in 1848.
These are the psychoses that are driving not only the immigration but the imagination, and the raging, uncritical, blame-the-other responses behind it.
Unfortunately, and perhaps tragically, the United States, which outside of a few hemispheric cases didn't take part in European colonialism, has innocently taken over the guilt - first in Vietnam (the French) and now in Iraq (the British).
The Danes recently put up stiff new barriers to Islamic immigration, as have the Brits and the French and some German states. A larger answer is to allow and encourage young people from across the globe to come to our schools, to our universities - to "choose" in another way - and to go home and improve their own countries with their knowledge. But as long as we are out there with our troops, our bombs and our self-satisfied advisers, strengthening the memories of the past, these psychoses are ghosts that will let no one rest. |
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