29 April 2010
The Immigrants
Lochiel, Lochiel! beware of the day
When the Lowlands shall meet thee in battle array!
For a field of the dead rushes red on my sight,
And the clans of Culloden are scattered in fight.
-Campbell
I don’t know what documents my Scottish forbearers had to have when the King decided to clear out the Highlands after the battle of Culloden Field in 1745. According to the family records, there were prototypical McSocotras here in Pennsylvania by 1748.
The King was apparently happy to see them go. The rest of the lot, the ones who were chased out of Europe by the Famine in Ireland and the consolidation of the German Nation-state were all here by the time of the Civil War, and thus did not enjoy the considerable indignity of Ellis Island, where apparently some of the immigration officials were rude, and sometimes capricious to boot.
None of our forbearers, at least according to family lore, were required to carry any documents with them whatsoever. Of course, the first ones arrived in a colony that owed allegiance to the same King who gave them the boot, and the later ones were welcomed as people who could perform the menial and strenuous labor required to build the nation’s infrastructure.
O’Socotras hauled ties and pounded stakes on the rails that stretched out from Alexandria to distant Memphis. The work was hard; it killed my distant grandfather on the job in the scorching Tennessee sun, and I do not know what his wife had to do to survive his passing. There was not much of a social safety-net in 1850s America.
Thankfully, the hard dues for coming to America were paid by others in the family, the long sea voyage, exploitive labor conditions, racism and the like. I have the considerable luxury of considering myself a native of this land, though I must confess the controversy over the immigration law has me baffled.
Apparently it is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them, though that is a requirement in every country I have visited in my life. Some places the innkeepers were required to confiscate my passport, which served to protect their interests and also assisted the local gendarmes in ascertaining my whereabouts.
It is also Federal law, dating back to 1940. So what is the big deal?
In Shanghai one time I discovered that the credit card style room key had to be inserted into a slot in order to operate the lights. It was billed as an energy-saving feature, though I suspected it also was a low-cost means for management to know whether I was in the room, which would facilitate access to my belongings or the hard-drive of my laptop.
Whatever. Here at home we are required to produce drivers license, proof of insurance and registration if we are stopped for a traffic violation. I was screaming up US-31 in Michigan a couple years ago in a rented Mustang. It was a nice Ford product, though the interior trim looked like a boom-box from K-Mart. A flight cancellation out of Traverse City forced me to drive back to the little village on the Bay for the evening, and I got nailed by an alert trooper north of Elk Rapids on that nice four lane stretch of highway.
I produced my documents as demanded and handed them out the window while the young officer dialed me up in the computer in his cruiser. It was a long wait. Apparently anyone who has the sort of paper trail you drag along in my line of work takes some time to access in the regional Homeland Security databases.
I got my ticket, eventually, and drove away resigned to the fact that the government knows a lot more about me than I would like, and that I am required to cooperate with it whether I am in favor of it or not.
I am in favor of immigration. How could I not be, being the beneficiary of it? Our growth and prosperity as a nation is a product of it. But is it too much to ask that people line up to come in? I think we did.
President Obama has a different perspective on things. He commented that the Arizona law makes it a misdemeanor for an alien to fail to carry documentation of his status. The quote was strangely illogical for a guy as cerebral as he is. “If you don’t have your papers ... you’re going to be harassed.”
Well, what is the problem with that? Arizona is ground zero in the war on the border. We all arrived here in these pleasant shores because of some radical unpleasantness. As I understand it, Arizona’s new law does not permit the cops to stop people on the grounds that they might look like illegals, but rather will ask the question in accompaniment with some other violation of the law. If my understanding is correct, no problemo. They check the rest of us pretty thoroughly, just like the trooper did to me.
But this is about something more. It is about a fundamental collective delusion that citizens of other nations have inalienable rights in ours. It is about a world that is slipping away, and a lot of people don’t seem to want it to go. This is a pretty good country. The whole change thing seems a little over-rated, but we are already so far down the road that perfectly reasonable things are matters of bizarre controversy.
I am reminded of a verse from an ancient homeland that I visited once:
A wind that awoke on the moorland came sighing,
Like the voice of the heroes who perished in vain:
"Not for Tearlach alone the red claymore was plying,
But to win back the old world that comes not again."
-A. Lang.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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