The immigrantist narrative lives!

Last night I went with the spouse to a fundraising dinner for the local branch of the International Rescue Committee. The whole thing seemed like a celebration of what I call the immigrantist narrative, and it left me a little unsettled.
Okay, I’ll admit it upfront: I’m an immigrant here in the US of A myself. But still, I continue to harbor this critical stance on the immigrantist narrative– here and in all other countries that were founded on the basis of large-scale colonial ventures.
Colonial ventures, you see, are always built on the ruins of wrecked indigenous societies. I think that’s what upsets me about the whole business. Think Voortrekkers and Randlords. Think Israel. Think the Trail of Tears; or the destruction of Aboriginal cultures in Australia; or the submerging of Tibetan culture, or, or or…
It sometimes seems quite simple to me: in order to run a colonial venture, you need colonists, right? And those colonists have to be… immigrants.
When I was growing up in England, there was a tale in the dusty annals of my family’s history about Black Sheep Uncle Alfred. This was in the late 1800s. He had made off with the money of a club he was treasurer of… So what did the family do with him, in order to deal with the shame he had brought to them? Why, they packed him off to America and he wasn’t mentioned in the family for many years thereafter…

Well, that was the view from England. From the other side of the Atlantic, however, this trope gets reinvented and we have a story of all the pluckiest, most talented souls from “the Old World” having the gumption to pull up their stakes and move over here to the New World. (Why did Bombs-Away Don’s labeling of parts of Europe as being ‘Old’ represent such a slur, anyway?)
In this narrative, immigration– the ability to uproot oneself from the ancestral land and the extended family therein– is seen as extremely virtuous. Admiring stories are told of people who completely reinvented themselves in the ‘New World’. The people who stayed in the Old World are seen as, at best, perhaps stick-in-the-muds, and at worst as undeveloped, primitive beings still bound by ties of blood and soil.
Ah, but actually that latter view is reserved for those remnants of the indigenous society that have managed to survive earlier waves of colonial immigration. What is with those people that they cling so tenaciously to their lands and their ancient customs? Why can’t they just get with the program of modernization and mobility?
Did you know that as the US of A expanded westward, it didn’t allow new territories to be admitted to the Union as ‘states’ until they had a clear majority of white settlers in them? (So much for democracy.)
Yes, I hear you say, but what has all this to do with the International Rescue Committee?
Well, say you have a certain number of $$ to spend on doing good works and you’re deeply concerned about the situation of the people in war-torn or otherwise pauperized country X. It strikes me you could either invest the money in trying to make things better in country X, or you could cherry-pick a few basically fairly elite families from that country and pay all the costs of bringing them here to the US and resettling them here.
Yes, I guess most of the people the refugee-aid people are bringing here to the US these days are either already refugees, or are facing dire conseuqences inside their present countries and thus in urgent need of ‘rescue’.
In the latter case, I certainly think you could spend your $$ and any political clout and organizing ability you have on making conditions better for those people in the countries where they are. And as for people who are already refugees, surely they could either be helped a lot where they are, or campaigns can be mounted to help improve conditions in their home countries so that they could safely return there…
Otherwise (and do I need to underline this), you are surely just contributing more to the global “brain drain” to the already-rich countries of the global ‘north’.
At the dinner last night I talked with a young woman who’s a member of an Afghan family being resettled here in Charlottesville. She’s working in a clerical job in the University of Virginia’s central administration, and studying in the community college in the evenings. “Do you think of going back to Afghanistan?” I asked her. She said she did– though she sounded as though she was still far from making up her mind one way or the other.
The local IRC branch has just brought its second family of anti-Saddam Iraqi refugees here to be resettled.
Isn’t this all a bit crazy? Shouldn’t we actually be encouraging all these talented people to return to their home countries at this point– or working toward that goal– so they can help in the rebuilding of their countries?
But of course is you’re a Resettlement Officer with the IRC or any similar group, such an outcome could very likely be considered as a “failed” resettlement, and your performance evaluation might suffer because of it… You want “success stories”! And so, the immigrantist narrative just continues to feed on itself, and on its own perceived virtues…
Well, I’m sorry about this little grumble. Many of my best friends, as they say, are ardent supporters of the IRC. (Just as many of them are ardent supporters of the ICC, and of war-crimes courts in general.) It’s certainly not comfortable for me to feel so misaligned with these good people over these issues.
So friends, if you can explain why what I’m writing is a load of horsecrap, write me a comment here!