If there is no spirit unfolding itself in history,
No gradual growth of consciousness
Beneath the land grabs and forced migrations,
The bought elections, the betrayal of trust
By party faction in the name of progress-
What about spirit in the personal realm
Unfolding slowly inside us, so slowly
That our best days seem like a holding action?
Seasons repeat themselves, but the tree
Shading the yard keeps growing.
(Carl Dennis. The New Yorker, 24/10/11)
As St. Patrick’s Day approaches with all the usual celebrity glitz, one can be given to think that immigration is a normal every day stress-free experience, and being an immigrant is a respectable aspiration. However, behind the glitz, immigration is perceived as a threat and immigrants a risk.
Emigration, the coercion to seek a better life outside one’s country, was always a risk. Now, in the security-prone world, immigrants are seen not just as a risk, but suspects. Note the negative, and in some instances the hostile statements during political campaigns by some politicians seeking office to attract popularity. Worse still, immigrants are usually mentioned in the same sentence as drug dealers, terrorists and human traffickers. Even some sources blame immigrants for the banking collapse and the global economic crisis that has left so many people jobless and homeless.
Of course, the old chestnuts of immigrants taking jobs, on welfare, over-taxing the health and housing systems are still repeated to feed the local rumour mills and oil recreational gossip. One would imagine that people in responsible public positions would ignore that kind misinformation. However, minds that are constantly fed with negative information about others may use such information to define themselves and may revert to violence in doing so. Such misinformation informs public opinion ending up in legislation. There are plenty examples of this kind of legislation being enacted in many states around the world and in states in the United States. Imagine teachers checking to see if their pupils are undocumented immigrants and police targeting people on “suspicion” of being undocumented.
St. Patrick whose life we celebrate this week initially arrived in Ireland as a slave. In modern parlance he would be described as trafficked for forced labour. These are facts that governments forget on St. Patrick’s Day. Painting everything green or looking at the world with green tinted glasses pulls down a blind for a day on the condition of millions of people like St. Patrick who are living in shadow-lands of misery fear, anxiety and in many instances squalor.
Hopefully, as we Irish celebrate and as others celebrate with us let us own the contribution we have made to the world. But let us not forget to work to change attitudes and legislation that enhances the lives of those on invisible margins of society but whose hearts are on journeys of hope like ourselves and our forebears. These people keep economies ticking over.
By day we worked in the orchards and fields but every night, while we slept, we returned home. Sometimes we dreamed we were back in the village, rolling a metal hoop down the Street of Rich Merchants with our favourite forked wooden stick…All week long they made us sweat for them in the fields but on Sundays the let us rest. (The Buddha in the Attic. Julie Otsuka)
