This week's immigration crisis can help us come to grips with the global migration problem at its origins. That is, grasping capitalism's twenty-first century persistent contribution to growing inequality and its corruption of both democratic and faith-based institutions.
Anecdotal evidence abounds as resentment about local migration metastasizes into growing nationalism and religious language is used in support of making America great again. It's visible in Trump's phone calls to Hungary's Viktor Orban--where helping a migrant has just been made a criminal offense-and where Trump's ally Steve Bannon has been traveling urging on Europe's swing toward Right wing parties'; or in Trump's affection for tyrants in the Philippines, Russia and Turkey. Most ominous, is the emerging White House plan to hold tens of thousands of migrants crossing the U. S. southern border to escape impoverishment and violence at camps on U. S. military bases (Concentration Camps?).
According to the the UN Global Migration Report, 2017, the largest number of international migrants (50 million) resides in the United States....and is growing. The centrist Council on Foreign Relations on June 18th 2018 warned that
"if mismanaged, irregular and forced migrants will outnumber regular migrants, putting millions of people and democratic values in grave peril....creating mass humanitarian catastrophes, modern slavery, and human trafficking, and could contribute to the demise of the liberal international order altogether."
It's already happening. Two hundred more refugees drowned in the Mediterranean this week and hundreds more have been rescued but are blocked from landing safely in Italy or elsewhere. At the U. S. Southern border hundreds of children have been stripped from parental hands and New York City's Mayor DeBlasio and Governor Cuomo were startled to learn that dozens of these refuge children had been shipped 2500 miles from the U. S. Southern border to, of all places, New York City!
The fundamentally dangerous question illuminated by the global migration crisis has to do with the diminishing usefulness of people--for thousands of years a source of chattel labor serving landed princes and plantation managers who needed their cotton or strawberries picked and their pyramids and temples built in honor of themselves.
While modern era migrants over the last two hundred years were bargaining chips in the struggle of corporations to meet their man/womanpower needs, this usefulness began to decline seventy years ago as automation reduced the number of workers need for manufacturing. Decline accelerated as Central Banks made decisions to abandon Chicago, Youngstown and Pittsburgh in favor of better investment opportunities around the globe; and the age of techno-capitalism dawned as Apple poured its production into the Foxconn system that created whole towns in China and Vietnam with tens of thousands of computer assemblers housed together, disregarding hundreds of thousands of jobs needed by lower middle class American workers in the U. S.
It is all of these "left behind" who are the base for demagogues like a Hitler or a Trump. "Humans continues to demand justice and an order in which they can live," wrote the classics scholar William Arrowsmith about Athenian democracy,
"Take away hope and men and women forfeit their humanity, destroyed by the hideous gap between their illusion and intolerable reality."
Trump's demagoguery is based in the despair of millions of workers left behind who see him as their last and only hope. His deliberate ironic effect is to feed the deep cultural isolation and resentment of working people by aping their rough-hewed resentment of their victimization, luring them to support the very policies that make their dislocation from the work force worse every day.
Fareed Zakaria, another centrist, wrote this week in the Washington Post of June 22nd about "an era of rampant globalization [where] people want to believe that they still maintain some sense of stability and control."
Between the ascendance of science, socialism and secularism, people [have]lost their trust in the dogmas and duties of religion. But this didn't change the reality that they wanted something they could believe in, something with which they could have a deep, emotional bond."
Cass Sunstein, University Professor at Harvard writes cautiously about the relevance of the Hitler similarity:
...we might be tempted to try to learn something from earlier turns toward authoritarianism, particularly the triumphant rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s....but some depictions of Hitler's rise [focus] more on the details of individual lives. They help explain how people can not only participate in dreadful things but also stand by quietly and live fairly ordinary days in the midst of them.
This Summer's learning academies should observe how the recent mass shootings have slipped into the background and how the main line church folks are slumbering on their vacations....while we're nearing a metaphorical "Trinity," not the holy one, but the one that blew up in Alamogordo in 1945.
