I’ve been looking at photos of Kosovo refugees in the paper. Last week, people in the photos looked stoic, this week everyone is crying. I think the enormity of the situation is beginning to sink in. NATO has begun airlifting refugees out and dispersing them among NATO nations. I suppose that’s the only option – I was going to say I suppose that makes sense, but nothing about this makes sense. Even if we manage to chastise Milosevic with our bombs, we can’t send the Kosovars home, their homes are gone. To try and settle them in Albania and Macedonia would only unsettle those regions – so they’ll be dispersed, scattered around the North Atlantic and I doubt if most of them will ever see their native land again. And where will they go? The newspaper said 40,000 are going to Germany, where they will find themselves on the bottom rung of the social ladder, below the Turkish guest workers. I’m expecting neo-Nazi rioting near the refugee centers in about 90 days.
The United States is taking 20,000 Kosovars, but the Defense Department said they will not be allowed on the mainland; they’ll be kept on Guam and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Yes, we still own a little bit of Cuba and we lift our lamp beside her golden door. Imagine being a Kosovar refugee, from the cool, mountainous Balkans. You’re robbed of your life savings, forced to flee with the clothes on your back, your community is destroyed and scattered and now you are shuttled off to an island in the Pacific or Cuba and summer is coming. A government spokesperson on the radio said Guantanamo Bay can easily accommodate the Kosovars as it is still set up from hosting Haitian refugees, other victims of our foreign policy collateral damage that we did not want to allow onto the mainland, either. In hindsight, the Irish were fortunate to have had the potato famine when they did or they wouldn’t have gotten in, either.
As the two sides in this conflict casually pass the name Hitler back and forth, I’m reminded of visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. The displays make it abundantly clear that throughout the late 1930s, thousands of Jews tried to leave Europe for America, but America was going through one of its anti-immigrant phases, just coming out of the Great Depression. One ship got close enough to see the palm trees along Miami Beach before it was turned back. As I looked at the display, a chill passed over me. I thought, “How could we have been so stupid? How could we have been so cruel?”
Here we are again, going through one of our anti-immigrant phases. It’s probably permanent this time. In the past, from time to time, captains of industry would notice that wages were getting too high and tell the government to turn on the “vacancy” sign next to the Statue of Liberty. Bring in a few million Italians, Poles or Chinese, drop the wages back down, start some ethnic tension in the cities to keep the working classes from thinking about politics. Now that free trade is here and capital is mobile, instead of bringing in immigrants, we take the jobs offshore when we want to drive down wages. This way, when there’s a big fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, no one finds out, because the Triangle Shirtwaist Company is now in Manila.
Because they are no longer useful economically, we’ve hardened our hearts against all immigrants, including political refugees. If you’re a Kosovar Albanian, that’s twice you’re a collateral damage victim of U.S. policy.
Beside the Golden Door
I’ve been looking at photos of Kosovo refugees in the paper. Last week, people in the photos looked stoic, this week everyone is crying. I think the enormity of the situation is beginning to sink in. NATO has begun airlifting refugees out and dispersing them among NATO nations. I suppose that’s the only option – I was going to say I suppose that makes sense, but nothing about this makes sense. Even if we manage to chastise Milosevic with our bombs, we can’t send the Kosovars home, their homes are gone. To try and settle them in Albania and Macedonia would only unsettle those regions – so they’ll be dispersed, scattered around the North Atlantic and I doubt if most of them will ever see their native land again. And where will they go? The newspaper said 40,000 are going to Germany, where they will find themselves on the bottom rung of the social ladder, below the Turkish guest workers. I’m expecting neo-Nazi rioting near the refugee centers in about 90 days.
The United States is taking 20,000 Kosovars, but the Defense Department said they will not be allowed on the mainland; they’ll be kept on Guam and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Yes, we still own a little bit of Cuba and we lift our lamp beside her golden door. Imagine being a Kosovar refugee, from the cool, mountainous Balkans. You’re robbed of your life savings, forced to flee with the clothes on your back, your community is destroyed and scattered and now you are shuttled off to an island in the Pacific or Cuba and summer is coming. A government spokesperson on the radio said Guantanamo Bay can easily accommodate the Kosovars as it is still set up from hosting Haitian refugees, other victims of our foreign policy collateral damage that we did not want to allow onto the mainland, either. In hindsight, the Irish were fortunate to have had the potato famine when they did or they wouldn’t have gotten in, either.
As the two sides in this conflict casually pass the name Hitler back and forth, I’m reminded of visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. The displays make it abundantly clear that throughout the late 1930s, thousands of Jews tried to leave Europe for America, but America was going through one of its anti-immigrant phases, just coming out of the Great Depression. One ship got close enough to see the palm trees along Miami Beach before it was turned back. As I looked at the display, a chill passed over me. I thought, “How could we have been so stupid? How could we have been so cruel?”
Here we are again, going through one of our anti-immigrant phases. It’s probably permanent this time. In the past, from time to time, captains of industry would notice that wages were getting too high and tell the government to turn on the “vacancy” sign next to the Statue of Liberty. Bring in a few million Italians, Poles or Chinese, drop the wages back down, start some ethnic tension in the cities to keep the working classes from thinking about politics. Now that free trade is here and capital is mobile, instead of bringing in immigrants, we take the jobs offshore when we want to drive down wages. This way, when there’s a big fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, no one finds out, because the Triangle Shirtwaist Company is now in Manila.
Because they are no longer useful economically, we’ve hardened our hearts against all immigrants, including political refugees. If you’re a Kosovar Albanian, that’s twice you’re a collateral damage victim of U.S. policy.