My Fellow Immigrants

Letters to America: George Washington's vision of immigration was radically different to what must be endured to enter the US today

“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respected Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.” - George Washington

Dear US immigrants,

It is a strange thing to be an immigrant in the United States of America. We are both welcomed and reviled, both excluded and included, and we live both outside and inside the conflicting worlds of its citizens. This is my second time enduring the infuriatingly-officious immigration procedures so that I can live in the homeland of my wife. We came this time with my three children, who have dual citizenry of both here and the United Kingdom, where I grew up. Getting my green card this time took a gruelling twenty-two months... I could have flown to a neighbouring country and entered illegally far faster, but this I refused to do.

There is a giant mural in San Francisco, where I regularly travel for my company, declaring ‘No human being is illegal’. This opposition to the idea of an ‘illegal immigrant’ stems from a particular perspective that denigrates the exclusivity of nations while paradoxically striving to respect all people. It entails a vision of ‘human rights’ that has nothing to do with the promises made in 1948, nor indeed the ‘rightful condition’ of the Enlightenment philosophers. ‘Human rights’ from this novel new viewpoint are not a means of holding governmental power in check. Rather, they are the strictures of a global cultural empire, whose demands everyone must accept or else face the terrible wrath-for-hire of the US weapons manufacturers.

In George Washington’s 1783 letter to Irish immigrants in New York, he suggested that immigration to the US was not intended merely for the wealthy. In this regard, his nation has failed its first president’s ideals, for on both occasions the core of the requirements I had to meet in order to earn permission to live here was proving that I had sufficient money. Legal immigrants in the US are inherently well-off, and if you are not (as the majority of the people on our planet are not), legal immigration is entirely denied to you outside of a demeaning ‘green card lottery’.

Washington vouched that his nation would accept the persecuted, but this was a conditional welcome, requiring “decency and propriety of conduct”... I doubt he would approve of the huge numbers of people being smuggled across the borders by criminal gangs who have turned illegal entry into the United States into an even more profitable business than selling narcotics. Although I am sympathetic to those who have given up on the aggravations of the official channels, or who could never qualify legally, it is hard to find any propriety of conduct in this evidently illegal form of immigration.

As immigrants living in this nation, we are at the mercy of both these conceptions of immigration - of the ‘nation of laws’ that is open solely to those with sufficient money, and to the empire of mandatory global values. For the patriotic nationalist, our outsider’s perspective is presumed irrelevant: we are expected merely to learn their values in order to fit in (i.e. to ‘assimilate’). But for the moral imperialist, our views are also irrelevant, for either we hold the right beliefs and are ‘good’ or we hold conflicting views and thus are as ‘bad’ as those upholding the ideal of a nation. The ‘melting pot’ of the early twentieth century has given way to two rival visions of the United States, and in neither are the unique perspectives of immigrants welcome.

It is my hope that we disparate US immigrants might somehow open the hearts of the citizens of this country into seeing themselves once again as “a nation united”, as it was memorably described by its third president in a letter to its second. Immigration, here and everywhere else, is hopelessly broken. But it cannot be fixed without securing that understanding of our planet that Washington possessed and that we have lost: not of eliminating nationalities, nor of one nation above others, but of many unique nations, co-operating in mutual prosperity. From these disparate nations, the US might yet come to welcome all those who truly merit the privilege of living in the land of the free.

With unlimited love,

Chris