The Refugee Crisis and a Theory of Flight
In 1970, my parents packed us up and moved us from a two-bedroom apartment in Rockaway Beach, N.Y., to Central Jersey. My brother had just…
In 1970, my parents packed us up and moved us from a two-bedroom apartment in Rockaway Beach, N.Y., to Central Jersey. My brother had just been born, and the apartment was now too small for the five of us.
The house we moved into, a for-bedroom colonial in a new development in a formerly rural town, was significantly larger and the neighborhood was literally under construction. It also was overwhelmingly white, with most of the men traveling to New York by train or bus for work, and the women staying home.
The narrative we tell ourselves — and by this, I mean the majority of people who fled to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s — to explain the move is one that will sound familiar to anyone paying attention to the current immigration debate. My parents were seeking a better life. They were seeking more room — but they also were fleeing violence and demographic change. The crime rate in the nation’s cities was rising and the complexion of those moving in had grown darker. Descendants of immigrants — Jews, Italians, Poles, Irish — once not seen as white were now running from their new black and Hispanic neighbors, who they blamed for the changing “quality of life.”
The animus and fear that drove whites from cities — called white flight — is well-documented and researched, and on some level is understandable. The changing world was difficult to grapple with for the generation that came of age during and shortly after World War II. Economic growth and the GI Bill meant there was money available, and housing developers were dividing up large tracts of agricultural land into smaller parcels, building houses and marketing them to the new middle-management class as an escape from the hardships of the city, while playing on the mythologies of wide-open spaces and the American Dream.
The mythological America advertised to potential homebuyers was white — if not in word, then in the images presented, which were nearly always of a Father Knows Best family. The unstated comparison was clear.
I raise this history for two reasons: First, the arguments made by my parents and others of their generation for their move are similar to those making the trek north from Central America, though the threats facing today’s migrants (as was the case for African Americans during the Great Migration and Puerto Ricans during the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s) are existential in nature while the threats facing the whites fleeing the cities were far less so.
Parents want better for their kids. My parents made what they thought was the right decision for our family and, while elements of their motives are suspect, no one should fault them for it.
The second reason is the parallels between the fears that drove white flight and the fears and hatred driving today’s anti-immigration efforts and attitudes. The language used to describe Puerto Rican’s and blacks in the ’60s and ’70s, the assumptions about them as broad social and racial categories, are far too similar to what we hear today to dismiss.
Puerto Rican’s were said to not have the same sense of concern for their homes or neighborhoods as whites. They were “dirty”and “dark,” uneducatable “infestations.” Blacks were the same. And both groups were blamed for the collapse of urban American in the north.
The language and arguments should ring familiar. It is the same language and rationale used by President Trump and his supporters (and more broadly by the nativist GOP Freedom Caucus for more than a decade).
It’s how we assign blame and explain our fears of a changing nation and world, and of an economy that works only for some. The collapse of American cities was caused by a set of economic decisions that bled urban America of its tax revenue and higher-paying manual labor jobs, which led to massive cuts in education and policing, a loss of middle-class residents and the further impoverishment of those left behind. Crime and other social ills were the result of this thicket of policies; crime and poverty then became an excuse for further disinvestment and. Downward spiral ensued. It’s like the human body, which has a natural level of resistance to viruses and infection; when that resistance is compromised, the body gets sick.
The United States has been in the midst of an economic transformation for the last several decades. Good-paying, non-college jobs have been vanishing thanks to automation, global trade rules, and the financial inaction of our economy overall. Short-term profit, immediate return on investment, the stock market — this is what drives the economy and determines work and wages in the 21st Century. It also has helped lead to the devastation of the Global South, which has been used as a laboratory by free-marketeers for years. American leaders have helped prop up dictators and have attempted to control the fates of places like Honduras and Guatemala, leaving them destabilized, impoverished and gang-ridden. Violence is a daily fact for the citizens of these poor nations to our south, thanks to U.S. policies. So, as many of the undocumented immigrants I’ve interviewed in recent years tell me, they flee, heading north, hoping to start over in the United States. All they want is peace and a better life for their children and themselves.
It’s an old story, and our response to them follows the same playbook white northerners used when Southern Blacks moved north. We — white Americans — have nowhere to run today, so we create categories and rules designating migrants as a threat, as dangerous, and we use language that dehumanizes people who are just seeking the same things all of us want: safety, security, stability, and freedom.
My parents fled to central New Jersey. Others fled from Brooklyn or Chicago to other suburbs, or from the Jim Crow South or Puerto Rico or Cuba or Central America to Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, etc. It is the human condition to seek something better. In this way, we are all refugees.
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