Listen to our experts discuss historical events and perspectives that help us understand the immigration debates today around Muslim immigration and persons trying to come across our southern border.
Transcript: Immigration Debates Today
Will: Efforts to control borders and prevent movements of people across borders have never worked. So there are good reasons to expect that there's nothing essentially new about the history of immigration today. The idea that certain religious traditions in this recent case, Islam, are incompatible with American political values echoes older debates over Catholic immigrants or for that matter Mormon Americans. That these two religious traditions in the past and the one today, Islam, are not compatible with being American. It's an American question. It's not a Muslim problem. Religions adapt, political traditions adapt, just as ethnic and racial sensibilities adapt.
Penny: Welcome to the Diversity and Inclusion for All project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
So I'm here again with Will Katerberg and Eric Washington to try to look at race in America by understanding a little bit better immigration history. And in this conversation, I'm hoping that I can get a better understanding of some of the key immigration debates that are part of the United States history and then drawing some connections between what's happened in the past and to help us understand immigration debates today. And we have at least two areas that I think are contentious or issues for us today. And one would be Muslim immigration and the other would be immigration at our south border. And some of the things we've heard in the news about the influx of people requesting to come in from the south and children being put in detention centers. So I'm wondering if we can perhaps identify a few insights or things from history and our immigration history that will help us understand those two issues and challenges today.
Will: I can start by talking a little bit about religion and maybe put fears about whether it's possible for Muslims to embrace American values, specifically American political values of liberty and freedom, of equality, of democracy and so on. One of the striking things is that if you read descriptions of Islam and why it's incompatible with democracy and democratic values and processes is how close the parallels are to the way that Catholic immigrants were criticized by Protestants in the early to mid 19th century and, in fact, well into the 20th century. The idea that certain religious traditions, in this recent case, Islam, are incompatible with American political values echoes older debates over Catholic immigrants, or for that matter. Mormon Americans, that these two religious traditions in the past and the one today, Islam, are not compatible with being American. Of course, both Mormons and Catholics have found ways to see compatibility between their religious tradition and their American political values. It's also important to add that Protestants have not always been comfortable with American values, like freedom and equality. Freedom of religion. Yes, Protestants said, but mostly they meant freedom of religion for people more like themselves, fellow Protestants. This is not uniquely American, of course, either. You know, there was greater equality and freedom of religion in England in the seventeen hundreds of eighteen hundreds. But (for) Protestants, but not religious freedom for the Catholics. So I think that's an important history, both that we've heard these arguments that are used today about Muslims before. And they turned out not to be true when it came to Mormons and Catholics. And we see good evidence among Muslim Americans today that just like Catholics and Mormons in the past, they find elements of Islam that are compatible with American political values.
So this is not a case of one religious group, Protestant Christians being naturally compatible with democracy and other groups having to figure it out. This has been a question of how does any religious group which believes we understand the truth in ways others do not, how you embrace not just cultural and ethnic diversity, but religious diversity? It's an American question. It's not a Muslim problem.
Eric: Great point. It reminds me of Sheik Kabeer. I think he's up in Minnesota. Since since 9/11, he's written a lot about how being Muslim actually does fit within a pluralistic society, that you could practice Islam neatly in a pluralistic society, he and he he goes back to the founding of Islam and also the spread of Islam, and that Muslims who left from the Arabian Peninsula found themselves in pluralistic societies. And even looking at how the Ottoman Empire operated. The Ottomans created a multiethnic empire. He argues that and he's I believe, he's American born and of Scandinavian descent. So he's he's he's white in how we understand white. And he makes his argument. Also, recently, I read a pretty good novel by Sahar Mustafa called The Beauty of Your Face, and it chronicles tension of Palestinian immigrant family living in Chicago between of between the first generation, second generation. But the novel really turns, even though she she goes back and forth in terms of the present. The novel’s set in the past of the family. But there's a scene in the novel where the protagonist who’s a woman, she's an educator, she sees she's in hijab where she has a confrontation with a white man. And the white man is like, you should go back to where you come from, you don't belong here. You're not American and blah, blah, blah. She says, look, I was born here. I'm just as American as you are. What do you have against me? So that goes back to Will's point about it's not a Muslim problem. It's an American problem. And to be more precise in terms of the context of the Beauty of your Face, so white American problem.
Will: And I would add that you would find variations in other countries too, that, you know, the Netherlands has a large Muslim. I was going to say immigrant population, but it's also increasingly a multi-generation, you know, population born in the Netherlands. Canada does. So these are these are modern questions in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious societies. How do you find things in common? How do you promote religious freedom and so on. And yeah, so it's an American problem and it's a Dutch problem. And it's it's a Canadian problem.
The other thing that's worth noting is how race and religion relate. And it's not just that Islam is identified with people who are not white. It's also that people who are white would have the wrong religion, lose some of their whiteness. So white Americans who became Mormons and embraced the Mormon experiment in Utah, who were, in fact, first driven out of Missouri to Illinois and then driven out of Illinois, flee across the plains to Utah. Their own story of Exodus, they were seen as dangerous and not quite white because of their religious difference.
It's also important to note that the ways Muslims are described often depicted as savage, as uncivilized, as uneducated. All of those kinds of things, you can see important rhetorical parallels to the way that non-whites have historically been depicted. So race and religion are often intertwined in complicated ways. There are ways of marking you, marking a person as non-white, even if the person is of ethnically European descent. Now, again, of course, those things being similar, it makes a difference if you're European-American and Mormon, you can melt in a way that a Muslim (of) Egyptian or or Nigerian descent cannot.
Penny: So it's helpful for me to to just recognize from history that we have often discriminated and declared that religions other than Protestant Anglo religions are less desirable, but that through time we've seen with Catholics and Mormons and hopefully with with some of our amazing Muslim-identifying American citizens too that we can actually be loyal Americans and good Americans with different sets of religious beliefs. And so hopefully, you know, we can start kind of thinking about what that good American can be many different religions, and that it doesn't have to result today in so many negative things against our Muslim fellow citizens.
Will: An important part of the story to keep in mind, and this is very much what historians tend to say and so that's why I'm saying it: We need to treat Christianity, whether it's Protestant or Catholic variation or Islam or Shintoism or Buddhism as historical phenomena. None of these religious traditions are trans-historical and unchanging. Islam is Islam is Islam or Christianity is Christianity is Christianity. Ideas of religious freedom, ideas of religious tolerance evolved in specific contexts in multicultural empires like the Ottoman Empire. They didn't have religious equality or freedom, but they found practical ways to mitigate religious conflict. In European countries during and in the wake of the Reformation, as they became religiously diverse and efforts to impose religious uniformity were bloody and led to thousands and tens of thousands of deaths, people were forced to deal with the practical question of what do you do with religious diversity within a sovereign entity? Eventually, practical need to avoid bloodshed led to a growing idea of tolerance and tolerance evolved from merely putting up with people who were different to trying to find ways to love your neighbor as yourself and to hopefully have your neighbor look upon you with the same honesty and empathy that you would look upon her or him. Religions adopt, political traditions adapt, just as ethnic and racial sensibilities adapt. They’re historical phenomena. It took time to make them happen. And that means they can change.
Penny: And that means that we might end up in a better space where, yes, there are different religious faiths, while they inform our lives, do not prevent us from living together. Right. As Eboo Patel says, in equal dignity and mutual loyalty.
Will: Exactly. Exactly.
Penny: And I'm wondering if there's a few insights, again, from history that can help us think in good ways or maybe gain a new insight into the border issues today.
Will: Well, one thought for me, and this is specific to immigration coming to the southwestern border, where in the last few years the United States has tried to build a new kind of wall against immigration, would be to recognize that the border from a historical and geographic point of view is unnatural. Native peoples before Europeans arrived crossed those borders and migrated across those borders with trade. After the Spanish arrived and created what for them was New Spain and what is now Mexico and much of the United States, west of the Mississippi, for that matter, parts of the Gulf Coast south….that was a geographically and culturally and politically integrated region. So when the United States conquered parts of northern Mexico in the eighteen forties and made them American territory, it put a border in an area that was ethnically, culturally, geographically integrated, and trade across the border, movement of laborers across the border, movement of cultural traditions across the border continued, of course, in the decades after the American conquest. In that sense, immigration from Mexico or immigration from people in Central America through Mexico is nothing unusual in history. In fact, it's it's what has happened for thousands of years. And these are integrated regions. And people move through those regions and across what is now an American border. A long historical point of view: The border doesn't make sense. And that's why people in cultural traditions keep moving across.
Penny: I think there are other examples, too, in the world where let's just say outside powers come in and draw boundaries and make countries. But people move and have moved throughout history across those lines, those artificial lines. And so immigration is a complicated issue, complicated by others coming in and drawing borderlines. Right. How might we gain some insights from our history, from the fact that the border is artificial, that it interrupts traditional long standing historical migration patterns? How can these historical insights help us a little bit understand the complicated issues that are currently part of our southern border immigration stresses or pressures?
Will: Efforts to control borders and prevent movements of people across borders have never worked. So as a practical matter, there are reasons even today, especially today in a world of globalization, why money and goods and cultural traditions and laborers are moving across borders. Why refugees who are disrupted in one place move across borders to find refuge somewhere else. And so this is not something you can prevent. The best you can do is manage the flow, perhaps by trying to solve problems elsewhere so refugees aren't created, but even more by finding ways to integrate people who move across borders effectively into your society.
And there I think the history of European immigration to the United States, people who were part of unwanted non-preferred, ethnic and religious groups, over time, they became insiders and part of the mainstream. So there are good reasons to expect that there's nothing essentially new about the history of immigration today.
Penny: I think too when I've heard stories about the arguments that people in the past have made for why those other people are undesirable, and they said things like they're lazy or they're drunkards or they're criminals or fill in the blank negative thing. We don't want them here that we fear some of those same things apply to people trying to enter from the southern border. Right. That we we attach all these negative, undesirable characteristics to them over there, as one of the reasons to keep them out. And just as we did in the past, it isn't always fair, right? There are people who commit crimes or are tend toward alcoholism or whatever in every group, that, right? it's not just the ones that have darker skin or the ones that are currently and the other side of that border. And so just as in the past, I think we've hopefully expanded how we think about these different groups that used to be undesirable immigrants and then became more desirable immigrants, that there might be some space to to think in more nuanced ways about people trying to cross our southern border currently.
Will: And that's why I think we can also take not just the history that we have as Americans or Canadians, that our ancestors once were immigrants, whether forced immigrants or voluntary immigrants, that Americans today who have immigrant heritages can look back and think about the hardships their ancestors experienced and the discrimination their ancestors often experience, say, Italian or Irish Americans or Polish Americans. And hopefully they can recognize something in their history into the in the kind of discrimination that people today are experiencing. I mean, perhaps they can also bring in a basic Christian value, which is which finds parallels in many religious traditions of love your neighbor as yourself. The ethnic discrimination that your ancestors or maybe you yourself experienced, if you were an immigrant and that you thought was wrong, will bring the same sense of identity to when it comes to thinking about immigrants today. Now, there's a phrase from the Bible that rings a bell for me. Know where God commands the people of ancient Israel to welcome the stranger who you were once strangers in the land in Egypt, recognizing shared experience, even if it's historical experience that of your ancestors and what other people are experiencing today.
Penny: Thank you so much. So, you know, the issues are super complicated and we're not doing at all a deep dive. But it is helpful, I think, to just be a little more aware of our history and how we've created groups of insiders and outsiders of more desirables and less desirable and how our ideas have changed over time and how in any group there are people who are and can be and will be great, I'm just going to say, great citizens, great Americans, great neighbors, and to just be open enough to recognize that even today and groups that are currently under the microscope and facing immigration challenges.
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