The Immigrants

"Brothers can you spare some room?"

There are two kinds of immigrants: point-to-point and Gypsy. The P2P immigrant - you know the one, my grandfather came to New York from Sicily, or my lawn guy came from Mexico City to Houston - is the more historically understood. It is also equally romanticized and vilified. Dig deep enough and everyone finds a P2P immigrant in their ancestry. At an almost perfectly Iinear correlation, the farther back people dig the more romantic it gets. Your immigrant ancestors were good, hardworking people. Factory workers by day, wholesome family patriarchs and matriarchs by night. To the faithful we are all children of the biblically larger-than-life Adam & Eve (peculiarly white in most visual interpretations, but I digress). To the empirical we are all children of stardust.

The Gypsy is mostly vilified. Human tolerance for the un-rooted is limited. Mistrust sets in, and it is almost impossible to eradicate. Ironic, since the gypsy does not stick around long enough to entertain the fears of the rooted ones. 

There is a third kind of immigrant, deserving of mention and respect, the Forced Immigrant. But for the purpose of this conversation let’s focus on immigrants who technically had a choice, regardless of consequences. In theory, we can consider the Forced Immigrant a branch of the P2P. Migrant workers or corporate globetrotters can be a subset of the Gypsy, but if they keep going back to their point of origin, or end up there, they are technically not immigrants. A peculiar hybrid are Gypsies that eventually pick a place and plant roots there for the rest of their lives. Gypsy-to-P2P crossovers, if you will.

“Nation of Immigrants” is simplistic political pandering. We are a migrating planet, never mind nations. We are on a rock that is hurling through universal space at a resulting speed of approximately one million miles per hour. Let me unpack it this way: at that speed the entire human race is gypsying through the equivalent of seventeen countries per minute. Hyper-movement is not an option, it is the de facto autopilot of life.

The absurdity of immigration perceptions can be illustrated by simple examples. A man living in Toronto, Canada who drives an hour and a half to Buffalo, New York is a Canadian immigrant. But wait, it gets better: a woman who moves five blocks, from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso is a Mexican immigrant. Meanwhile a family can move 5,823 miles from Kure Atoll, Hawaii, to Riviera Beach, Florida and not be an immigrant. To be clear: that distance is roughly a quarter of the earth’s circumference. Way farther than any Italian immigrant to New York travelled.

This level of absurdity was not lost on Europeans. Against much greater odds than the average heartland American can comprehend, Europe opened its borders within a lifetime to twenty-eight nations, with almost as many cultures and languages. “For Czech, press 24...”  But it’s not just about arbitrary borders and physical proximities, is it. It’s also about those elusive jobs, beliefs, customs, rituals, habits, languages, looks and smells.

Pragmatic realism sets in. The EU and the US have been experiencing sympathetic pains since the traumatic events that took place between 1993 and 2001. The earlier event (1993) was the year the European Single Market was born. It rose from the ashes of two World Wars and one Cold War, in the name of “four freedoms”: movement of goods, services, money, and people. As it turned out, the union had to settle for three out of four freedoms. That free movement of people thing has not worked out so well, creating a seismic social shift to the far right all across Europe. As for the latter event (2001), it was one infamous September morn in America that almost broke the needle for Americans, slamming it to the far right. 

Enter Sandman. We talk a big game about “the almighty buck” in America, but we should really consider quitting the charade. The prime directive of our lives is, and always has been, the almighty fear. Fear rules the world, not money. Money is just what most people believe will make the fear go away. In the words of the fearsome Skar,  follow me, and you’ll never go hungry again! Money buys you a personality, so that you’ll never be lonely again. Money, regardless of how it’s obtained, will buy the adulation of millions for someone who will make you great again. 

In every family’s lineage there was once an immigrant who was feared. Who was persecuted. Who was hated. Not recognizing this basic scar of life constitutes a fear, hatred, and persecution of your own kind. 

In the meantime, should you choose to refute that premise, let’s join hands and recite the Purebred’s Creed - shall we?

Immigrants steal jobs.

Immigrants rape.

Immigrants sell drugs.

Immigrants murder.

Immigrants will hurt your children.

Immigrants create “no-go zones”.

Immigrants are dirty.

Immigrants will take Christmas away.

Vote for me, Sandman. 

I alone can make the immigrants go away.

...

“Hush little baby don't say a word

And never mind that noise you heard

It's just the beasts under your bed

In your closet in your head

Exit light

Enter night

Grain of sand”

-Metallica, “Enter Sandman”

Fear Nation

"Danger! Danger! Danger!"

America, we have a problem. This is a problem that you won't find on the news. So if you wait for your favorite news channel to tell you what the problem is, you'll just grow old. And most likely scared. Either way they won't tell you not because they're hiding the problem, but because for the most part they haven't a clue. Yes, there's irony in there somewhere. But let me use one of the many recurring bad news subjects that they report about frequently, to find our problem.

In 2007, a Harvard Law article concluded that there was no proven correlation between gun control and murder or suicide. I'm surprised I have not heard the pro gun lobby promote the article more. But regardless of where you stand on the issue, here's my problem with the logic used by the authors of the study: one of their central arguments revolves around the United Kingdom, and the fact that the UK already had a relatively low gun death incidence before tight gun control laws. Therefore, the fact that after tight gun control they still have a low incidence compared to the US disproves a correlation. The problem with that logic is that it ignores a different kind of law: that of supply and demand.

The US has one of the least restrictive marketplaces in the developed world, something at least half of Americans see as a global competitive advantage. In many ways I believe it is a healthy competitive advantage. But I am also convinced that when you elevate any man-made system into demigod status you've just set it up for failure. There is a reason the American founding fathers set up a system of checks and balances: no one, not even the free market, should ever be above scrutiny.

So let's scrutinize the market for one moment: a basic marketing course teaches that to penetrate a market with as much of your product as possible you have to be able to touch at least one emotional trigger in your customer-buyer. One of the most common emotional triggers is fear. The business of fear is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world, but especially so in the more deregulated marketplaces. 

In case you're not familiar with emotional branding or fear-based selling, here is a short list of industries that thrive on it: insurance, pharmaceuticals, retirement / financial planning, alarm and security systems... you get the point. Now, to be clear: just because you work in any of those industries does not make you a bad person. In fact, a lot of good comes from those industries, no doubt. But just like all individuals are imperfect, so is the marketplace we create.

One more free-market dynamic before I tie it all together: private media cannot exist without advertising revenue. So for example: in America, if you frequent travel channels on television you will notice a lot of advertisement from airlines, hotels, and related travel products and services. And if you frequent news networks like FOX News and CNN, you will notice a major amount of advertisement from fear-promoted products and services. Firearm manufacturers don't advertise on mainstream TV in the US, but they benefit vicariously from 24-hour fear-based news programming. Without any significant restrictions, the average American can go from a FOX News Special Report to an AR-15 assault rifle in about an hour. 

If you follow the gun control debate in the US, you will notice that the pro gun lobby emphasizes the word "ban" over "control". You will also notice that what follows is a message of fear about freedom lost. In a highly deregulated marketplace, the result is highly predictable. So are firearm sales profits.

So what does any of that have to do with gun control in the UK and a Harvard University study? This: the UK has and always had more market restrictions than the US, and therefore the flooding of its marketplace with any product, including guns, has always been a much more difficult endeavor. All the government of the UK did years ago, as it realized that there was a real danger of its marketplace being flooded with firearms, was to preempt the move.

How is the UK market more restrictive than the US? Higher levels of government involvement, higher overall taxes, higher cost of living, higher cost of doing business, and a culture that has not embraced the marketing of fear as profusely as the US has. Yes, America: freedom does indeed have a price, and blood is not its only currency.

I think it's ironic that Harvard Law did not consult with its top-ranked business and economics school next door. Surely they would have been reminded that the laws of supply and demand almost always predetermine the laws of a government. Gridlocked gun control by itself will never work in the US. Only a paradigm shift collaboration between fair gun control and a mass detox program against a culture of fear-addiction will solve our problem.

...

"The Newsroom":
The Shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords 

(Click on image to view video clip)