Us Against Them

    Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
    Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
    You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane, 
    All they will call you will be, "deportee"
                                           From "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)"
                                           By Woody Guthrie and Martin Hoffman

    During World War II, Congress authorized a program to bring Mexican farm workers into the United States to fill labor shortages caused by the war. Private contractors were to provide transportation to and from the Mexican border. If contractors defaulted, the U.S. Immigration Service filled in.
    In 1948, a plane carrying Mexican laborers crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California. All aboard were killed. Newspaper and radio accounts of the crash named the flight crew but not the 28 Mexican passengers. They were called only  "deportees."   They were buried in a mass grave.  Only 12 were ever identified.
    Folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a poem containing the words above.  Later a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman set it to music. The song became a staple of the American folk music  movement in the 1960s.
    Guthrie was assailing the cultural bias manifest in the episode: The dead passengers were only hired help.  And they were not even from our country.  They were not like "us." In death as in life, they mattered less.
    Biases are part of being human. Everyone harbors them.  We carry around in our heads a kind of personal caste system.  We label people:  This one is diligent; that one is lazy; the other is greedy. Some lifestyles are wholesome; of others we disapprove.   Some vocations are lofty, some menial. On the ladder in our minds, not everyone stands on the same rung.
    Our varying views have a common denominator:  Some people and their attitudes are essentially like me and mine.  But others are essentially different. Those differences mark the border of unfamiliar territory. There, my norms may not be observed;  my interests may not be wholly valued. People who are different put me on alert.
    Add the catalyst of ethnicity, and our attitudes can reach punitive extremes. The American story is full of examples. When they reached our shores, Italians, Irish, Poles, Dutch, Chinese and more had to endure disdain, ridicule, abuse and worse. To this day, African Americans pay a heavy price simply for being who they are.    
    Newcomers. Outsiders. People who don't look or speak or dress or worship or celebrate or grieve the way we do.  They all put us on alert.
    The death of  those wartime workers marks an example that has exploded anew in the debate of illegal immigration.  The debate can be especially heated, even venomous, because it takes place in a powerful new context. Demographic trends are literally changing the nation's face.  In about 40 years, people  who've traditionally thought of themselves the typical American -- that is, whites -- will be a minority.  The surge from south of the border is not just a legal, political or economic problem. It's a reminder that the way we live together in our own country is headed for fundamental and inescapable change. 
    Ethnicity also is playing a new role in presidential politics. An election that pits a moderately conservative Republican against a moderately liberal Democrat is complicated by the fact that the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney,  is a moneyed patrician, and the Democratic president is African American.   Us-versus-them imagery is especially tempting, and some have succumbed. A vivid example comes from former New Hampshire Governor and White House Chief of Staff John Sununu. He declared not long ago that President Barack Obama needs to "learn how to be an American."  This would be an exceedingly odd thing to say of a fifth generation WASP.  It resonates -- in some ears -- because the president is a black man with an unusual name.
    (For the sake of a smile, let us note that Sununu was born in Cuba, and that his immediate heritage is Palestinian and Greek.)
    Unless we find a way to transcend human nature, ethnic tensions are inevitable in a country as diverse as ours. But nowadays they've been heightened by the sheer size of the illegal migration from the south.   And other pressures -- economic, and cultural -- have joined to put ugly edges on our national conversation. 
    Failures of leadership complete the mix.  A bankruptcy of ideas has opened politics on the right to proprietorship by second-stringers, ideologues, snake oil salesmen and quacks.  Republicans themselves acknowledge that their presidential nominee is merely the strongest of a weak bunch.  
    On all sides we find a contagious portrayal of political notions as moral precepts. In the sadly ironic result, we lose the moral discipline to respect others' point of view. Policy debate becomes a kind of holy war.  Candidates are not merely opposed; they are reviled.  Public discourse becomes genuinely hostile to differences of opinion.  
    American democracy should aspire to more than an ethic of intolerance.