Now that immigration and borders are America’s number-one political and emotional issue, upon which the whole GOP’s (and America’s own) future rests, I am reminded of the news about Amsterdam’s buildings and canals facing collapse. The immigration news is social and the Dutch news is physical, somewhat unrelated: But they converge in the universal tendency in all things to harmonize within themselves, which sheds light on our own “immigration problem.”
To solve it, the Biden administration had counted on Latinos wanting to stay home if their poverty and political disorder were made tolerable enough. That approach failed and Latinos want to cross the border el norte in search of a better life. The issue has been so central to American politics that Donald Trump was elected twice on the promise to protect our borders.
Regarding reports from the Netherlands: Many centuries ago, Amsterdam was built below sea-level on millions of wood pilings, which are now collapsing under the wear and tear of modern traffic. Sink holes are appearing in the city now, foreshadowing disasters to come if something is not done to keep the eventual invasion of sea water to overcome Amsterdam. As a result, billions of euros are earmarked to get the enforcement construction started.
Now these two disparate events, sea water in Holland and immigration in America, are connected by the universal principle — both social and natural — called equilibrium, the tendency in everything to seek harmony with itself.
The Dutch people, with their technical savvy and human determination, have successfully defied this universal principle by building gigantic dikes, over 100 miles of them, to keep the sea water from achieving its own equilibrium. The human defiance of a natural principle can be successfully carried out only if a concerted, determined and unsparing effort is made constantly, without rest. We know of the heroic Dutch boy who tried, with his thumb, to stop the sea water breaking out of a crack in the dam. While physically impossible, the story symbolizes the obsessive nature of a nation that lives day and night with the defiance of equilibrium. The original wood pilings would eventually rot out and the whole capital would collapse into sea water, giving the universal principle its inevitable conclusion: It’s the natural order of things.
Like this technical project in Europe, the immigration issue in the Americas is of a similar kind of struggle for (and against) equilibrium, just as inevitable and just as forceful as the one in nature. No man-made barriers could keep them out in search of their own equilibrium. Like the sea water seeking to achieve a state of harmony with itself, there is a relentless effort among the humans to attain a greater share of the wealth (even its breadcrumbs) that their neighbors enjoy exclusively.
Economists calculate that the difference in wealth between the United States and its southern neighbors is about 20 to 1, the largest wealth gap in the world between two regions sharing a border. Most dramatically, if you just step across the “border” northward, you will earn 20 times as much for your labor. In reverse, if Mexico were rich and America poor, which American would not try to cross south for a better life?
In nature, it is the massive equalization like earthquakes or floods that do the job. In society, such an awful disequilibrium is overcome by revolutions — or migrations. Americans came to the New World for political and religious freedom; Latinos want to come to their New World for economic and political freedom.
Americans now want to shut the gate: As in Amsterdam to keep the water out, the haves in America move heaven and earth just to keep their wealth in their own coffers, hiring America’s poor (ICE) to keep the Latino poor out.
The have-nots in America, on their part, are resigned to and accept the idea — thanks to the effects of pernicious education, propaganda, and the law (yes, don’t forget the law which sends the sheriff’s deputies to evict or arrest you if you fall behind payment) — that the rich will always be rich. Thus brainwashed, America’s have-nots believe that threats to the rich are threats to their own pocketbooks. So, wealth remains largely untouchable within American society.
But our Latino neighbors are not Americans: They are not brainwashed and are free from the effects of our own mandatory education, sophisticated propaganda and the feared law. As people with more natural feeling capacities, Latinos want some of that wealth that’s just across the imaginary line called the border. In their view, the border is artificial and the citizenship accidental, and legal and illegal crossings are just legalistic inconveniences, not moral distinctions. Borders are constantly remapped, and even Americans thought nothing of borders during frontier days as theirs changed every day. After all, borders and citizenships are nothing permanent: Half the U.S. once was Mexican territory. History is decided by winners; so are the borders.
Of course, we build walls and deploy thousands of border guards and ICE agents to keep our wealth within American borders. But the forces of equilibrium are relentless. Our poor and hungry neighbors, just like the unforgiving sea water in the Netherlands, are coming desperately through every crack in the map, as we protect our gold and silver just as desperately with all our power and brutality.
If we were angels in heaven watching this cosmic struggle between irresistible forces against immoveable objects, would we see it as tragedy or comedy?
Jon Huer, retired professor and columnist for the Recorder, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.