World Policy Journal
Volume XIX, No 4, Winter 2002/03

Slouching Down Xenophobe Alley
Karl E. Meyer ^*

 

The symptoms are unmistakable. Across America in December, throngs of male foreigners frantically swamped federal offices, where they were grilled, fingerprinted, and digitally photographed. Those aliens whose work or student permits were somehow deemed wanting were liable to be handcuffed and herded like felons into lockups. This was the result of a hastily prepared, ill-publicized order signed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who initially ordered the fingerprinting of all alien males 16 or older who were native to Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Sudan. Responding to a justifiable outcry over this selective list, the Justice Department expanded the order to include 12 other Islamic countries, plus North Korea, but revealingly continued to omit Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Faced with further protests, the Justice Department then added both countries and (inexplicably) Armenia– only to provoke a roar of mystified anger from politically influential Armenian Americans. Armenia was dropped from the list.

Thus did the United States slouch down a familiar path, marked Xenophobe Alley, whose ultimate destination is likely to be Remorse Avenue and possibly Reparations Square. Granted, Washington does contend with a serious security problem in locating Osama bin Laden's sleeper cells, or any other terror gang. Granted as well that U.S. colleges and universities have been careless monitors of foreigners bearing student visas who fail actually to enroll–almost as careless prior to 9/11, one hastens to add, as the FBI, the CIA, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But Attorney General Ashcroft's response is like that of a zealous citizen who sets off false alarms throughout the city to arouse people to the danger of fire.

Like certain strains of influenza, or like insatiable locusts that hibernate for 14 years, xenophobia seems to recur in cycles. The first outbreak in the young American public was directed at suspected Jacobins, and gave birth to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Then came the harassment of the Popish Irish, before and after the Great Famine of 1846–47, an antiforeign movement that found its lasting symbol in the Know-Nothing Party. After the Civil War, there was the Yellow Peril, fanned by the yellow press, that led to the enactment in 1882 of the Chinese exclusion law. But the true precursors of the present campaign were the Red Scare of 1919–20 and the drive in the 1930s to close the gates to Jews and others fleeing Nazi Germany.

I have in my library a little blue book, The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty, by Louis Post, who was assistant secretary of labor from 1913 to 1921. Spurred by an outbreak of terror bombing, including a lethal blast on Wall Street, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer ordered the wholesale arrest and deportation of thousands of suspect aliens. Louis Post was himself responsible for key deportations, and his book constitutes a mea culpa. In stirring this American delirium, he writes, the chief agency was the Department of Justice, whose secret service viewed radicals as "moral rats" whose depravity warranted illegal. searches and arbitrary detention. He goes on:

The records of accusation and evidence for which the Department of Justice made itself responsible through its secret-service auxiliary, and which are now in the files of the Bureau of Immigration by the thousands, would disgrace the judgment of any lawyer who dared cite them in vindication of the epidemic of arrests to which they relate. Only slightly more than a third of all the aliens arrested were legally deportable upon the evidence submitted.... Except for the membership clauses of the deportation laws there could hardly have been, out of the thousands of aliens charged with deportable offenses, more than a canoe load of deportees.

It is mercifully the truth that nothing so awful has yet happened on Attorney General Ashcroft's watch, but then suppose there is another terror attack, comparable in horror with September 11. In Los Angeles just this winter, among the many unreasonably detained on technical charges was an Iranian-born Israeli citizen who fled from his birthplace after the 1979 revolution. As the New York Times reported (December 17, 2002): "He spent all of Tuesday in the federal building lockup in Los Angeles, where he said he saw dozens of men in similar circumstances. He was then taken by bus to a jail in Pasadena, where he spent the night. He was later taken to a detention center in Lancaster, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles, where his father-in-law put up $1,500 bail to get him out on Thursday afternoon."

"This was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me," the man said. "I am very respected in the business community here and I was just trying to do the right thing [by turning up to register], to help solve the problem this country has with terrorism." He added: "We were treated like animals in Iran and all I want is for my kids to grow up and say they're proud to be Americans. But until the day I die, I'm going to be a foreigner in this country, because of the way I look and my accent."

What America Gained

As to the 1930s, an interesting perspective is to see the period through the ingratiating memoirs of Walter Albert Eberstadt, Whence We Came, Where We Went: A Family History (published by W.A.E. Books, Whitehurst & Clark, 100 Newfield Avenue, Edison, N.J.). Eberstadt's story is typical of many German Jews who were able to escape the Nazi furies, and who reciprocated their adopted countries generously. In his case, young Walter went first to England, where he attended Oxford, served in the British army from 1940 to 1946, commanded an infantry platoon in Normandy, and then ended up as a military control officer in Hamburg, where he had spent much of his boyhood. After an editorial apprenticeship as a financial writer with the Economist in London, Eberstadt sailed to New York, and rose to prominence as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers and Lazard Frères.

Here let me confess an interest. Walter is no stranger to this journal, or to the World Policy Institute, or to New School University. That said, what commends his memoir is that it so exactly reflects that mixture of humor and melancholy that make him so inspiriting a figure as the chairman of our institute's advisory board and a trustee of the university. This sample well expresses his outlook:

Much commends dying where you are born, but had I not left my homeland, I would have missed out on a wonderfully varied and interesting life. I have been able to draw on three countries, at various times home, both loved, and hated. Most of us need and want to belong somewhere, but if you don't totally belong to any country or creed, you become gun-shy of too much nationalism and religion. Flags, national anthems, hymns, the emotions they stir–and the pain they can inflict! I am far from immune to their spell but try not to be swept off my feet.

Had we been Gentile rather than Jewish Germans, I have no reason to assume we would have belonged to the courageous minority of Nazi opponents. I like to think we would not have been attracted to dictatorships, but then tolerance is probably as much a matter of glands and temperament as of character and principles. Those who seemingly on principle champion unpopular causes, or who are against the government of the day, tend to be contrarians by temperament, bile, and disposition as much as reason. They are contrarians in the stock market and contrarians with their spouses.

And as with many refugees, Eberstadt also tasted the malicious absurdities of officialdom. During the Battle of Britain, he was briefly detained as an "enemy alien," along with many hundreds of other German Jews. Still, this occurred at a moment of mortal peril in an isolated Britain braced for an imminent invasion. Nowadays, so it seems to me, the real peril for the United States is not an invasion, but its opposite–the fruitless quest for total security, at the cost of scuttling the very principles for which Americans are fighting. One recalls that during the Third Reich, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels famously vowed to wage "total war," and in the end perished with his Führer in total defeat. For this reason, the newborn Department of Homeland Security gives me a certain quiver. It has an unhappy resonance. As rendered by my wife in Nazi-speak, it would be Das Heimatverteidigungsministerium.

A Parental Voice

It is now a commonplace that the United States benefited immensely from the European political and religious exodus in the 1930s, which among other things denied Hitler the scientific brains that could have given his armies the atom bomb. Yet at the time, the refugee influx was the focus for bitter attack, so much so that the liberal Roosevelt administration granted visas to as few as possible. It happens that my father, Ernest L. Meyer, himself the son of German immigrants, fought hard to keep the gates open. He summed up the matter in his daily column for the New York Post on October 12, 1940, which now seems unexpectedly topical. Its title was "A Land Without Aliens."

Orange, Tex. Chairman Martin Dies of the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities said that if Congress permits the committee to continue its activities the investigation will result in deportation of 7,000,000 aliens. – News Item.

Now it happened that Martin Dies rubbed the magic lamp, and the genie appeared, and the genie said: "What is thy will, master?"

And Martin Dies answered: "It is my will that straightaway all the aliens in America be exiled to some distant and most inhospitable spot, and there do sufferance for their sins."

And the genie said: "Truly I can grant thy wish, master, but there is a law in my land which says that whosoever is sent into exile shall be allowed to take with him whatever he has created by his own efforts. This is, I think, a just law, and if you abide by it, I can grant your desire."

And Martin Dies said: "Indeed, your law is quite just. Let the aliens be deported, and let them take with them what they have created, for surely they have fashioned nothing but dissent and plots and radical heresies and sins and sabotage, and to these they are welcome."

And the genie said: "So be it master." And he uttered a few words of strange power, and a miracle happened.

It followed in that very instant that a vast fleet of barges and boats was fashioned, and into them, millions upon millions, flocked the aliens, and they took with them what they had created in America.

They took with them highways hewn out of the wilderness by Sicilians and Slavs, and great rafts of lumber felled in the forests by the Irish, Swedes and Norwegians, and many millions of square miles of earth made fertile by the Germans, the Danes and the Dutch, and billions of garments woven by the Jews, and mountainous masses of coal and iron and copper dug from the pits by Italians and Finns and Poles, and whole cities of skyscrapers and subways and railroads and mills and marts wrought by the sinews of many aliens from the earth's four quarters.

And they took with them also their alien culture, their music and their songs, their languages and their literature, their books and their Bibles and their cookery, their piety and their passions, their ideals and philosophy and folk-dances and fun which had been woven into the rich and multi-colored fabric of America.

Now all this happened when the genie granted the wish of Martin Dies, when the aliens left with all their works, and a great want followed, and a great and strange silence. And in that silence there was naught to be heard save the frightened whimpering of Martin Dies crying: "Genie, genie!" But there was no answer, for the genie, an alien, was on the boat to Baghdad, and after that there was nothing and the night.

Finally, a Correction

Due to an editing error, the article in our fall 2002 issue by Tadeusz Swietochowski, "Azerbaijan: The Hidden Faces of Islam," grossly, if inadvertently, understated the number of people internally displaced in the 1992–94 war over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Instead of 100,000, the total of those displaced was well over ten times higher. The consensual figures can be found elsewhere in this issue in an article expressly on the plight of IDPs, or internally displaced persons, in the South Caucasus, which we hope makes partial amends.