On the Fringe
The pilot of the huge Airbus A380, which is the world’s largest plane, made a public announcement about the delay that was holding us back on the tarmac: A kid was unwell and the parents decided to avoid any risk of a medical emergency over the polar flight path. The plane returned to the gate, and we waited for the family to deplane and their bags to be offloaded.
The long 16-hour flight to Dubai now became an even longer 17-hour flight, which closed the narrow window for the connecting flight to Chennai.
I have learnt by now that it is best to yield when life is not within my control. Thankfully, the middle seat was open. At the window seat was an Afghan with a prosthetic forearm who asked me to help him unzip his jacket. I wasn’t going to complain about a flight delay.
I scanned through the list of foreign movies that might interest me. Even before we were airborne, I selected to play “On the Fringe”. I figured that I could not possibly go that wrong with a Penelope Cruz movie, especially when she was listed as one of the producers.
Maybe you will watch it, while sitting at home as opposed to when squeezed into an economy class seat in a plane. Quite a bit happens to humans over 24 hours in the movie, which I watched two months ago. It features a lot of immigrants, and it is immigration that this post is about.
This opinion essay in WaPo begins with an opening paragraph that is well crafted:
MADRID — Spain’s baby bust began more than 30 years ago and has lately accelerated, prompting a question that confronts most rich countries and nearly all in Europe: How does society cope, let alone maintain its dynamism, with free-falling fertility driven by a soaring share of women who have no children at all?
Spain, like most of Europe and Far East Asia, has been experiencing very low fertility rates. On an average, women aren’t having enough kids to replace the ones who die and, increasingly, significant percentages of women are choosing not to have even one child.
How would a country then continue to grow and prosper and take care of its elderly?
Spain, roughly tied with Italy as the fertility laggards among major Western countries, has opted for more immigrants. In the late 1990s, scarcely 3 percent of residents in Spain were immigrants; today they account for more than 17 percent of population — one of the highest shares in Europe, and more than in the United States.
Re-read that: As a percentage of the population, immigrants in Spain outnumber immigrants here in the US. The foreign-born account for only 13.9% of the US population.
[Surging] immigration has bolstered Spain’s robust economic growth, which is outstripping most of Europe’s. Spanish law has smoothed the way for migrants, especially Latin Americans sharing language and cultural affinity with Spain. They gain easy access to working legally and, after just two years, eligibility for citizenship.
If Spain can allow that level of immigration, surely we can do that, right, more so given the poetic rhetoric of “give me your tired, your poor”?
But, immigration has become a toxic political issue, particularly after the rapist came down the escalator in 2015 and launched his presidential campaign in which he referred to immigrants with terrible language. Recently, he has even started yelling and screaming that those trying to enter the country are not even humans but are animals! It never ceases to shock me that there are tens of millions of people who practically worship this racist rapist.
Catherine Rampell, who is a WaPo columnist, lays out her argument about immigration right in the title: “You don’t want immigrants? Then tell grandma she can never retire.”
Rampell writes, and not for the first time, that “all of the new job growth since the pandemic, on net, has been due to foreign-born workers. That is, if you stripped away immigrants, there would be no more people employed today than was the case before covid.”
These facts versus the rhetoric spewing out of the mouths of the racist rapist and his party people, among many other such comparisons, ought to easily convince any rational voter to vote for the incumbent and the candidates of his party. Yet, as of now, the candidates are tied?
The fact that “native-born Americans are less likely to be in the workforce today than in years past” is, as Rampell writes, “entirely due to aging.” She writes:
[If] current immigration trends continue — which they might not, depending who wins in November — immigration is likely to boost our fortunes in the years ahead: The Congressional Budget Office recently revised upward its 10-year gross domestic product projections by $7 trillion, attributing the increase to immigration-driven labor force growth. Our longer-term fiscal challenges also look better, since immigrants pay taxes and are much less likely than native-born Americans to (ever) qualify for benefits, including programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
If we were to have Spain’s level of foreign-born population, then we will have another 3%, which is about 11 million people.
If we were to have a level of foreign-born population that Canada has, then we can take in another 9%: Approximately 23 percent of Canada's total population is foreign-born. So, 30 million more foreigners can easily settle in these United States of America.
But, the problem for the rapist and his party is not really about immigration itself but the fact that the immigrants aren’t white. The ones who want to come here are packaged in various shades of brown. When he was in the Oval Office, the rapist openly and loudly opined that “we should have more people from Norway” instead of immigrants from “shithole countries”. The rhetoric against immigrants is, therefore, really about non-whites, isn’t it?
So … pundits like Catherine Rampell can layout all the facts and logic forever. But, that won’t change the feelings that racists have about immigrants.