It is not possible to overemphasize the empirical fact that our Nation is entirely populated with immigrants and their descendants (with the possible exception of its Indigenous peoples). Yet the controversy over the admission of new Americans from foreign countries seeking safety or a better quality of life for themselves and their families is productive of non-empathic and determinative controversy
The word “xenophobia,” is universally understood as a fear of strangers or of someone from a different place of origin. It is our considered view that such a mindset is, at the same time, similar to such phobic pathologies as “claustrophobia,” the fear of confined spaces, “agoraphobia,” the fear of being in places where escape is difficult, “pathophobia,” the fear of disease, and “astraphobia,” the fear of thunder and lightning, but as a singular and distinctive aberration, it can be taught, as in the case of the universal dynamics of human bigotry.
We perceive the pathology of ” xenophobia,” as constituting another example of the toxic plethora of irrational bigotry, as morally inappropriate and, sadly, like many other pernicious forms of prejudice, or intolerance, has become a subject of intense disputation and enmity.
It was Emma Lazarus, who referenced the Nation’s institutional and empathic welcome to needy foreigners, by the empathic designation of the Nationally representational, Statue of Liberty ” as the “Mother of Exiles,” and in poetic terms reference it a symbolic colossus, standing tall in the East River, facing Europe with the open invitation, “.Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free,” Her aesthetic message articulates the Nation’s traditional humanistic welcome to all new Americans, as legislated in the Nation’s Immigration Laws.
We, with much discomfort, recall the deplorable declarations of Donald Trump on the subject of immigration, “They (?) send us their (?) bad people, their criminals, their rapists…murderers, et cetra ad nauseum. Before we proceed with our contextual theme, we would inquire as to whom Trump refers to when he accusatorily refers to “they” (as in “they send”) and “their.” Foreign refugees from dire peril are universally in flight from their former government and certainly are not “sent” by their respective authoritarian or criminal leaders from whom they flee. By empirical contrast, immigrants universally, escape from dire poverty and famine, seeking a better life for themselves and family.
It is infuriating to hear Donald Trump’s gross and defamatory exhortations, to the delight of his loyal horde of America’s huge underbelly of populist acolytes, concerning these vulnerable souls, desperately fleeing from a dismal existence, yearning, in the words of Emma Lazarus, “to live free.”
The defamatory words, “rapists,” criminals” and the like, neurotically ascribed by Donald Trump to the poor, desperate, and brave heroes who venture to brave great vicissitudes in their desperate march across untold miles of boiling hot desert wasteland in desperate search of freedom, are especially hateful, false and especially obnoxious for the persona of Donald Trump, who has been shamefully a declared an adjudicated rapist is a recognized multi- indicted and convicted felonious criminal, and incidentally, himself, a first generation American citizen (son of a German immigrant) whose all three marriages were celebrated with immigrant wives.
Donald Trump,. with the cultish compliance of his populist base, would likely prefer a change the Nation’s emblematic motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” to a less inclusive expression such as “In Trumpus Verbatim.”
For all those xenophobic descendants of immigrants, we would earnestly inquire as to what makes current immigrants any different or worse than the population of Americans, who, irrefutably are children of immigrants?
-p.
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