NATIONHOOD V NATIONALITY IN THE TIME OF TRUMP…
MANY of us stand in shock and awe at what Donald Trump has managed to accomplish in the short time he’s been in the White House. Since the travel ban on citizens of seven Islamic nations, about 60 000 existing visas have been revoked, and numerous people who had been trying to sleep in a cramped airplane seat or were eating plastic airline food when the regulation was passed were simply turned around at the airport on their arrival and sent back to their point of departure. And Trump’s famous wall with Mexico is now estimated to cost about $21 billion instead of the originally estimated $12bn. But that’s okay, because the Mexicans are going to pay for it anyway.
But I am not surprised. I was in the US just before The Donald was voted in, and the highlight of my trip was a visit to the Ellis Island National Immigration Museum with my 94-year-old Aunt Marian, who had been “processed” at Ellis Island in November 1938 as a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany.
It was an experience of such ironic paradox that if it hadn’t been sad, terrifying and literally a matter of life and death, it would have been funny. While they’d had enough money to bribe their way to a favourable place in the visa queue and to buy a first class ticket to the US, Marian’s family were not allowed to take any money out of Germany. So my teenage aunt, after swanning it in first class for a few weeks, ended up penniless in an orderly but very crowded mêlée of arriving refugees. And then the unthinkable happened. Her father got a dreaded chalk mark, which sent him straight to the hospital wing, and none of them would be allowed out until he was either declared fit to enter the US, in which case they all could, or they would all be sent back to Germany to a not uncertain fate. So they spent a fearful night in the 600-bed dormitory section where – according to Marian – the food was inedible. But they were lucky. An uncle who was already living in the US and who had done quite well for himself solved the problem with a big paper bag full of dollar notes. And they were in. (Some things never change.)
It wasn’t that easy for everyone. It’s lucky for Marian that, for example, they didn’t leave six months later on the MS St Louis. After a safe and uneventful – and even pleasant – trip across the Atlantic, the 900-plus Jewish refugees on this ill-fated vessel were denied entry into Cuba, the US and/ or Canada – even though they had visas – because these countries had changed the entry regulations while they were at sea. So what happened to them? They were sent back to Europe – but not Germany, of course. To “safe” countries like France, Belgium and Holland. If you know your history, you’ll know that means that a goodly percentage of them will have ended up in extermination camps.
And the reason? German Jewish refugees were denied entry into the US because they may have been German spies! If this sounds familiar, remember this was last century, not last month, but you can be forgiven for being confused. Not much has changed in this country that markets itself as a “melting pot” and “a nation of immigrants”.
A 1938 poll found 67% of Americans were opposed to accepting German, Austrian and other political refugees. A January 2017 poll found 48% of Americans in favour of Trump’s order to suspend immigration from seven Islamic states – and only 42% against. Does that mean that 10% of Americans just don’t care?
Ellis Island Museum is all about history, and about the history of immigration, so it’s definitely an adventure of the mind and soul, and it’s a rare visitor to this museum who won’t start questioning some of the things we take for granted. What, for example, makes someone American? And, as a visitor from South Africa, I certainly found myself musing on issues closer to home – it’s only because of people like Rhodes that the Limpopo River is a border, so what makes someone South African? Or African for that matter? I was born here, but my father was a European refugee, so what does that make me? If we look back far enough, we are all amakwerekwere, so what duties do we have – as humans – towards more recent refugees from famine, war and genocide?
Marian and I wandered around for a while until we found “her” window. She showed me where – nearly 80 years ago – she had sat gazing at the Statue of Liberty, wondering if she would ever get into the US or if she’d be sent back to Germany. If she’d be one of the lucky “huddled masses” of the beautiful inscription on the statue’s plinth that was then – and is now even more – a tad disingenuous: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempesttossed to me…”
It’s a beautiful poem and a noble sentiment, but it’s not true and never was. It always did refer only to Western European huddled masses – and even then only if they had money. And anyone who looked decidedly wretched would get a chalk mark and – if they didn’t rub it out quickly enough or turn their clothes inside out – would be denied entry on medical (often eugenic) grounds.
Even so, there are some very positive aspects to the museum. There is a lot about the resilience of the human spirit, and a retroactive acknowledgement of past injustices, which – it seems – has not been noted by the present dispensation.
But it’s not all deep theorising. The ferry ride over is fun, with some stunning views of the New York skyline and – of course – Lady Liberty.
We had a lovely lunch under some trees, with beautiful views, and then we headed over to the American Immigrant Wall of Honour, where Marian showed me where her family’s name was inscribed.
On the ride back to Battery Park I had a chance to try to come to terms with the concept of immigration, citizenship and all that. To be honest, we’re all Africans – in fact, according to the latest theory, we’re all descended from the few humans who survived the last ice age by hanging out in the South-Western Cape and pigging out on seafood. And these guys (our ancestors) headed off into Europe and wiped out the poor old indigenous Neanderthals. And then we proceeded to populate the Earth, move from place to place, kill enslave and/or assimilate anyone who looked different, spoke differently, prayed differently, got in our way or occupied land that we rather fancied. And the weirdest thing is that a surprising number of people are actually proud of that heritage. That includes a number of Zionists who seem incapable of seeing the irony in their occupation of Palestine, and the many American citizens who see no irony in building a wall between Mexico and the states of California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, which – until the 1846-1848 invasion of Mexico by America – had been a part of Mexico.
I wonder what changes the curators of the museum will have to make to the displays over the next few years to make sense of Trump’s presidency.