In this week's episode of WITHPod, chrislhayes speaks with author Suketu Mehta about his vision of America and what it means for the country to be welcoming to strangers. Listen and full transcript:
Migration is central to the human experience. For as long as we’ve been around, people have been moving from one place to another. Though it’s never been easier to get from point A to point B, the inequality between those places could be as great as they’ve ever been. We’re now on the front edge of a climate crisis, launching the greatest period of human migration that will ever have happened on the planet.
I mean, we know from the fossil record and that humans started in one very specific place in this world, and after enough time they got everywhere. The way they got everywhere was moving around, migrating. Read the writings of the Roman era, and it is just wild to imagine how much movement and migration and mixing of cultures there are 2,000 years ago. There's no airplanes, there's no fossil fuels, it's not easy to get from place to place, but people move around. Jesus is born in Bethlehem because people move around.
So all around the world we're seeing huge amounts of people moving and huge disruption to politics around that migration. And in a lot of ways this is going to be the central challenge for us, in this century. I really, truly believe that. The central challenge is climate and making sure that we have a habitable planet and we don't cook the earth past a kind of disastrous tipping point.
And that's like, in some ways the project of this podcast, is to talk about that. But it's also the project of today's guest, who is an incredible guy, incredible author. His name is Suketu Mehta, and he wrote essentially a kind of manifesto about his vision of America, welcoming the stranger, what it means for America to appeal to the better angels of this nature, with respect to immigration.
SUKETU MEHTA: That's the question. Exactly. Where am I from? The planet Earth. The mother ship. Well, I was born in Calcutta. My mother's from Nairobi. I grew up in Bombay. And when I was 14, I came to Jackson Heights. So, I used to answer this question,"Where are you from?" growing up in Queens I'd say,"From Bombay." But increasingly now, when I go around the world, I say I'm from New York. I lived in Queens. I've lived in Brooklyn.
And we just had to transit through Germany from Frankfurt to Cologne, and then get on a flight from Cologne to JFK. But at the Frankfurt Airport, the German passport control officer looks at my father's Indian passport, and mine, and my sisters' Indian passports, and we're fine. But my mother's British passport, it was a passport given by Great Britain to citizens of the former Commonwealth, that basically had no value.
If we hadn't gotten on the plane, he would have stayed on the plane and woken up in New York. So it was an absurd journey throughout. And then when we get to JFK, our first apartment in the country was a studio apartment in Jackson Heights, and there were five of us crammed in this studio apartment. And the super turned off the lights the first night because there were too many people in the studio apartment.
I remember my second day in this school, this white kid with red hair and freckles, coming up to me and glaring at me and saying,"Lincoln should have never let them off the plantations." And I said,"But what's that got to do with me?"CHRIS HAYES: That was the opening line,"Lincoln never should have let them off the plantation?"CHRIS HAYES: In Queens.CHRIS HAYES: That's right. Queens that gave us Archie Bunker and Donald Trump.CHRIS HAYES: And this boy.
CHRIS HAYES: I mean, it's funny you say that because the cosmopolitan nature of New York City exists side by side with incredible amounts of racial stereotyping and ethnic stereotyping, from every group to every other group. Right? I mean, I remember ... in the Bronx, there's a lot of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans — Dominican friends about Puerto Ricans saying wild, crazy, obviously false stuff. Generalizing about Puerto Ricans all do this.
What's the recipe? What makes the culture work when these fear, resentment of the stranger is so universal? And even in the multicultural little apartment complex, what's the difference between the world that's instantiated there and the world that's instantiated in your Catholic school, where you are the subject of really nasty, racist bullying?
Hindu rioters walk down a street after setting a truck ablaze in Bombay, India on Jan. 10, 1993. Police fired on rioters, but sectarian fighting between Hindus and Muslims raged unchecked for a fifth day in the industrial city in western India.CHRIS HAYES: Essentially someone who, in previous roles, incited this kind of violence.
SUKETU MEHTA: So I went to this Catholic school in Queens and somehow survived it, and then went down to NYU. But my parents were afraid I'd be Americanized if I lived in the dorm, so I had to stay home and commute from Jackson Heights to NYU. And now I said,"I'm getting into NYU housing one way or the other." So I'm an NYU professor now and I go to-SUKETU MEHTA: Exactly.
SUKETU MEHTA: I write in the book about an experience I had with my sister year last Thanksgiving. We decided that we were going to get a drink in Hoboken, in New Jersey, because Hoboken had just elected a Sikh mayor. As we were walking across the street, this car pulled up with these young white kids who were just yelling all kinds of things:"Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar," and they were gesticulating and making obscene gestures.
SUKETU MEHTA: Look, every immigrant group that's come to the country has had this phrase thrown at them. The Irish had it, the Italians had it, the Jews had it, and it hurts. It hurts every time because you come here and you really want to contribute to the country, and you think that this is one place where you can be American. I've lived in England, I never thought I could be English. I've lived in France, I never imagined I could be French.
But of course that's true with everything. Every single one of them, every single one of them, a culture you're embedded in where it seems wrong or vile, but not preposterous, is as preposterous as that statement. Every bit of ethnic stereotyping, bigotry, hatred, tribal, confessional, whatever it is, is literally that preposterous. But it doesn't feel that way to people in the moment, to huge swaths of people. Even very wise and smart people like Benjamin Franklin.
So, all across community like Jackson Heights, through much of New York, there's this kind of fear of the state of the midnight knock, which is like Stalinist Russia. I never thought that we'd see the country come to this path. SUKETU MEHTA: But that's the question of open borders. Does the nation have the right to control who comes in, how many they let in? It's a very complex issue. I'd like to first point out that this whole question of borders and passports and visas is only about 100 years old. In the long history on the planet, we human beings have only started thinking about these questions about a century ago.
SUKETU MEHTA: So, in my book I also considered these arguments by serious philosophers, not just crackpots, who say that any kind of collective has the right to define rules for membership, or there's this lifeboat here. The United States is a lifeboat in an ocean, and there are lots of people swimming around. If too many people get on the lifeboat, then everyone sinks — both the newcomers on the lifeboat and people who've been there before.
CHRIS HAYES: It's one of the most closed off society to immigration of any, probably it is the most closed off to immigration of any First World country. That it just makes no sense that just the natural lottery of where you happen to be born essentially determined all your life outcomes, and like if you're born in a slum in Bangladesh, like,"Too bad. Got to stay there. Can't go to the United States, because you’re SOL buddy." At some level it's like that's morally indefensible.
CHRIS HAYES: This is what's so wild. The U.S. barricading itself behind the walls, when you ... Colombia has got a million Venezuelans, a million. Can you imagine if a million folks showed up? We're freaking out because several hundred thousand a month are showing up at the border from all of Central America. There were several million Iraqis in Damascus alone at the worst periods of the sectarian civil war in Iraq, in one city. It creates lots of tension. There's lots of fights.
CHRIS HAYES: So, I want to make the argument, the argument that restrictionists make. I've spent a lot of time going back and forth with these people and reporting on immigration, so I feel like I can give their arguments.
There's no evidence that these alleged waves of immigrants are actually disturbing the peace, or else making people poorer. However-SUKETU MEHTA: Right. Steve Bannon once said that the origins of the current way of nationalism, not just in America, but in Europe, originated in the 2008 financial crisis. Now, I don't agree with Bannon on much, but this is one thing where I feel he has a point. These people's money was stolen, and where did it go? To the plutocrats, it went to Wall Street. The government bailed out the bankers. America has never been more unequal. The top 1 percent make more than the bottom 90 percent.
SUKETU MEHTA: I totally agree that in the beginning to never-Trumpers, the country club Republicans, they had it known that they didn't liked Trump. Once he was in office, he gave them the biggest Christmas gift in history, the tax cut. And now, they're all behind him. And he is planning to get re-elected on the basis of immigrant hatred. This is going to be his signature policy, and all the plutocrats are behind him and they've never been richer.
CHRIS HAYES: And that's literally the exact same thing in Le Pen votes in France. It's the same thing at Trump votes in the U.S. An absolute iron law of all this is that people who are not immigrants in the most cosmopolitan areas which have the most exposure to immigrants are the most pro-immigrant populations in every respect.
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