Right now, there’s a narrative that Central American asylum seekers are a caravan of people intending to hurt Americans. While this may sound like something new, it isn’t.
Irish refugees coming to Ellis Island in the 1840s and 1850s were described as lazy, filthy, and violent. Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s were considered uncivilized and unclean. Italian immigrants in the 1880s, beginning 1900s, “ignorant of democracy” and “disposed to criminality.” Filipino immigrants during the 1920s and 1930s, inferior and untamed, and the list goes on.
Like so many waves of immigrants/refugees/asylum-seekers before them, this wave of Central Americans are “the other:” the “they,” “them,” “these people,” which is why this campaign was created. Many of us have ancestors who left their homes to escape war, violence, political upheaval, economic instability, famine, and drought. Some of our family members were immigrants, others with refugee and asylum statuses; they came here because they had to—met with suspicion and fear.
For those of us with immigrant/refugee/asylum-seeking ancestry, it takes looking in the mirror to see “the other,” the “they,” “them,” “these people,” whose coming-here threatened to rip an America held near and dear apart. Our bones know this fearful narrative well; we are the children (first generation and fourth generation) of immigrants/refugees/asylum-seekers who went through it, as the Central American asylum seekers go through it now. We are them and “them:”
The Irish wave amidst the Potato Famine in the 1840s; German wave after the Revolutions of 1848; Chinese wave from economic chaos in the 1850s; Jewish wave in result of the anti-Jewish uprisings in the early 1880s; Dominican wave during political upheaval and economic instability in the 1960s, continuing 2000s; Haitian wave from a devastating earthquake in 2010; Syrian wave amidst a civil war happening today; and the so-many-more waves among and in between.
So let’s support our brothers and sisters from the south—this wave—and share our how-I-got-here stories. For, little by little, story by story, we can dispel the fearful narrative about Central American asylum seekers and seek to end the perpetuation of otherness towards immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees.