From Paris to Key West
By: Ben Fathi
Tags: Key West, Travel, Racism, Journalism, France

The Coming Immigrant Revolt

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” — Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

I was in Miami on a business trip last month and used the opportunity to spend a couple of days in Key West. The last time I was there was roughly thirty years ago. Perhaps I was just seeing the island through different eyes but I have to admit it felt very different this time around.

The intervening years have not been kind to the Keys. The multiple recent hurricanes and resultant economic downturn have been devastating to the region. And the recent introduction of cruise ships have added, there’s no other way to say it, a certain sleaze factor to the island.

Debris was strewn all across the side of the road as I drove down the highway that connects Miami to Key West: a four hour drive down a one lane highway. The locals kept talking about the “high season” starting in a couple of weeks, right around Christmas. Meanwhile, the streets were mostly empty.

Step a couple of blocks away from the busy main drag and you’ll still find the same quaint artsy shops, the breezy island bungalows, and the quiet Bed & Breakfasts catering to climate refugees from the frigid Northeast. There are also still plenty of elegant restaurants and shops around on the island but, increasingly, establishments on the main drag are giving way to T-shirt shops, tequila bars, and kiosks selling day-long excursions to nearby islands.

Downtown Key West looks like pretty much any Caribbean or Mexican resort town, waiting lethargically in the warm afternoon for the tourists to come off the cruise ships and give the economy a boost.

There seemed to be two Key Wests vying for control of the island: the old Key West of cottages and fancy restaurants right along with T-shirt shops and assorted tourist traps right next door. What was most intriguing to me was that “The Two Key Wests” seemed to live in equal but separate worlds, their paths rarely crossing. This was driven home to me by an amazing experience I had in a high end restaurant one night.

I walked in around five PM and sat at the bar, looking for a glass of wine and a light dinner, fighting jet lag to stay awake for a few more hours. The place was deserted except for the bartender who was busy washing glasses behind the bar and the restaurant manager who was interviewing prospective waiters at the other end of the hall.

I listened absentmindedly as the first interviewee spent about twenty minutes answering various questions posed by the restaurant manager. When the next candidate sat down for his interview, it became immediately clear that he was not a native English speaker. He spoke English clearly and had no trouble communicating but he did have a Spanish accent.

Within a couple of minutes, something very odd happened. I heard the bartender say loudly and to no one in particular: “English as a first language!”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by the remark. Perhaps it was just a follow-up comment to a discussion he had with one of the waiters a few minutes earlier. I hadn’t paid attention to their conversation.

I ignored the comment and continued to sip my wine. The restaurant manager asked a couple of other questions. Within thirty seconds, the bartender said, again, loud enough for everyone in the large restaurant to hear but also apparently to no one in particular: “English as a first language!”

Another minute or so went by before the manager brought the interview to a close and thanked the candidate. The entire interview had lasted no more than three or four minutes.

It took me a few minutes to realize what had just happened. All at once, the bartender’s comment made perfect sense. He wasn’t talking to the waiter, he wasn’t even talking to himself. He was listing a hiring requirement for waiters previously agreed upon with the manager: English as a first language. Why are you wasting time on this guy? He’s clearly fresh off the boat. Not our type of people. Move on.

He had just vetoed the candidate solely on the basis of his speaking skills, his native tongue, his accent — and hence his heredity — and nothing else. I have no trouble believing that the candidate was deficient in a dozen other ways — but I would have expected those to be decided by the hiring manager who was interviewing him, not by someone twenty feet away who is not even officially part of the interview process. I am assuming, of course, that he was a legal immigrant with all the proper paperwork. I am not in any way, shape or form, trying to make a case for illegal immigration.

I was stunned as I sat there thinking about this but, by then, the candidate had long left. I quickly paid and walked out, not wanting to get involved. Walking back to my room, I rationalized the situation in my mind. What the hell was I going to do anyway? Raise a stink about racism right then and there? To what end? I told myself arguing with a single bigot wasn’t going to change anything.

But the episode has weighed on me. This was clear and unadulterated racism, condoned by the management of the restaurant. The only thing missing was a printed sign hanging above the bar: “Coloreds need not apply.”

I’ve seen the same thing in the West coast for years, of course, with Mexicans and other immigrants trying to claw their way up the economic ladder. The economy of the rich rarely interacts with the economy of the poor, it seems, and does so only reluctantly.

I happen to have lived on both sides of the fence. I am privileged enough to have retired from a successful career at age 52. I have lived the American dream, you might say. But I’m also one of those immigrants who clawed his way up the economic ladder. I made $2.60 an hour washing dishes in a steakhouse as my first job while also attending college as a foreign student upon first arriving in the US almost forty years ago. I, too, was once fresh off the boat.

But enough about me. This is not about me. This is about all those others who are struggling and haven’t made it yet. Having lived in this country for my entire adult life, I consider myself an American and I sincerely believe that most Americans are not racist. But it is also true that a small subset engage in xenophobic activities such as the one described above.

Immigrants have always been discriminated against in this country. If it wasn’t the Cubans and the Mexicans, it was the Japanese during World War II. Or the Irish after the potato famine. Or the Chinese who built the transcontinental railroad. Or the Italians fleeing poverty. Or Middle Easterners escaping barbaric regimes back home.

Replace Cuba and Mexico with Middle East or Italy or Ireland or Japan or China or India or any one of a dozen other world regions over the past two hundred years and you are guaranteed to find similar experiences by each of those ethnicities. If they weren’t profiled at the border, they were rounded up into internment camps, they were used as indentured labor to build the country’s infrastructure, they were shunned and ostracized as outsiders. But every one of those ethnicities is now broadly accepted in America and has found a way to not just integrate with, but also to change, the culture of America for the better.

At every point in the history of this country, some subset of the population has been discriminated against — based on their place of birth, based on their native tongue, based on their cultural beliefs, based on the color of their skin, based on their financial situation, based on their willingness to take low paying jobs away from Americans. Based on things they often had no control over.

And it wasn’t always brown or black people that were hated. A hundred years ago, European Catholics were discriminated against just as much as Muslims are today. Newspapers warned that the influx of Catholics would “take jobs, spread disease and crime and plot a coup to install the Pope in power. In 1844, mobs burnt Catholic churches and hunted down victims.”

Progressives and conservatives are in a rare unity welcoming Pope Francis to the US, but anti-Catholicism was rampant…www.theguardian.com

The Muslims and Mexicans being vilified and discriminated against today are a resilient bunch. They are already merging with the rest of American society at a faster pace than previous ethnicities. The Japanese had it worse. The Irish had it worse. The Chinese had it worse. The list goes on. No one said it would be easy. But it’s the only way forward.

“I say you know it’s funny I think we were on the same boat back in 1694.” — Indigo Girls. Shame on You. Shaming of the Sun.

I love this country but I shudder as I see the rights of immigrants pummeled on a daily basis. These are the very people that are working their asses off to make this economy grow. Whether it’s the gardeners mowing our lawns or dishwashers and cooks in our restaurants or the laborers working in our factories, they are part of this country. They’re here already and chances are they’re working multiple jobs to make their own lives and the lives of those around them better. They’re helping the economy by working hard, making money, and spending it.

And yet, what they get in return is racism, xenophobia, and a hidden two class system that is as pernicious as the Jim Crow laws of the past century. What do we gain, exactly, by antagonizing them, discriminating against them, creating a hidden “separate but equal” universe for them?

Where is the #MeToo moment for immigrants who are discriminated against? Why aren’t they banding together and demanding their rights?

We attacked the equal rights problem several times over the past couple of centuries. Equal rights for blacks — which almost tore this country apart. Equal rights for Women — makes sense, they’re half the population. Equal rights for gays and lesbians and transgender people. All good stuff. But how about Equal Rights for Immigrants? I wonder if we have the stomach to attack that one head on.

Our political problems will continue to worsen if we don’t address this problem. No, trickle down economics doesn’t work. Been there, done that, had financial meltdown. No, allowing lobbyists and special interests and big corporations to run this country won’t work either. Been there, done that — again and again. The results have been a disaster each and every time.

We need to treat immigrants like they deserve to be treated, like the downtrodden that we promised to take care of. If we don’t do it, who will? We are the richest nation on earth and yet we squander our money away and turn a blind eye to those needing our help — for reasons that they have no control over: their place of birth, their cultural beliefs, their accents. It almost doesn’t matter where they come from.

We’ve shown that we can discriminate against white Christians from Western Europe just as well as brown Muslims and black Africans and yellow Asians. So the problem is not them. The problem is us.

If we don’t solve this problem constructively, positively, as a united society, we will have a revolution on our hands with immigrants demanding their equal rights — which they fully deserve.

And don’t tell me we don’t have the money. We are the richest nation in the world. Here are just two data points to disabuse you of that notion:

“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.” — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. “U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined.” — NationalPriorities.org.

All I’m saying, Mr. President, is if you give these people a helping hand instead of a kick in the groin, if you help them with job opportunities instead of reminding them that they come from “shithole” countries, perhaps they will give you a few more people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. A few more Albert Einsteins and Neils Bohrs. If, instead, you spend billions on an ill-conceived and useless wall to keep them out, we all lose in the long run.

It would take just a little bit of introspection to realize that “they” haven’t changed. They are still who they are and who they’ve been for many generations. It is only us, the people of America, the very definition of America, that have changed over the past two centuries.

I am an immigrant. I am also an American. Two hundred years ago, we were all immigrants. And yet, somehow, we keep finding reasons to hate “them,” the others, whatever the definition of “them” happens to be in the current decade. How hypocritical of us.

“But the thing that scared me most was when my enemy came close; And I saw that his face looked just like mine” — Bob Dylan. John Brown. The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964.

Here’s a — hopefully constructive — suggestion. Let’s start documenting the cases of discrimination against immigrants. And you don’t have to write an essay to do so. An uploaded video recording will do just fine.