This Land Is Our Land

by Suketu Mehta

  There is a war going on in Denmark—what the Danes call a “meatball war.” It is a bloody war, but the blood is pig blood. Denmark has 5 million people and 13 million pigs, and politicians in the country want to redress the imbalance. In 2013, Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt railed against Danish childcare centers dropping pork from their menus because they felt it might offend Muslims. A survey by a newspaper found that of the country’s 1,719 childcare centers, exactly 30 had stopped serving pork or switched to halal food. But the meatball war had begun in earnest. That year, the far-right Danish People’s Party (now part of the ruling coalition) announced that it would drop out of a closely fought mayoral campaign if the incumbent promised to serve more pork meatballs in public canteens.

  In 2018, the immigration minister, Inger Støjberg, asserted that Muslims observing Ramadan were “a danger to all of us,” and demanded that those persisting in fasting during Ramadan stay home “to avoid negative consequences for the rest of Danish society.” She pointed to bus drivers and people working in hospitals; a fasting bus driver might become faint-headed and crash his bus. A spokeswoman for one of the country’s main bus operators said they’d never had an accident with a driver who was fasting. If the minister’s dark fears were true, the entire Muslim world would be awash in traffic accidents and medical malpractice during Ramadan.

  In 2016, the pro-meatball side won a battle in the central Danish city of Randers. Its city council decreed that all public buildings must serve pork. “We will ensure that Danish children and youth can have pork in the future,” a councilman stated. But another councilman said that the idea of defining a “Danish food culture” is absurd. “This is a pseudo-problem that doesn’t exist in Randers. We don’t have any institutions where you can’t eat a hot dog if you want.”

  The war over what real Europeans eat has a long history. During the Spanish Inquisition, an easy means of identifying Jews and Muslims for torture and forced conversion was if they shunned pork. When Indonesian migrants from the Netherlands’ former colony began arriving in Holland in the 1950s, Dutch government officials regularly made unannounced inspections of their homes to make sure they were eating potatoes, not rice, and were thus assimilating into Dutch culture.

  In 2016, the Danish parliament passed a law under which newly arrived refugees would be subject to a police strip search, and any valuables, including family jewelry, worth over 10,000 Danish kroner ($1,250 at the time) would be confiscated as advance payment for whatever support the state might provide them later. I remember the Hasidic Jews who would troop through my parents’ diamond office on Forty-Seventh Street in New York, and their tales of how they’d gotten into the diamond business: they fled Nazi Germany after having converted their assets into loose diamonds, which they could carry on their person. If they were to have the misfortune to be in the same situation today, they would have their assets forfeited if they showed up in Denmark.

  The world’s richest countries can’t figure out what they want to do about migration; they want some migrants and not others and will demean their own image to keep the latter out. In 2006, the Dutch government tried to make itself unattractive to potential Muslim and African migrants by creating a film, To the Netherlands, that included scenes of gay couples kissing and topless women sunbathing. The film was a study aid for a $433 compulsory entrance exam for people immigrating for family reunification—except those making more than $54,000 a year, or citizens of rich countries like the United States, for whom the requirement was waived. The film also showed the run-down neighborhoods where immigrants might end up living. There were interviews with immigrants who called the Dutch “cold” and “distant.” The film warned of traffic jams, problems finding a job, and flooding in the low-lying country.

  In 2011, the city of Gatineau, Quebec, published a “statement of values” for new immigrants that cautioned against “strong odors emanating from cooking,” which might offend Canadians. It also informed migrants that, in Canada, it was not okay to bribe city officials. Also, that it was best to show up punctually for appointments. It followed a guide published by another Quebec town, Hérouxville, which warned immigrants that stoning someone to death in public was expressly forbidden. The warning was duly noted by the town’s sole immigrant family.

  In the twenty-first century, we will all have to suffer neighbors we dislike. I’ve been living in Lower Manhattan on and off since 1980, when I studied at NYU, where I majored in Greenwich Village. I have a lot of immigrants coming into my neighborhood now. They are wealthy invaders from Europe, China, Russia—as well as California, Florida, Oregon. They bring their tastes for food, which are quite different from mine. Most of the bagel shops and bodegas have disappeared, to be replaced by restaurants featuring $300 tasting menus. I don’t like what these newcomers have done to my neighborhood. They are a real economic threat to the people who live here: they’ve forced out the artists, the writers, the musicians that made this neighborhood what it is. The newcomers have only the power of their money. But they’re here. And I have to live with them.

  The distaste for immigrant manners and mores so evident in Denmark and the Netherlands is spreading quickly. Often, a sexual panic is involved. In Germany, the country’s “welcome culture” changed in one season, from the guilt-expiating September 2015—when the Merkel government opened its doors—to “rapist refugees go home” after the Cologne attacks on women that same New Year’s Eve. Of all refugees, the most frightening is the womanless male migrant, his eyes hungrily scanning the exposed flesh of the white woman. The words the tabloids and right-wing politicians use to describe these Afghan or Moroccan men are similar to the terminology used to describe black men in the United States in the early twentieth century: as sex-hungry deviants. In 1900, the South Carolina senator Benjamin Tillman spoke from the U.S. Senate floor: “We have never believed him [the black man] to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”

  Fast-forward to 2017: “Pro-rata, Sweden has taken more young male migrants than any other country in Europe,” said Nigel Farage. “And there has been a dramatic rise in sexual crime in Sweden—so much so that Malmö is now the rape capital of Europe.” This claim was quickly debunked: by 2015, the year Sweden took in a record number of asylum seekers, sex crimes decreased by 11 percent from the year before.

  While it is true that there are horrific stories of organized rings of rapists with immigrant backgrounds—such as a group of Pakistanis in Rotherham, in the U.K., who groomed teenage girls for sex, or the North African men who assaulted German women en masse on New Year’s Eve 2016—there’s no evidence that immigrants overall rape or steal at rates higher than the general population. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that immigrants commit less crime than the native-born. Mug shots of dark-skinned criminals, whether Moroccan or Mexican, somehow strike more terror in the Western imagination than those of homegrown white rapists. The fear is primal, tribal: they’re coming for our women.

  Salman Rushdie wrote about the perverse reversal of history in books (and their screen incarnations) such as A Passage to India and The Jewel in the Crown, which have as central events the rape of an Englishwoman by an Indian: “If a rape must be used as the metaphor of the Indo-British connection, then surely, in the interests of accuracy, it should be the rape of an Indian woman by one or more Englishmen of whatever class … not even Forster dared to write about such a crime. So much more evocative to conjure up white society’s fear of the darkie, of big brown cocks.”

  * * *

  In situations of social stress, there’s a long history of empires forcing entire populations to move: the Koreans that Stalin moved to what is now Uzbekistan; the Cherokee Trail of Tears; the massive population exchanges and massacres that followed the hasty British exit from India in 1947. Trump wants to deport some 12 million to 20 million people, the majority of them nonwhites, because they are “criminals”—simply for se
eking a better life for themselves and their children. This is not immigration control. This is ethnic cleansing. What else do you call the planned forcible transfer of millions of men, women, and children—3 million of whom have known no other home since childhood?

  If we are talking about crime, consider that the most ruthlessly efficient elimination in our species’ bloody history was the extermination, by design or oversight, of the native peoples around the world by European migrants. So, when Americans or Australians talk about “the rule of law” or “jumping the line,” it is an argument rank with hypocrisy.

  Nobody asked the Aboriginals if Britain could dump its wretched refuse on their shores. Eighty-four percent of the aboriginal population died out after British colonization. When the British arrived in Tasmania in 1803, there were more than six thousand Tasmanians in nine culturally and linguistically disparate nations. There was conflict between them and the settlers, who accused them of stealing their sheep. The natives were put beyond the reach of colonial law; you could legally hunt them down like vermin. Thirty years later, only a hundred of them were alive. The survivors were transported to other islands, and in 1876, the last surviving full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal died, and with her, her race.

  From its founding in 1901 until 1973, Australia had a “white Australia” policy. Now it’s a hotbed of immigrants; half of Australians are immigrants or their children, many from nonwhite countries—two of the three top sources of recent immigrants have been India and China. But there are still people who’d like to go back to a white Australia, including Peter Dutton, the home affairs minister and architect of the policy of locking up mostly Muslim refugees in offshore internment camps. In March 2017, he offered emergency visas to white South African farmers who were facing legal action to redistribute their lands to black farmers, because they “need help from a civilised country like ours.”

  When nonwhite refugees flee to Australia by boat, they’re intercepted by the Australian navy and dumped in Papua New Guinea, in a hellhole called Manus Island. Conditions there are made deliberately inhuman, so that other asylum seekers are deterred.

  The boatloads of refugees afloat on the seas are a human version of the famous New York garbage scow, the Break of Dawn, that roamed the Caribbean and the Gulf in 1987, looking for a place to unload its 230-foot-long, 18-foot-high mountain of the city’s trash. It was originally supposed to do so in North Carolina, where officials rejected it, suspecting it of having toxic waste. It was then turned away by Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, which is when the boat decided to slip into Mexican waters. The Mexican government dispatched its navy and air force to keep a watch on the barge. The navy, such as it was, of Belize, was also ordered to put it under surveillance. The Bahamas, too, refused to take NYC’s garbage.

  After traveling six thousand miles and spending a million dollars trying to find safe harbor, the Break of Dawn returned to New York and disposed of the trash in a Brooklyn incinerator.

  PART IV

  WHY THEY SHOULD BE WELCOMED

  15

  JAIKISAN HEIGHTS

  Teddy Roosevelt declared, in a 1915 speech to the Knights of Columbus, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans … The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic … The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”

  If Teddy Roosevelt were around today, I’d take him on a walk around Jackson Heights. To those who say, “Should immigrants assimilate?” I have two words in response: “Jaikisan Heights,” the South Asian way of pronouncing the name of the Queens district.

  When my family first came to New York in 1977, we found a dangerous city, a bankrupt city, a city from which the white middle class was fleeing. I got mugged twice when I was a teenager; our car got stolen regularly. Jackson Heights was not glamorous or welcoming. Assuming that, like in India, the best schools were the “convent” schools, my parents put me in the nearest Catholic school, where I was one of the first minorities. One of the teachers called me a pagan. I was a senior during the Iranian hostage crisis, in 1980. One day I was walking down the hallway with my friend Ashish, the only other Indian in school, when an Irish boy yelled at us, “Fucking Ayatollahs!”

  We stopped and turned around, and I corrected him. “Hey! We ain’t Iranians. We’re Indians.”

  The boy considered this new information. “Fucking Gandhis!”

  When we were there, most of the South Asians in this neighborhood were Indians, beneficiaries of the 1965 Immigration Act, which lifted racial quotas and encouraged family reunification. They were professionals: engineers, doctors. Now, it’s a much more diverse mix of South Asians: Bangladeshis, Nepalis, Tibetans, Bhutanese. They are shop owners, taxi drivers, garment factory workers.

  Very few of the Indians I knew when I was growing up here in the 1970s are still in this neighborhood. With one exception: some of the children of those families, friends of mine who are artists, writers, and journalists, who lived in the East Village in the ’80s and in Park Slope in the late ’90s, are increasingly moving to Jackson Heights. There’s something about the diversity of these streets that is attractive to people from all over—piano players from Paris and software engineers from Kansas. Increasingly, creative people want to live in the kind of city where they can hear many languages spoken on the street, and have a choice between pupusas and parathas for dinner. Diversity isn’t just a nice thing to have; it is actively essential to attract the kind of people who create wealth.

  If Teddy Roosevelt were walking with me, I’d invite him to take a look at the directories in the buildings of Jackson Heights. The names in the lobby of the building I grew up in on Eighty-Third Street range from Abbasi to Winfred, passing Balyuk, Bruschtein, Basu. My neighbors were Indians and Pakistanis, Jews and Muslims, Haitians and Dominicans; the building was owned by a Turkish man but the super was Greek. Many of them had been killing each other just before they got on the plane. But here they lived next door to their ancient enemies, and their kids dated each other. It’s not that we loved each other. Behind closed doors, at our dinner tables, our parents still said horribly racist things about the other nationalities; some of us still sent money back to the most nationalist and far-right parties or militias back home, to attack the groups that our neighbors in New York belonged to.

  But we were in a new country now, making a new life. And we could live side by side and interact in certain demarcated ways. We could exchange food; our kids could play together; they could go to school together. We discovered that we are more alike than different. South Asians in the West, for instance: Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who have been warring at home discover, in Jackson Heights, that they are “desi,” and share a love of samosas and Bollywood. If we still didn’t like our neighbors, we would not burn and riot as we might at home; we would suffer them, because the hate-crime laws in New York are enforced vigorously, unlike at home. It’s been years since there was any major ethnic conflict in the city. Because no one ethnicity dominates, no one community gets blamed if the economy goes south. A walk around the extraordinarily safe metropolis illustrates the data: places with more immigrants have lower crime. Thirty-eight percent of New York’s population is foreign-born, and crime rates have fallen to what they were in the 1950s.

  The immigration divide is also an urban-rural divide. In country after country, rural voters elect xenophobes. The majority of people who voted for Brexit lived in the British countryside; multicultural London was the Tower of Babel for them. The areas that have the least immigrants are the ones mos
t afraid of them. People in cities tend to like immigrants more, because they have everyday experience of them. This kind of density, living in the same space, having to share courtyards and grocery stores, forces you to interact more than you otherwise would. You go outside your comfort zone and find that you’re not uncomfortable.

  Soon after Trump announced his ban on Yemenis and other Muslims entering the country, my friend Somak, a New Yorker and venture capitalist, decided to go to Bay Ridge to eat at a Yemeni restaurant, in solidarity. “There was a line out the door,” he recalls, of other New Yorkers with the same idea.

  It’s astonishing how little ethnic strife there is in New York. It’s astonishing how safe New York has become, while encountering some of the biggest waves of immigration in its history. It’s astonishing how free the immigrants are to follow their own culture, language, religion. It’s astonishing how rich immigrants have made New York. If there’s a poster city for demonstrating that immigration works, New York is it.

  In 2010, the bigots brayed in full chorus against a group of Muslims who wanted to put up a religious center near Ground Zero. They smeared the organizers as terrorists. Very few politicians came to the organizers’ defense; most attacked them. “It’s insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero,” said the Nassau County congressman Peter King, who had earlier held hearings in Congress to brand American Muslims as terrorists. Earlier still, he was one of the most active supporters of the Irish Republican Army in Congress, raising money for its terror attacks through the front group Irish Northern Aid Committee (Noraid). “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it,” he declared in 1985.