January 19, 2024
“Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Luke 9:58, also Matthew 8:20). Jesus was homeless. For him, it was not a tragic necessity but a choice. That is the context of the remark: a man approached Jesus and said he wanted to follow him, and Jesus was making clear to him what such a choice entails. Why homeless? After all, Jesus could surely have solved the problem of having a roof over his head. Again, the context of the scene clarifies: when the man says, before I follow you, first let me go home and bury my father, Jesus says to let the dead bury the dead. To follow him is to have no ties, no commitments. The choice is absolute, without qualification. It seems, at least at first glance, an extreme and otherworldly position: all earthly ties are temptations to be rejected.
Jesus’s implied ultimatum, that we must choose between earthly primary concerns and ultimate spiritual concerns, is something that many Christians may find uncomfortable to think about. There has been a division in the history of Christianity between those who take it literally, and therefore take ascetic vows of poverty and the like, and those who interpret it more liberally to mean that it is a matter of priorities. Jesus seemed to enjoy eating and drinking, and was willing to feed multitudes, so when he said that man does not live by bread alone, he must have meant that when someone—like Satan during the Temptation—tries to tell you that you must choose bread instead of the Word in order to survive, you must not forget that, when push comes to shove, there are values higher than mere survival. So perhaps it is okay to have a home—even though a home is a material possession, and there are greater things than material possessions. But the same is true on the higher level. Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home, but there is “a better home a-waiting / In the sky, lord, in the sky,” in the words of the old hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”
Today, millions of people are homeless—not “unhoused,” meaning that they belong to a place like, say, Seattle, but have no housing in it, but truly without a home. They have left their home or lost it, and it has rarely been by choice. What must that be like? One of my best students years ago had lived for a time with her mother in their car. At least they had the car. They were not even migrants, for migrants are on their way to another place, hopefully better. I cannot imagine living without a home. Perhaps that is the reason that William Kennedy’s Ironweed hits me so powerfully. Its hero, Frances Phelan, has lived on the streets for 22 years, moving amidst the whole community of homeless people. In addition to the animosity they face—migrants and homeless people are not wanted, not anywhere—they lack one of the basic human needs, shelter. In his notebooks towards his book Words with Power, Frye initially counted shelter as a primary concern. In the ultimate form of the book, he subsumed it, in the final chapter, under the wider concern of “property,” in Aristotle’s sense of what is proper to a human being. Human beings cannot live directly in nature like the animals, but must have “property”—clothing, shelter, tools—that make up for an evolutionary lack. In Frye’s scheme, primary concerns have a physical level but also a higher emotional, ultimately spiritual level. Thus, sex is a primary concern, but its higher form is the sense of connection we call love. Shelter is a physical concern, but “home” is something emotional that is no less necessary for being intangible. Home is, of course, where the heart is. And that is why being homeless is a terrible thing, more than just being shelterless. In Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man,” a former farm hand, now old and worn out, returns to the place he used to work because he has nowhere else, causing an argument between a husband and wife about accepting him. When the wife says that he has come home to die, the husband mocks the word, and says, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But being taken in means an emotional welcoming, not just room and board. The wife replies, “I should have called it / Something you haven’t to deserve.”
All this is background to the latest crisis, that of immigration, which, people are shrieking, is totally out of control and which is going to doom Biden’s chances. Immigration and homelessness are real problems, and no one denies that they need to be dealt with. What is puzzling, and bears investigating, is degree of hysteria generated by these problems. To begin with, a few facts, for this is an area of great and often willful confusion. Here is the situation as laid out by Steven Rattner and Maureen White; Rattner was counselor to the Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, and White is senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:
We have an underfunded immigration apparatus that is swaddled in bureaucracy, complicated beyond imagination, bound by decades-old international agreements, paralyzed by divisive politics and barely functional under the best of circumstances. | Now we face the terrible consequences. In fiscal year 2023 alone (from October 2022 to September 2023), the United States had two and a half million “encounters” along its 2,000-mile border with Mexico, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That is over two and a half times the number just four years ago, overwhelming the ability of governmental bodies — border patrol, immigration courts, human services agencies — to manage the flow. (New York Times, January 9, 2024).
Note that the problem is not so much the increased number of people as the inadequate system of processing them. Anyone who follows the news knows that all attempts to overhaul the immigration system have always been blocked by Republicans, so that they can blame Democrats for the problem, then grandstand with “tough” measures like separating families at the border and busing migrants to northern cities and dumping them, not to mention of course Trump’s wall. The result is an ongoing humanitarian disaster. Perhaps even a well-designed, well-run, adequately funded processing system would be straining at this point to handle the numbers of people made homeless by an increasingly unstable world, but it would arguably bring the problem down to a manageable level. As I write this, the NPR website has posted an article from WBEZ Chicago (January 12, 2024) announcing that that, due to a storm forecast to drop a foot of snow, the city is delaying implementation of its order that migrants who reach a 60-day limit will have to leave the city shelter housing them. But eventually they will be forced out anyway:
“They’re scared. They don’t know what’s going to happen,” Veronica Saldaña, a volunteer who has been aiding migrants said Thursday. “And nobody does know. So we don’t have any answers for them. So they’re really worried. Are they going to be put on the street?”
These people have the governor of Texas to thank for their plight, as it was his order that they be bused to Chicago and dumped. None of this should be happening. It is all politics of the most heartless kind. Moreover, awareness that the system has broken down is probably generating greater numbers of people who show up hoping to slip through in the chaos, like people crashing the gate at a concert. There is no doubt that the United States cannot accept everyone. Rattner and White agree that “As heartbreaking as it may be, we simply cannot take every refugee from every failed state,” citing places like Venezuela and Nicaragua. But the problem ought to be manageable: there is no need for the panic and anger that immigration generates. Of course, a good deal of that is whipped up by the Republicans, and by Trump in particular, mostly by relentless lying. Immigrants are not criminals, but, on the contrary, statistically more law-abiding than American citizens. They are not importing drugs: most fentanyl is brought into the country by citizens.
The immigrants who are the greatest drain on social resources are those who have been illegally transported to places like Chicago and New York and dumped—but of course those are the immigrants that are always in the news, giving the impression that immigrants are all parasites. But most immigrants are seeking employment, and, in doing so, are not taking jobs away from citizens—they are employed in the kinds of hard, low-level jobs that Americans will not take.
Here we arrive at one of three inconvenient truths about immigrants. Yes, many immigrants are fleeing from bad things: poverty, political violence, even climate disaster. But what is often minimized in discussions of the causes of the swelling numbers is what they are fleeing toward. Hein de Haas, professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, in an article for The Guardian on December 29, 2023, says:
The misleading assertion that poverty causes migration conceals the fact that labour demand has been the main driver of growing immigration to western countries since the 1990s. More widespread education, women’s emancipation and population ageing have led to labour shortages; these have fuelled a growing demand for migrant workers in sectors such as agriculture, construction, cleaning, hospitality, transport and food processing, as supplies of local workers willing and able to do such jobs have increasingly run dry. Without such chronic labour shortages, most migrants wouldn’t have come.
Border crackdowns inevitably fail: the Mexican border is 2000 miles long. If you want to reduce immigration, the secret, Haas is saying, is to eliminate the motivation for coming. Ah, but we don’t want to do that. Employers don’t have to provide the levels of pay and benefits necessary to attract local workers to do such jobs. And if they did, prices would increase, and consumers would howl. So immigration is fundamentally caused by exploitation born of greed—not just capitalist greed but consumer greed. Amazon gets away with exploiting its workers for the same reason: its customers love the convenience of their next-day Amazon Prime account.
This is not exactly breaking news. Woody Guthrie’s famous folk song “Deportees” dates from 1948, when a plane deporting migrant workers back to Mexico crashed and killed all aboard. The workers were temporary workers hired because of the labor shortage caused by World War II:
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted Our work contract’s out and we have to move on Six hundred miles to that Mexican border They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves We died in your hills, we died in your deserts We died in your valleys and died on your plains We died ‘neath the trees and we died in the bushes Both sides of the river, we died just the same
The last verse of the song asks the question that we have not answered over 70 years later:
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil And be called by no name except “deportees”?
The second inconvenient truth is that we need immigration—and have always needed immigration—to sustain the level of population, as observed by Rattner and White:
Without immigration, our population would begin to decline in 2037, according to United Nations projections. Even continuing to admit a million legal immigrants a year would leave our population flatlining within half a century. Maintaining our historical population growth rate of 1 percent would suggest admitting nearly four million individuals a year. | While that may be more than today’s politics can withstand, we should care about keeping the number of Americans growing at a reasonable rate. Immigration is our defense against the challenges of an aging society. Fewer workers supporting more retirees makes it harder to adequately fund Social Security and Medicare.
The third truth is the most inconvenient of them all—we are immigrants. All of us, unless you are Indigenous. I have written on this subject before—one of the early newsletters, a few years ago, was on the Statue of Liberty—but the current attitude of so many people impels me to speak again. I respect anyone’s concern about the burgeoning number of migrants, the failure of the system, and the need to do something about it, but no one seems to register awareness of the irony involved when they say, or at least imply, “Get those people out of here.” I am the grandchild of Italian and Polish immigrants. Yet I have cousins who were obsessed with the “terrible” problem of immigrants, legal and illegal—the distinction tends to vanish in these conversations—20 years ago. Why did my grandparents come, leaving home behind? For the same reasons immigrants come now—for economic opportunity and, in my Italian grandfather’s case, to avoid being drafted into the Austrian army during World War I, since Austria controlled northern Italy, and possibly being ordered to fight fellow Italians. I cannot imagine what it must have been like, not only to brave the economic uncertainty, but to come to live permanently in a country where they did not know the language. Most of them learned English, though they were working class, not educated people, which is impressive. What moves me most deeply is that by doing so, they bequeathed the English language to me, their grandchild—not their native language but to me “home” in a way deeper than any physical place. I am grateful to them for giving me this life and this language. And American society resented them, then as now. I grew up in the era of ethnic jokes, about Italians, Poles, Irish, Jews, all the interlopers who provided cheap labor but who were supposed to be crude, stupid, rowdy, drunken, not respectable.
Why is there never any sympathy for today’s immigrants, no expression of regretfully mixed feelings, no discomfort or guilt, not just on the part of my relatives but of everyone? Why no recognition of the tragic irony of the children and grandchildren of immigrants trying to shut the door behind them? That era of immigration is behind us, but the same thing is happening to the newer waves. I have read that the drift of Latinos away from Biden towards Trump is a younger generation who are concerned about “border security.” I don’t want to fall into “virtue signaling”: I am not advocating “open borders,” and feel there must be some limit, and yet am uneasily aware that I am a privileged citizen of the richest country in the world. Other people know it too, on some level: the defensive tone of some of those arguing is an indication that on some level they know how hardhearted they might sound. The story of America is a story of immigration. Even if your ancestors came over on the Mayflower, that too was immigration, and, unlike the non-violent immigration of the present, it was aggressive and unprincipled. Indigenous people were expelled from their homes, by war, by military force, by treaties that were lightly broken by the white race, a process still going on in the 20th century: Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is still in the theaters for those who need educating. The Statue of Liberty perhaps represents an impulse of psychological compensation, an expiation of guilt. We will welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. The welcoming of immigrants, of strangers, and of the needy strangers most of all has become a part of American mythology, and one that we should be proud of, even as we recognize how often it has been betrayed.
This is where the theme of the imagination comes into the discussion. The kind of paranoia we call xenophobia is rooted in a kind of us-or-them State, in the Blakean sense of a psychological condition that constructs reality for those within it. The paranoid State is what Blake called the “cloven fiction,” reality cloven into subjective self and an objective world that includes other people. It is an alienated condition: all that is not self is “other” and thus potentially threatening. The modern ideology arising from this alienation is Social Darwinist. Life is a competition, a zero-sum game in which, if I win, you must lose. Another person, when needy, is a potentially dangerous threat, the drowning person that can pull you under if you try to rescue them. A similar metaphor is that of the lifeboat, in which there is only room for so many. In 1954, a science fiction writer named Tom Godwin published a moral parable called “The Cold Equations,” in which a spaceship crew discovers that an 18-year-old girl has stowed away. But that means there will not be enough fuel or air, so the entire ship will perish: equations don’t lie, and they are “cold,” caring nothing for human sentiment. So out the airlock the girl goes. Godwin stacks the deck: the ship is carrying desperately needed medical supplies to another world, and the girl voluntarily sacrifices herself when she learns the situation. But the message comes through: it’s us or you. A hard world requires a certain hardness of heart.
In Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” the favorite saying of the speaker’s neighbor is “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker thinks about this:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.”
Towards the end of the poem, the speaker views the neighbor:
I see him there, Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
The neighbor has acquired his saying from his father, and does not question it. But in the speaker’s mind, it is an expression of primitive savagery. There is a town in Ohio named Xenia, after the Greek word for hospitality, because of the warm treatment given to one of its founders. But in fact small towns are often suspicious of outsiders and intensely conservative. In his early reviews of Canadian literature, in the 1950’s, Northrop Frye coined a phrase that became famous: early Canadian society, confronting a vast and hostile wilderness inhabited by hostile native peoples, developed a “garrison mentality,” a feeling that life was a constant state of siege. Within the garrison, there was great pressure to conform, to fit in, because there was no possibility of leaving. Frye’s point was that such an attitude lingered long after the actual garrisons had disappeared. Such garrison mentality characterizes many small-town conservative voters in the United States today. Their language shows that they regard themselves and their values as under attack, and one of the things that most horrifies them about urban life is its diversity and cosmopolitanism, which seems to them a kind of threatening chaos.
A famous story by Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery,” published in 1948, depicted a small town continuing a ritual in which, once yearly, an inhabitant is selected by lottery to be stoned to death in order to ensure good fortune for the society. Like the saying of the neighbor’s father in “Mending Wall,” this is more primitive savagery disguised as the wisdom of the elders. When people say, “We have always done it this way,” it usually means they do not want to examine something that will not bear thinking about. In a ritual detailed in Leviticus 16, the Israelite community was purified by having its evils transferred to a “scapegoat” that was then driven out into the wilderness to be devoured by demons. Animal sacrifice is a substitute for human sacrifice, however, which is more powerful. The Aztecs solved the problem by sacrificing prisoners of war to the gods. But the message is the message of the high priest Caiaphas about Jesus: “Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (John 11:50).
Another famous story is Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973). Omelas is a utopia, the price of whose existence is the perpetual tormenting of a single child. The ones who walk away are those who will not accept happiness on that condition. LeGuin, as she acknowledged, did not invent the parable: a version of it occurs in both Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and William James. But she brings it home—literally home. For “Omelas” is “Salem” spelled backward—Salem, Oregon, close to where LeGuin lived. Our society, like every society in history, profits by the exploitation of others, and the question is how we are to come to terms with our conscience. One way, of course, is sheer denial: “I worked for all I’ve got and deserve it. I owe nothing to anybody.” The myth of the rugged individualist, the self-made man (it is usually a man) who owes nothing to anyone and who is therefore not his brother’s keeper, is a rationalization, popular with Ayn Rand-style libertarians, a denial of human interdependence and interconnection. The ultra-rich are constructing their own lifeboats: Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have reportedly purchased survivalist bunkers in case society ultimately breaks down, and entrepreneurs like Bezos and Musk want to colonize Mars in order to turn it into an interplanetary survivalist bunker. Here we reach the deepest foundation of the fear and hatred of immigrants, homeless people, and the like: the fear that the walls may break down, and all the old-stone savages will be prowling and dangerous. That fear is explored from the point of view of those who are not privileged in Octavia Butler’s darkly powerful dystopia The Parable of the Sower and its sequel, in which a future United States has disintegrated into lawless anarchy. The only way to survive is to be taken in by communities that are literally garrisons, armed and defensive.
In Blake’s view, true warfare is the “mental fight” of imaginative States. Each of the cultural contributors to the Western tradition—ancient Greece, Jewish Scripture, and the New Testament—offers a vision of human connection and interdependence that contrasts with and is a possible alternative to the paranoid vision. The world of Homer’s epics is dangerous and violent, but in the midst of it is the tradition of xenia, hospitality, specifically hospitality to the stranger, the xenos, thus the opposite of xenophobia. Among warriors, this sometimes took the form of a ritual called “guest-friendship,” the swearing of a vow something like that of the “blood brother.” In book 6 of the Iliad, Diomedes and Glaucus, Greek and Trojan, confronting each other on the battlefield, discover that their fathers had sworn guest-friendship to each other. Therefore they decide not to fight—there are plenty of other enemies on the battlefield. The Odyssey, set in the world of peacetime, repeatedly dramatizes the social obligation of hospitality to strangers, especially as its hero is a wanderer trying to get back home. It was a serious obligation that all strangers had to be taken in and all their needs provided for, without even asking for their names, let alone their credentials. You were also unconditionally responsible for their safety, with your life if need be. The Odyssey depicts hospitality on a spectrum, with the utopian society of the Phaiakians at the positive end of the scale and the guest-devouring Cyclops at the negative end. The Phaiakians take Odysseus in at the lowest point of his fortunes, when he is washed up upon their shore without even the clothes on his back. They throw an entire festival in his honor without even knowing his identity, and they take him back at last to Ithaca, risking the displeasure of Odysseus’s enemy Poseidon in doing so. Here, the wisdom of the ancestors is positive, in the form of a saying that “Strangers and guests come from Zeus.” Indeed, they may be Zeus in disguise. Jupiter’s (i.e., Zeus’s) bad treatment disguised as a mortal on earth is what decides him to drown the world in Ovid’s version of the Classical Deluge story in the Metamorphoses. Zeus was Zeus Xenios and Athena was Athena Xenia, the patron deities of strangers and foreigners. Where are they when we need them?
Virgil’s Aeneid continues the tradition of hospitality to strangers. In its opening, Aeneas and his Trojan band, homeless after the fall of Troy, are taken in by queen Dido. In a gesture of magnificent hospitality that deliberately echoes that of the Phaiakians in the Odyssey, she says,
I shall dispatch you safely with an escort, Provisioned from my stores. Or would you care To join us in this realm on equal terms? The city I build is yours; haul up your ships; Trojan and Tyrian will be all one to me. (1.775-79, Robert Fitzgerald translation)
Later, she tells Aeneas that her empathy derives from having been herself a refugee, fleeing her native land because of an evil brother:
My life Was one of hardship and forced wandering Like your own, till in this land Fortune would have me rest. Through pain I’ve learned To comfort suffering men. (1.857-61)
In Hebrew Scripture, God or his substitutes may appear to mortals in disguise, as Zeus did, to test their hospitality. In Genesis 18, three strangers visit Abraham, who accords them hospitality. One of them either speaks for God or is God, and delivers the message that Abraham’s wife will bring forth a son. When Sarah hears this, she laughs, as well she might, since she is 90 years old, but the joke is on her. The child was name Isaac, which means “laughter.” Not funny at all is the next chapter, Genesis 19, in which Lot gives hospitality to two angels. When a group of rowdies shows up and wants to have some fun with the strangers, including rape, Lot offers his daughters for the rowdies to rape instead. Nonetheless, the angels smite the rowdies, and Lot and his people escape to a town called Zoar. There is a historic village in Ohio, not far from me, called Zoar. It was founded in the early 19th century by German Separatists, in other words by immigrants fleeing religious persecution, and was in its early days a remarkable attempt at a communal society in which all was owned in common, because we all belong to one another.
Which brings us at last to Christianity and the New Testament. Christian love is Agape, translated “charity” in the King James Version, and including charity by the modern definition, as in Matthew 25, in which Jesus speaks of the separation of the sheep and the goats at the Last Judgment. To those he redeems, he says:
For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: | Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me….Verily I say unto you, Insomuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25: 35-36, 40, King James Version)
Those who deny charity are consigned to hell by Matthew. We may not be fond of hellfire threats, but the anger at human hard-heartedness is there in the title, from the Book of Isaiah, of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The Okies who fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s to California were white and citizens, yet just as despised as the Mexicans they displaced as a source of cheap labor. Woody Guthrie has a song about that too, “Do-Re-Mi,” which says don’t bother going to those paradisal western states unless you’ve got the do-re-mi.
In Luke 10, what we get instead of wrath is the central parable of Jesus, that of the Good Samaritan. The greatest commandment is to love God, and love thy neighbor as thyself. When asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells the familiar story. My neighbor is the stranger on the road who is in need. Agape is compassion, and it knows no limits, and does not ask about qualifications or rewards. Traditionally, the author of the Gospel of Luke was a physician. There are two types of sacrifice. The scapegoat type sacrifices another for our own benefit. Contrastingly, Christian Agape is based on self-sacrifice, motivated by an empathy and compassion rooted in a vision that we are not merely interconnected and interdependent but actually one. Those who attempt to live according to this vision may find that, literally or figuratively, they have no place to lay their head. They are poor, wayfaring strangers (in the words of yet another old song) rejected by those who are busy building walls and staking claims and excluding those who are said not to belong. However, when the Phaiakians deliver Odysseus back to Ithaca, he is asleep, and Athena blows up a fog to prevent him from recognizing where he is when he wakes up. Perhaps someday, when the gods are done putting us through their trials and dispel the fog, we may, like Odysseus, realize that we are standing upon home without knowing it. Home, where the heart is. Home, from which we were never really gone.