Imperialists and Immigrants

There I was, minding my own business, reading the travel section on a Saturday morning, when it struck me, in an article about rebuilding London's East End for the 2012 Olympics, how the fiercest nativist movements seem to spring up and thrive in countries that have the longest record of invading, extracting, enslaving, encroaching, appropriating, and exploiting other countries that have something they want - labor, tea, gold, spices, labor - which the rich (and getting richer) nations simply viewed as animal, vegetable, or mineral resources to be taken and used.

But look out, when some of the human resources settle down, perhaps put down roots, build a community, and inhabit significant portions of the privileged "first-world" nations, many first-world natives view their fellow immigrant neighbors as some sort of uninvited problem that doesn't really belong there. Since they were there first, they know better, drawing the commonsense conclusion that the Others should just go away.

But first give us your labor, tea, gold, spices, (got any oil?), then go away.

A few very advanced and sophisticated nations take the direct approach and build a fence to keep the alien life-forms out of the better neighborhoods north of the Rio Grande or west of the West Bank. Others use more subtle means such as literacy tests, poll taxes, gerrymandered districts, violent intimidation, an official national language, or an national religion to keep the Others in their place.

I guess some people are just entitled to have it both ways. Does the colonialist entitlement come from that old romantic notion of natural rights to life, liberty, and property? Maybe all those enlightened Europeans, flush with enthusiasm over all that Reason, all that power moving the big watch put in motion by the big watchmaker, amen.

And just as suddenly I lost interest, although the inherent unfairness still irks me.