Refugees- A Reflection
In the midst of the national hubbub about refugees in our country, I began reflecting on my own experience and how it shaped my perspective on refugees. As the child of white, middle class parents growing up in the cloistered West Hills of Portland Oregon, I did not recall having much early awareness much less connection with such people and their problems.
Then I remembered that our parents signed up around 1963 to host a white Dutch family repatriating from the newly independent Indonesia. The family— father, mother and several children— arrived in Portland through the offices of a relief program. I believe their name was Eskes. My parents and others found a house for them to rent. The relief program provided transition services. I was a newly-minted teenager with many anxieties and low social esteem. I was a little friendly with the oldest child, a boy.
What I had only fuzzy awareness of was the Dutch father’s view of the world. He had been a professional of some sort in Indonesia, and he was not willing to accept a post here that would diminish his social standing. Despite the best efforts of the local transition team he did not accept any of the proffered jobs, and eventually the family was on its own. I understood that he was unreasonably stubborn and felt some sympathy for my parents’ frustration Acting with kindness to welcome the stranger was not simple.
Around the same time, my mother gave me a book by Dr. Tom Dooley, a Catholic MD who’d served in the Navy. He’d been touched by the horrors of the civil war grinding along in a place called Viet Nam. After mustering out, he’d gone back and worked to provide medical and other services to ordinary people in South Vietnam who were victims of the fighting and disorder. He’d written three books about his experiences. I think she gave me Fire On The Mountain which had just come out. I remember that the descriptions of his work in the clinic, the terrible medical condition of some of the patients, the poverty and stories of terrible atrocities by the Viet Minh really affected me. I was saddened to read about people who were suffering—even halfway around the world.
Fast forward to 1971. I am a student working my way through college. I must make enough money to pay rent, buy groceries, and meet all of life’s needs. At the same time, I need to pay for school. I was fired from my previous job in May 1970 for participating in a student demonstration that spring. My picture was in the newspaper and that was sufficient cause. It wasn’t even a good picture. The job had been working in the mailroom of a large, commercial real estate company. One of the other two mailroom employees was a man from Ethiopia. He told us to call him Joe. He was older perhaps in his late thirties. He claimed to be a relative of emperor Haile Selassie, and clearly felt that working in the mailroom was beneath him. I had studied North African politics as part of my college work, so I found him interesting though he was not eager to talk about his experiences.
I did not have many job-seeking connections of my own out in the world; my mother was my ‘go to’ resource. In this instance she made a phone call to Margaret Godfrey, who lived not far from us. Mom told me that I should show up at the downtown offices of Catholic Charities where Mrs. Godfrey worked. The offices were in the Loyalty Building at SW Third and Alder. Mrs. Godfrey was a very energetic, middle-aged woman with a pronounced accent. She offered me a job as front desk receptionist and file clerk. To start immediately.
I was somewhat surprised to find myself hired. I was a 21 year old hippy with long hair and a jeans wardrobe. I had worked earlier at the public library doing filing and shelving, so the file clerk part of the job seemed logical. But front desk reception meant I would be the face of the organization, and I did not fit the profile. That desk was situated facing the elevator doors. And the phone would require ‘phone tone’—etiquette which welcomed callers and steered their calls to the right destination. I knew so little about that skill set that I wasn’t afraid to take it on.
Catholic Charities was the umbrella organization for all the service activities undertaken in the western Oregon archdiocese. Services included Catholic Relief Services, family services providing counseling, childrens services such as adoption, and emergency assistance. The organization was run by Fr. Morton Park, a large man whose nickname, I soon learned, was “El Oso”, the Bear. He was a whirlwind presence in black spinning through the office.
The “relief services” arm of the organization served needy families and individuals across the globe. Started in 1943 during the chaos of the world war, the American Catholic bishops recognized that there would be massive need for such programs when the war ended. As an example, Mrs. Godfrey’s distinctive accent was Austrian. She had married an American and followed him home after the war from her hometown of Graz. I quickly became acquainted with the bookkeeper whose office was in the northeast corner of the building. Elena Rodriguez was a recent refugee from Cuba. She was a kinetic personality. And the author of Fr. Park’s nickname. He frequently beelined in the direction of her office as questions arose about a particular program line item or projected revenue source. As part of the United Way the organization had to meet AICPA generally accepted accounting principles. Elena’s family was originally from Barcelona and her Spanish preserved the distinctive ‘th’ for ’s’ pronunciation of Catalonia. She explained this and myriad other things to me after suggesting to Fr. Park that she needed an assistant and that I might be a good choice. That decision ultimately turned the rest of my work career toward non-profit management.
By 1975 I had become an ‘old hand’ at Catholic Charities. In the early fall that year, I had also married and was planning an epic trip with my new bride to Europe in the late summer of 1976. We were going to hitchhike five weeks through Ireland. Then spend time with people in England and on the Continent with whom we had local connections. That part of the trip was slated for nearly four months.
By the time we returned home, I had been through more than a dozen countries where an equal number of languages were spoken. I had slept in barns, on the floor of a rail car, and in youth hostels filled with traveling young adults from across the world. Stays in youth hostels put us in group kitchens where we prepared meals with all the other folk and then sat down in common rooms to play cards or other entertainments. 1976 was an election year and our Bicentennial. The questions and comments of our fellow hostelers ranged from curious to hostile. (Jimmy Carter winning, Swine Flu, the death of Mao Zedong, the Soweto uprising, a Belfast bombing in October) Viet Nam was still a contentious issue among these travelers, particularly those from Germany and France. Australians and Kiwis by contrast tended to be more supportive. I quickly learned that these people were well-informed but that their perceptions could be very different than mine.
Our weeks in Ireland were enlightening in different respects. We hardly ever were distant from signs and marks of Irish struggles. Against invaders going back more than a thousand years. Against the land itself, so hard in places that little could grow unless the fields were fortified regularly with seaweed. And against economic forces and diseases in the 18th and 19th Century. Harsh weather in the 1740s led to near half a million deaths. Entangled with the English and their official view of Ireland as a prime provisioning source for the domestic industrial base at home became a dagger to the heart when cholera swept through the world connected by shipping networks. That was the 1830s. Similarly, the dependence of the general populace almost exclusively on the potato as a food source led to the Great Hunger for seven years beginning in 1845. And the 1873 “Long Depression” across western industrial nations struck Ireland hard. Each of these events triggered waves of Irish emigration. Large numbers of those emigrants left for the United States and Canada.
Among them were my Dodican and Haley, Byrne and Fitzgerald ancestors. By the ‘80s, I had a broader picture of the world in my head from traveling. I also had a better sense of the people and cultures beyond Europe. For starters I was playing soccer. Newly popular in the States because of the NASL league’s expansion, I began following the Portland Timbers. I also joined a team of mostly American men my age, augmented by one Mexican, two Canadians, and three Saudis who were studying at PSU. From that start, my participation in the sport evolved through decades to being an essential activity.
Soccer or fußbol as it’s called in Germany is played everywhere in the world. In Munich in ’76 I’d had a chance to see an amateur club team play. We were staying with one of the players and his wife. At the game, both teams played hard and then joined their spectating families at an on-site restaurant operated by the club. There they shared a meal, sang songs and socialized. I was enchanted by this model of sport as a force for community. It reinforced my commitment to being part of this global activity.
I soon had friends from places as diverse as Zimbabwe, Ghana, Cambodia, Nigeria, Brazil, England, Ireland, Missouri and Hermiston. A wonderful sense of camaraderie is threaded through the game. Inescapably that element has embedded itself in my understanding of the world, not only that it is leavened with the spirit of the game, but that soccer demonstrates potential to build communities defined beyond just national, racial, or cultural frameworks.
I hope that the trajectory of my experience with refugees is clearer. I would add that my Catholic Charities experience led me to work in non-profits which placed a high value on identifying community between people of vastly different backgrounds. I feel that I have been given a great gift because I see humans like me when I look at the faces different than my own.
In addition this wealth of life experience has fostered strong rational beliefs about the issues that “others”, people not exactly like us, generate. Back in that period when my Irish ancestors were coming to the United States, there was ferocious resistance to their presence. They were considered to be subhuman, just a step above Negroes. Portrayals of the Irish as apelike, primitive and drunken were common.
Hatred of the Irish because they were largely Catholic and culturally very different was fostered in the press and in periodic violence against them. However, the Civil War began to change that point of view. The Union army needed soldiers and Irish refugees were encouraged to join up. Without the men who responded and fought, the Union might well have failed to win. I know that today our armed forces have struggled to recruit the number of individuals needed and that many first generation immigrants have stepped up and volunteered to serve, acquitting themselves honorably. They follow in the tradition of the Nisei men and women who volunteered for the U.S. in WW2 even with their families in internment camps. For every psycho killer who’s come into the country illegally, there are countless newcomers— hardworking, moral, upstanding people hopeful that the American dream is a real thing.
One massive reality gets left out of most discussions about border control and national security. That is the global imperative of demographics. In 1950 just after I was born, world population was just under 3 billion folks. Looked at in relation to available land on the planet, that was 17 people per square kilometer. Not too bad in average density. Today’s world population is roughly 8 and a quarter billion people. That’s 55 people in an average square kilometer. About the same as 20 households if each had slightly more than 2 people.
But available land on the planet is not all habitable land. Online sources say about 44% of available land is used for agriculture as an example. And available lands such as the Sahara or Gobi desert are not habitable by and large. Neither are heavily forested mountains and marshy natural spaces.
A byproduct of these realities is that there are more people on the planet than can readily experience the kind of life an average American takes for granted. To the extent that is true, is it reasonable to believe that emigrants from hard scrabble places will not do their utmost to reach places where life for themselves and their families might be better?
People across the entire world are picking up their belongings and heading for places they believe will provide that better life. To the extent that such people feel the country they are from is unable to offer them food, shelter, health care, security and similar basic conditions for a reasonable life, more of them take the risk to set out for a first world country. To that point our government’s recent scrapping of all the kinds of aid programs we’ve provided to poorer countries across the world almost guarantees that more desperate people will set out for ‘greener pastures’ including the United States.
What is the root of these new government policies? Debate continues about the reasoning behind massive government cuts to aid programs. Inescapable though is that the cuts play to voters who believe that ‘scarcity’ is normal, that we as individuals and a nation don’t have enough to take care of our own people much less to give away to others at no cost. In economics, scarcity is an essential concept tied directly to value. Diamonds are more scarce than gravel; that truth sets their relative price.
On a related track, scarcity is a concept in social psychology. When people look around their world and think that they are going to lose something they have, they are more intensely motivated to take action.
As Americans, the majority of us have enough food, clothing, and shelter. We have enough money to play a video game, buy a beer, or pay for a streaming movie. But on the public airwaves many voices loudly assert that ‘hordes’ of people from other places are coming here and that their presence will take away jobs, or groceries or housing or the food from their tables. The ‘scarcity lens’ is myopic. Its focus on “what we’re about to lose” makes seeing the wealth and plenty that abounds in our country more difficult. American farmers make part of their earnings growing food which is passed on to domestic and international consumers. For decades the government (we taxpayers) have paid the farmers to do so.
Americans generate 17 million tons of textile waste a year, just over 6% of total municipal waste. On average, 700,000 tons of used clothing gets exported overseas and 2.5 million tons of clothing are recycled. Three million tons are incinerated, and a staggering 11 million tons get sent to landfills.
Other examples show similar patterns. The economic structures which underpin our culture don’t encourage equitable distribution; they are based on continuous and increasing consumption. I am not arguing here for overhauling our social order; I am making the point that the ‘fear of losing what you’ve got’ is not rational. In fact, as previous generations since the founding of this country have shown, new people entering our economy help it to grow. Refugees wanting to come to America want to be consumers. And they are willing to work, just as my Irish immigrants did, to make that happen. The last thing they want is for their children to be ‘the other’.
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