Immigration is the human face of globalization. When an Indian software geek, a Mexican farmworker, a Filipino nurse or a single mom crosses an American border, our reservoir of human capital is replenished, refreshed and rejuvenated. As reported by The Economist in 2013, over 40 per cent of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or their kids.
Immigrants are the living manifestation of our social entrepreneurial commitment to the unfettered flow of human capital and to the free exchange of ideas, traditions and knowledge. Newcomers, by definition, are cultural ambassadors—spreading new languages, cuisines, new belief structures and new traditions from one community to another. The result is cultural diversity and, as a result, cultural strength and resilience.
As global citizens and as social entrepreneurs, we know that each time a human crosses a national border, it brightens our future in the same way that the stars brighten the darkest of night skies. The globalization of the world’s populations and the migration of people (not the numbing, impersonal statistics—but real living, walking, eating, laughing, singing, dreaming, loving people) are a social entrepreneur’s hope.
Every cosmopolitan nation has immigrants. According to UN statistics, 244 million people worldwide live somewhere other than their country of birth, including almost 20 million refugees. Over 43 million immigrants reside in the United States, comprising approximately 14 per cent of the population. Of that 43 million, 11 million people are without legal status—stigmatized and politically sterilized. For them, life without citizenship is an apartheid look-alike.
US industrial policy profits from northbound labor to make our beds, mow our lawns, pick our fruit, slaughter our meat, tend our children and cook in our kitchens. Simultaneously, American trade policy pimps American exports. Free trade and open borders for goods and capital. Unfree trade and closed borders for human capital. What’s wrong with this picture?
If you believe in the basic oneness of humankind, then the people who scapegoat immigrants or demonize refugees test us.
It’s pretty damn obvious that a person who breaks the law to feed a hungry family, escape imminent personal danger or build a new life of opportunity is a fundamentally different kind of person than a criminal who violates the law with intent to hurt or steal. Because we know this, we sign online petitions; vote against politicians spouting anti-immigrant bigotry; contribute humanitarian dollars to soothe our sadness over the latest refugee crisis; and support campaigns against human trafficking. It’s the kind and decent thing to do.
In the end, all societies and all cultural traditions – no matter how storied or sacred – are a polyglot of influences, mythologies, cognates, cross-breedings and historical accidents. “Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead,” concludes social philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Case for Contamination. Betting on cultural purity never works out because cultural purity doesn’t really exist. It never did. And, it’s not the social entrepreneurial way.
Thanks to the coddling of racists and anti-Semites by the Trump/Republican Wasteland, it’s no longer a secret (not that it ever was) that too many Americans are xenophobic. Even when I try my best to respectfully understand their frightened, shriveled, miserable viewpoint, I want to scream.
Estranged from their ancestors’ story of immigration and assimilation, they choose to forget that we live in a country that was settled by genocide. For more recent examples, they also forget the moral mistakes of World War II, when the United States blocked Jewish immigration and put Japanese-American citizens in internment camps. They implicitly disavow the words emblazoned on the Statute of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
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Jonathan C. Lewis, author of The Unfinished Social Entrepreneur (from which this commentary is adapted), is a life-long social justice activist and social entrepreneur. He is the Founder of MCE Social Capital, an innovative social venture that leverages private capital to finance tiny business loans to deeply impoverished people, mostly women, in 33 countries in the developing world. He is also Founder and President of the Opportunity Collaboration, an annual strategic business retreat for 450 senior level anti-poverty leaders from around the globe. In addition, Jonathan is the co-founder of Copia Global, an Amazon-like consumer catalog serving the base of the economic pyramid in Kenya. Jonathan is a Trustee of the Swift Foundation and serves as a General Partner of Dev Equity, a social impact investment fund in Central America. #UnFinSocEnt @SocentClinic (Photos by Pixabay)