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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. My Los Angeles Immigration, emotion and reason By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 800 words Publication date: June 18, 2006 I grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1950s and 60s. Since the 1970s I have globe-trotted and lived in several different countries. But I still have family connections in the city and twice a year I return and immerse myself in things Scottish. The problem is that things Scottish keep changing. Fifty years ago, my schoolmates were all white, as were friends, neighbors, busdrivers, policemen, shopkeepers and almost every long-term inhabitant. The only dark skins I saw were university students who would soon return home. Today, many Scots are of Indian or Pakistani origin, the accents of the younger generation identical to that of their home-grown peers. Schools are multicultural, are as all the professions from doctor to busdriver. I am, however, not impressed. My Scotland is a small, homogenous society, where we all share the same allegiance to haggis, heather and Robert Burns. These new Scots have different roots and sometimes wish they would find another home. Be happy in London, Delhi or Johannesburg but leave me with alone with my childhood. I first visited Los Angeles in the 1980s. In the 1990s I lived there for several years. To me the city teetered on the edge of reality, neighbor to Vermilion Sands, the sun-baked suburbia created by science fiction writer J G Ballard. In Ballard’s world people lived in houses built in the shape of the square root of minus one and gathered on the beach to watch cloud-sculptors in the sky. Their homes were adorned with singing plants and at night they employed sound-sweeps to clear rooms of the sounds of old conversations that clung to furniture and walls. My home was in West Hollywood, a community only slightly less surreal. Around me, glimpsed from car as I drove aimlessly hour after hour, I watched Los Angeles unfold from Rodeo Drive to Huntington Beach, from the San Gabriel Mountains to Disneyland. In my air- and music-conditioned bubble Vermilion Sands was only a freeway exit away. In the real world, LA was for me a city primarily peopled Caucasians and African-Americans, dotted with enclaves of other ethnicities. Ten years later, it has become a Ciudad de Latinos. I hear Spanish In Trader Joe’s in West Hollywood. The Valu Plus in Winnetka has more signs in Spanish than in English. In a once black neighborhood of Pasadena, televisions blare Univision, not UPN into the morning. I don’t like it. My Los Angeles welcomes immigrants but the prevailing culture remains Anglo-Saxon. My Los Angeles is the surfers of Newport Beach. My Los Angeles is the Ahmanson Theater and the Hollywood Bowl. My Los Angeles is film noir, Sunset Strip and Route 66. My Los Angeles is persistently two-tone. My Los Angeles is dying or never existed. I don’t think I am racist. I speak Spanish fluently and read Garcia Marquez in the original (with occasional recourse to the dictionary). But for me it is the language of Bogota, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires, not LA. So do I rush to join the ranks of immigration hawks in Scotland and America? Do I demand a wall from San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico? Would I insist on English only in schools and on the streets? Am I in favor of deporting illegal immigrants and possibly legal migrants and their offspring as well? No to all the above. I may hanker for a Los Angeles carved in my image, but my response is grounded in emotion, not reason. (And as a migrant myself it’s also hypocritical.) Reason tells another story. Mass migration, both violent and peaceful, lies at the heart of the human experience, People have always left their homes, permanently or temporarily to seek a better life elsewhere. Only in rare cases such as the migration of pre-Columbians into the Americas, have they moved to land where no other people lived. Sometimes new arrivals are easily absorbed by the old culture, sometimes they overwhelm it. Often the cultures have fused, as in America, where the British heritage has long been intertwined with deep roots from Africa, Europe, Asia and the rest of the Americas. In less than one hundred years Los Angeles itself has seen wave after wave of immigration, including Okies, African-Americans and Japanese, all of whom were despised and distrusted before they were absorbed. Two hundred years ago the city spoke mostly Spanish. As the wheel of fortune turns it returns to its roots. Resentment towards come from other cultures is understandble but short-sighted. The wise among us accept the inevitable. With one exception... We should welcome those who want to live peacefully among us, but resist one group with every civilised means at our disposal. The ignorance and bigotry harbored by religious fundamentalists of every hue threaten our communities, our minds and our lives.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |