January 25, 2006: Foreigners, assimilation and the basic of all rights


“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”-Robert Frost

Immigration versus assimilation. This topic transcends borders, from France and America to the far sea of Japan. What makes someone indigenous? Native? Why do some countries welcome foreigners and others create concrete walls of precaution to protect themselves from these “threats” (as Bush, Rove, Cheney and the rest of the White House cronies would have us believe them to be)?

Living in Japan as a five foot eight inch Caucasian woman, I obviously stick out in the massive Osaka crowds. I politely ignore the stares on the trains, laugh off the jibes in subways and calmly rebuke the negative jingoist comments I can often understand in Japanese. I never in my life thought that I would experience discrimination that I had read that existed in America or heard first-hand from my friends who experienced outright bigotry. Fortunately, the Midwest somewhat sheltered me from this harsh existence that many others experience, so my first-hand knowledge at being an outsider was the moment I entered the geographic borders of Japan as a “resident alien.”

The conversation is a fluid and timely one in our lives. We are still learning lessons from Paris’s riots, groping at understanding the subtle differences between Shi’ites and Sunnis, and commemorating Martin Luther King’s dreams of a day when the content of our character pushes aside color and creed. For now, however, we live in a time where the pugnacious nature of racism is truculently inevitable.

In Japan recently, one of the Diet (parliament) members proclaimed that Japan is a “homogenous” nation. Furor erupted from the Brazilian, Korean and Chinese communities (to name a few) who celebrate their ethnic diversity while embracing their inherent “Japanese-ness.” So why do some nations value the idea of a melting pot and what provokes others to forego this diversity?

The Economist from last November explained that “hyphenating beats segregating” in America, a nation whose stars and stripes better assimilate Arabs than France or other European nations. The article describes “assimilation” as the ability for minorities in America to have equal opportunities for education, income and advancement, i.e. social, educational, commercial, political equality. While I virulently inveigh that we as Americans have a long ways to go, I remember a conversation I had with an Arab-American friend of mine, Razi, several summers ago.

We met at a conference for young leaders concerned with American’s image in the world, and Razi was a representative from Dearborn, Michigan; the location of the nation’s largest Arab population. Being a deftly and embarrassingly ignorant Midwesterner, where the only diversity I ever experienced was the variety of cowboy hats I saw each day, Razi patiently described his reactions after 9/11, his Muslim faith and how he appreciated every opportunity to explain his views to an ignorant person (i.e. me). He truly believed that Arab-Americans had an opportunity those in other nations did not, even if he did get hassled by the FBI and frequently pulled aside at airports.

So why do nations like France and Japan not possess mechanisms that allow this same kind of understanding? I am not about to proclaim from a soapbox that American is the epitome of equality and understanding, but at least our nation was founded upon the shoulders of men and women who knew these borders were transient; a melting pot, an Ellis Island of good will toward all man and womankind, with a few bumps along the road of course (like Bush’s immigration plan).

My brilliant and insightful tomodachi Takara (Sista in Sendai) has highlighted the fact that in Japan, a place where thousands of years of culture meets tomorrow’s trends in technological and scientific advances, still has vast difficulties using archetypal images for minorities, from African-Americans to Korean-Japanese. And according to the Economist’s pre-requisites for assimilation, Japan certainly exudes arenas where fairness in social, educational and some political equality, at least for a modern, capitalist nation-state.

So what must be done? I too, am in a lover’s quarrel with the world, as Frost so poetically had inscribed on his epitaph. Therefore, I do not feel that we can simply envisage walls and borders. Rather than America alienating Vincente Fox and our Mexican neighbors, rather than Japan eliminating educational rights to foreign children, instead of ignoring the poverty of Arabs in Parisienne tenements, we need to inclusively create political equality for our increasingly globalize world. David Ardo, a human rights researcher colleague, highlighted in a recent Japan Times article how Japan must exhort lawmakers to support legislation that promotes the rights of gaikokujin, or foreigners and extend basic human rights to all peoples living within the borders of Japan. We must cede this bombastic idea that foreigners are a threat, and instead embrace the diverse qualities that they bring to our lives.

Only then can we truly embrace the ai, or love, that Frost, spoke of…the whole world over.