Ugly anti-immigrant uproar

By Michael Haley

Did you catch the blood bath in the comments section after the Napa Fair announced that there would be a Mexican theme to the Fair this year, complete with Mexican music and food? Not that we all aren’t eating Mexican food a lot anyway. It was long and it was ugly.

People, it is just a theme for a fair. It has nothing to do with illegal immigration, or any immigration. The only effect it had is to slam local Hispanics personally. It doesn’t solve any immigration problems. It ends up as race-based bashing, and nativism, rather than what it is, simply a theme for a fair.

I don’t think that most of the people who are upset about the Mexican based theme are racists, or that they really dislike Mexicans. Not most of them, anyway.

But if not, then what are they? They are clearly frustrated and angry people. Having said that what they did was wrong and unfair, I also have to defend them and say that there is something legitimate things they are angry about, they are just taking it out in the wrong place in the wrong way.

To understand, we have to back up a bit. Psychologist Abraham Maslow identified in the 1960s the needs of human beings, arranging them in a hierarchy based on which needs are strongest and must be met first before you go on to other, what he called higher needs. The most basic needs were for safety and security, i.e. food, shelter, and the very next one is the need to belong.

The need to belong is one of the most basic needs that we have, we cannot survive without a sense of belonging to others and it drives a huge amount of our behavior. And it was driving the immigrant bashing behavior that day on the Fiesta de Napa thread.

When you grow up in a town, you experience that town the way it is for you as a kid and you develop a strong attachment to it and the way it is. It is "my town". When the world changes as much and as rapidly as ours has, it creates a lot of anxiety for people, they lose their place in their own world, they can feel like strangers in their own town.

This is a big part of the underlying psychology behind immigrant bashing. So many new people coming in, of any stripe, and those who get their sense of value and belonging there find that source of comfort has been stolen, and they get mad about it. And well they should. It is not bad to feel that way.

The fact that the world has gone through so many rapid changes has disrupted our basic sense of identity, and is behind a lot of the confusion and alienation we see around us, politically and socially. The old values that brought us all together have been disrupted, you see this strongly in issues like gay marriage and immigration.

We need new values that incorporate something we can all feel a part of to feel connected. That is what the idea of multiculturalism could have been, but unfortunately that got hijacked by partisans and turned into something else that actually divides us, not brings us together.

This is the legitimate message of the Fair bashers, they feel isolated in their own community, with huge changes that they don’t like and don’t feel like they can control or have any impact over. This leads to huge frustration and anger.

What is wrong is to blame the newcomers, whoever they may be. They are not the problem. Government policy and the lack of enforcement is the problem.

I can’t solve this problem in one short column, or even detail it out much. But I suggest two things.

One is that we all be aware that we need community, we need to find shared values that we can all be a part of, no matter what part of the world or nation or race we may be from. Indeed, this is one of the biggest challenges of our age on every level. We need alliances at home as much as we need alliances in the world.

And we need to support the Fiesta de Napa. Let‚s make this year’s Fair the biggest and best yet.

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