Donald Trump's mother, Mary Anne McLeod, traded a town in Scotland for New York to join her two sisters and work as a housekeeper.
Several decades earlier, the Bavarian Friedrich Trump had landed on Ellis Island, he was 16 years old, he was illiterate, did not speak English and it is hard to believe that it crossed his mind that he was going to become the grandfather of a future president of the United States .
However, perhaps the last thing that occurred to the young and enterprising Friedrich was that his grandson would be the person who would do the most to ban immigration: the politician who made it law that migrant minors - like himself - should be separated from their families. parents once the border is crossed.
Trump has not only said outrageous things.
He has become the model for politicians like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán capable of declaring that "all terrorists are basically migrants."
It costs a lot less to believe an outrage than to go to the trouble of digging up facts to form an opinion.
Today we consider entrepreneurs who make money - what an expression.
At the time of Trump's grandfather and mother, it was those who undertook a life capable of expanding the world, their own and collective.
This Land is Our Land
(Random House Literature) is not just an essay on immigration, history, justice, economic and cultural reasons or humanitarian causes.
It is also the story, and the research of Suketu Mehta, who arrived with his parents in New York in the 1970s and who coined the term
interlocal
to describe the growing population that feels from two places at once.
The book collects a lot of data: facts that show how economies thrive with the arrival of a young and willing workforce (that is immigrants) and how crime is always dominated by locals.
It also contains answers: what an immigrant brings (wealth, culture and stability), why they are owed (it is a form of reparation) why they are feared, and the clumsiness, ignorance and inhumanity of opposing what will eventually come .
The writer Suketu Mehta in an image on his website.
Whites are expected to cease to be the majority in the US by 2040. But today, 13% of the population is immigrant and 25% of businesses are started by immigrants.
A third of the Nobel prizes were also won by immigrants, but it is in technology where they stand out: 60% of the great American technology companies have been founded by immigrants.
Steve Jobs (Apple) was the son of a Syrian immigrant.
Sergey Brin (Google) arrived from Russia when he was six years old.
Until recently, we were able to move to travel.
Not to survive.
When the humanitarian is not considered a sufficient criterion to allow the mobility of people around the planet, one speaks of the economy (not fear) to limit immigration.
But it is unknown that half of American farm workers are irregular immigrants.
Reagan granted the green card to legalize the situation to 2,700,000 workers.
Tax revenues increased.
The crime rate dropped by 5%.
Education is also key in migration.
Most of the Indian immigrants are well prepared to work in technology companies (not to mention those founded by them).
That allowed 133,000
Mumbai-trained
software
developers in 2000
not to accept the pre-Merkel Germany conditions that needed programmers and issued 20,000 entry permits opposed by the Rhineland Prime Minister - "more children and fewer Indians" - and with some conditions - not taking his family, staying for only five years and knowing German before arriving - that made only 160 Indians apply for one of those places. "Why would they go to a country where they were welcomed with a carpet sprinkled with nails?".
Mehta also talks about culture, but not only about the wealth that immigrants bring or the mix they produce: “It is the permissiveness, openness, and vigor of American culture — and not its rigidity — that continues to attract the masses. ”.
And from the traces of historical culture.
Salman Rushdie analyzes how in novels like
Passage to India
or
The Jewel in the Crown
, an English woman is raped by an Indian.
Not even Forster dared to write otherwise.
After all, who was going to read him?
"It's much better to evoke white society's fear of dark people, of big brown cocks."
Mehta turns to data.
He notes how in his book
Tristes trópicos
(1955) the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss describes what he sees in Calcutta as a childish town, by the sympathy of their looks, the obsequious behavior and the taste for trinkets: “The street provides each individual a home where he sits, sleeps and gathers that viscous garbage that is his food ”.
Mehta compassionately concludes that the anthropologist loved tribal India, but not modern country.
The book addresses the future and points out that political refugees and those fleeing poverty need to be added to refugees from climate change: because their lands have been flooded, for example.
Mehta argues that those responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases - the cause of the floods - are the ones who should welcome those who have seen their land disappear for something that has nothing to do with it.
We know, and more with the pandemic on top, little of the future.
But it does not seem that young Europeans will be able to pay their parents' pensions.
And it does seem that urban density has no turning back and that, therefore, almost all of us are going to have to live with neighbors very different from us.
We can look the other way or learn to live together.
At the end of the 21st century, 40% of the world's population will be African.
Mehta sums it up: "The future of our species, like our past, is African."
His book
This Earth is Our Earth
describes our planet with data and stories.
And our world.