Little Insecurities

So I saw a movie last night that I’ve been wanting to see for some time now. It’s a film called “The Visitor”, and it’s been out for, oh, probably over a month now. You can catch it at whatever theater near you plays the limited release movies, usually near a college, art section of town, you know, hippie places.

Anyways, this movie, “The Visitor” (there’s a slight spoiler alert, but nothing overt, more of a thematic alert), is ostensibly about a widower college professor who befriends a couple (in the the romantic sense) of Middle Eastern (illegal) immigrants (one from Syria, the other a Muslim Senegalese, so yes not really the Middle East). Empirically however it is about something much more important.

The movie, for lack of a more verbose description, is slow. It is a typical heavy drama, with very few momens of light interaction, and an even less engaging main character (the point being that he is so disaffected that you can’t help but wonder about him). In doing so, however, it lowers your defense for the few moments of intensity. The anger that the professor feels when his friend is profiled and sent to a detention center, the languish of the mother when she realizes her son is gone, and the jubilant feeling of freedom from expectations.

So that’s the movie, it was great, I wasn’t enthralled every moment, but as I’ll explain soon that wasn’t the point.

Empirically the movie was about the new generation and how we treat our immigrants, legal or otherwise. It does a great job at displaying the differences between how an individual treats the immigration issue and how a group (or government) does. There are two defining parts in how the film deals with the problem, one from the immigrant side, and one from the national side. I’ll tackle them one at a time.

Terek, the Syrian 20-something drum player, is eventually detained by NYPD for jumping a turnstyle at a subway station. Now, of course, in the movie he doesn’t actually do anything wrong. He gets stuck in between bars after paying his and his professor friend’s (which has happened to me countless times) with his drum and jumps over the last bar. NYPD descends upon him, asks him his nationality, and sends him to an immigration detention center. The movie doens’t make any qualms about the arrest of illegal immigrants, there’s no fight over that fact, because, well it’s a “law”. What it does do though is discuss the ethics of immigration arrests in the first place. One of the most compelleing lines in the movie comes when Terek’s frustation is at a peak and he screams, “We are not terrorists! The terrorists have money! They have support!” Now what an interesting concept. We arrest countless of poor, or lower-middle class immigrants everyday, and not once do we think that these international terrorist cells are some of the most well funded organizations in the world. Osama has billions in family assets, enough to buy living spaces, food, supplies, anything else they might need.

The people we have in detention centers aren’t terrorists, they’re doing the same thing our parents did when they first came to this country, working however they can and trying to live in America. Now I can’t say I understand the plight of the new immigrant to America, I’ve never had to endure anything close to coming to new country and trying to understand its culture which can sometimes be unforgiving. Being an ex-pat and being an immigrant are very different situations.

Now since I can’t say much for that scenario, the most moving moment in the whole movie is when the main professor is in the detention center asking about his friend who has been transferred without any notice to any number of centers in the US. He exclaims, “You can’t do this to people! We are not helpless children!”. What a statement. Our government has taken the problem of immigration and transformed it into this protectionist dogma of a concerned parent. Even more compelling is that this is a “conservative” movement, the same brand that concerns itself with smaller government and states rights. How ironic then that republicans want to cover America in so much protective plastic that the size of the government will continue to grow until immigration is non-existent and our beautiful process of heterogenity starts to move backwards.

Our government has transformed us into xenophobic children, the kind that will always need protection from the outside world and the inhabitants that might come to our country. It is amazing then, that the same pundits who calim to be “classic conservative”, those who love the idea of a liberalized global economy and hate the idea of a government that interferes in any way, are so against the idea of immigration and a more liberal policy on that front. I know that the comment made by the professor in the detention center struck a chord with me, and I realize that we are not children, and we cannot be told who are our friends and who are our enemies.