Monthly Muse: 9/2024

Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation

Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.

Weekly Groundings will be back next Friday; today, I offer you the September 2024 Monthly Muse.

Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth

• Weekly Grounding #62

• Weekly Grounding #63

• Weekly Grounding #64

• Weekly Grounding #65

• I’m One of You Now

Contemplation

This month’s essay, “I’m One of You Now,” is on the topic of migration. Immigration policy has become a central aspect of the 2024 presidential race and has emerged as the Trump campaign’s strongest electoral issue since more and more Americans have come to support stricter immigration controls in recent years. However, the American right’s efforts to promote the issue through a concocted story about pet-eating Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio has redirected discussion away from real policy and toward inane culture war talking points.

Left-liberal disinformation surrounding violent incidents against black people (the Jussie Smollett hoax being the most egregious example) provided the pretext for many on the right to dismiss all claims of violence against Afro-Americans as fake news. Similarly, I suspect that the Trump-Vance campaign’s choice to double down on the pet-eating migrant story will serve as a pretense for many on the left to brush off any and all sincere critiques of mass immigration as unfounded (even more than they already do).

We need to bring the discussion of migration away from the surface level culture war impasse and toward substantive issues of policy. But before that is possible, it is important to cultivate a nuanced understanding of what migration is about—not just in relation to politics, but also at the economic, social, and psychological levels. “I’m One of You Now” is an attempt to do this by way of a personal vignette about one particular elite migrant from India. I hope you’ll have a read if you haven’t already.

While the Trump-Vance fixation on Haitians in Springfield suggests that Republicans are chomping at the bit to reign in poor and working-class migration, the increasing influence of Big Tech donors on Trumpism 2.0 has made the campaign quite sympathetic to elite migration. In one interview, Trump was asked if he would promise to give Silicon Valley employers “more ability to import the best and the brightest around the world to America.” He replied: “I do promise…I happen to agree, that’s why I promise, otherwise I wouldn’t promise.” Trump went even further to advocate a policy of automatically handing out green cards to foreign-born graduates from American colleges and universities and lamented that elite Indian and Chinese migrants were not given enough opportunities to work and start businesses in the United States.

Making up stories about poor Haitian migrants while giving their elite Asian counterparts a free pass is only intelligible in a world where tech billionaires are bankrolling the Trump campaign. The hypocrisy is all the more ironic since Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, is herself an early product of the elite migration pipeline from India to the United States, as I discussed in last month’s Monthly Muse. A Trumpian critique of elite migration seems logical, but Trump’s newfound allegiance to Silicon Valley tech moguls has pushed his campaign in the opposite direction.

This is all to say that serious analysis of the current immigration regime is desperately needed. The elite migration that both candidates support should not be left out of the picture. Write a comment or send me a DM to share your thoughts and let me know if you’d like to see more writing on this topic at Handful of Earth in the future.

Provocation

American writers in Paris, “had been divorced from their origins, and it turned out to make very little difference that the origins of white Americans were European and mine were African—they were no more at home in Europe than I was.

“The fact that I was the son of a slave and they were the sons of free men meant less, by the time we confronted each other on European soil, than the fact that we were both searching for our separate identities. When we had found these we seemed to be saying, why, then we would no longer need to cling to the shame and bitterness which had divided us so long.

“It became terribly clear in Europe, as it never had been here, that we knew more about each other than any European ever could. And it also became clear that, no matter where our fathers had been born, or what they had endured, the fact of Europe had formed us both, was part of our identity and part of our inheritance.”

—James Baldwin, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American”