"Immigrants are Welcome Here"
Iowa is home...
Maybe 100 people or more were at the Iowa State Capitol yesterday for a rally organized by the Iowa Migrant Movement for Justice. Speakers told compelling stories of their journeys, struggles, and successes.
They spoke with pride and with love for their families, communities, and the state of Iowa. I saw several friends in the crowd. Sometimes we shared a word or two, and other times we just smiled and waved at each other. One man who looked familiar (sorry, I’m terrible with names!) told me he was glad to see me because he knew I would write a good story about the protest.
I had no plans to write a story. I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to write a story. I didn’t have the time to write a story. But I didn’t have the courage to tell him so.
But a story found me, and here we are. Thanks, friend.
One young woman asked me if I wanted a whistle. I nodded. I hope I never have to use it.
As the speakers were talking, their voices echoing through the rotunda, another young woman wandered through the crowd, handing out Iowa MMJ Advocacy Day Action Sheets in the photo above. Eventually, she stopped on the stair below me, caught my eye, held a sheet up, and raised her eyebrows ever so slightly, which I took as a facial expression to be universally translated as “do you want one?”
To which I replied with a facial expression and nod that she interpreted as a “yes, please,” and she handed me one with a smile, confirming to me that I’m basically a good human being on the right side of history, along with her and the rest of the people at the rally.
The Des Moines Register did the heavy lifting for me this morning, summarizing the legislation and the Iowa Migrant Movement for Justice’s objections to it:
The organization’s action sheet highlights three bills.
SSB 3169, which would require state departments and professional license boards to use the E-Verify system, “would harm lowa workers by relying on a faulty federal database which would worsen lowa’s workforce shortages,” according to the group.
HSB 668, which would eliminate required affirmative actions reports from state departments, school districts, and others, “eliminates decades of equal opportunity safeguards and will harm lowa by making our state less welcoming,” MMJ said.
HSB 663, which would create a presumption that any undocumented immigrant arrested in Iowa for a crime other than a simple misdemeanor is a flight risk and should not be granted bail, “is redundant, government overreach, creates a two-tiered justice system and relies on federal verification systems that are prone to errors,” MMJ said.
As I stood on the stairs looking down at the speakers, I felt a presence beside me. It was the editor of an Iowa MAGA website. I check it almost every day, and it’s disturbing. I’d write more about it, but I don’t need the negative energy this morning. Neither do you.
But as we both stood within inches of each other, watching the event unfold, I wondered what he was seeing.
Did he hate the people because he is racist? Does he think that they are “vermin” like some in MAGA do? That they are from “shit-hole” countries and should go back? Does he want a white Nationalist authoritarian “Christian” state where only people of European descent belong? Does he think ICE should be here, arresting the people below us, and sending them off to concentration camps without due process?
Or, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he believes that immigrants are welcome, but they need to be here legally.
But that’s not what his website suggests.
The path to citizenship is expensive with plenty of obstacles in the way. This is despite the fact that we desperately need immigrants to power our economy. Without immigrants, our farming, manufacturing, construction, and hospitality industries collapse. So why do we put so many obstacles in the way of immigrants?
Racism.
Unlike him, when I looked into the crowd, I saw family and friends. People who have come from all over the world to be Iowans. Just like my ancestors did.
After the rally was over, I was speaking to a friend about some of the terrible legislation Republicans were passing or attempting to pass this year.
She said something like, “But they are such nice people in person!”
I asked her if she had ever read Hanna Arendt, the German-American historian and philosopher who wrote of the banality of evil—its very ordinaryness.
She hadn’t, but typed the name into her phone.
Arendt wrote about how the thoughtless person can go along with anything, even evil, as long as it is normalized and accepted by the majority.
In considering Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt wrote:
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Do I think the MAGA man with the website and our Republican legislators are evil?
No, I don’t.
I think they are in a cult of Trump laced with explicit and implicit racism. Perhaps equally significant, they are in a cult where only money matters, regardless of the human and environmental consequences.
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I’m a proud member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Please check out our work here. I also publish Cedar Creek Nature Notes, about Violet the Dog and my adventures on our morning walks at Cedar Bluffs Natural Area in Mahaska County, Iowa.
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The banality of evil…broken by the shock of shouting, breaking glass and pepper spray…concentration camps quietly being constructed and filled…job growth defined by those “native born”…vileness and cruelty aren’t always shouted at rallies but by the strokes of pens and voting switches
Spot on. My 93 year old Iowa dad espoused the same sentiments as you. He just passed. I wish he had read this piece.