If we are to free each other from slavery, in all its forms and disguises, we must be clear-eyed about our own vulnerabilities. Bullies and parasites rely on them to keep us in our place—especially our fear of the other, our instinctive reactions to the unfamiliar, and even our misreading of things we don’t fully understand or perceive.
“That Black Man”
I’m certain that fear was the root of the hot and angry objections to “that black man” coming to our all-white church in our all-white suburb. I’d never heard anyone there overtly identify as a racist or white supremacist, and I suspect they would have been horrified had they been accused of such things. But the fear was there, and it erupted the moment their protected perimeter was approached by someone other.
Though I was early on taught to value and respect others, I suspect racism had taken quiet root in me too—not as overt hatred, but as some implicit, subtle fear or miscomprehension of people who didn’t look or act like me. It took time and a lot of travel to kill those bitter roots and teach me to value, respect and actually enjoy the enormous diversity of humanity.
But when we finally get it, we’re much harder to fool or manipulate.
Turning Their Enemies Into Your Enemies
Friends might prank each other with fake snakes or spiders—harmless scares that prompt a laugh once the truth is seen. But bullies and parasites do something darker. They manufacture fear by inventing enemies—caricaturing people as monsters, threats or villains.
They demonize others to try to turn them into your enemies, claiming those people are conditioned to do evil and must be dealt with ruthlessly. And when they do that, and there are deaths of any others nearby? Dismissed as collateral damage.
Or they speak of them as Aristotle did—as a lower class of beings. We are their betters, they claim. The rest are fit only to serve the high-born above them, or to be sacrificed as needed.
Or they confine them to the ghettos, branding them as lazy, dirty, dangerous—then red-lining their neighborhoods and nations, locking them in place by law so they can’t move or work.
Or they stoke fear of them if the “others” are immigrants—branding them as criminals, rapists, the diseased, the insane—to keep them away. It’s the same smear, recycled across every wave of immigrants—Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, Germans, Mexicans, Arabs, Asians, Muslims, Catholics, Hispanics… and, and, and.
Even the people who were here already—Native Americans—weren’t spared. They were branded as “savages,” forcefully removed by the army from the land they’d occupied for centuries, and killed if they resisted.
This isn’t some imagined, revisionist, “liberal guilt” fiction. It’s real history, and we need to acknowledge it—or we will repeat the worst atrocities of our past.
Immigrants
Fear of the other is a time-tested way to convince us that immigrants will steal our resources rather than help increase them. But every wave of immigrants has ultimately benefited us, rising from demonization to respect—because they were productive. They added to our resources. (The obvious exception, of course, is when the “immigrants” were armed colonizers who enslaved the people already here.)
We’ve seen these tactics used to fool and manipulate us—stoking fear, dread and revulsion instead of respect or sympathy. Time and again, we’ve demonized entire populations for the actions of a few bullies and parasites among them. Our bullies and parasites magnified—or invented—theirs to make us fear all of them. But most were just ordinary people, like us, like you, trying to be safe and productive, in a country that stands as a beacon of freedom, and whose founding documents declare human rights unalienable—for all humans, not just “citizens.” (See the upcoming chapter Our Rights and Obligations for more.)
Let’s pause for a moment and recall who we are. When France honored the vision and virtue of the United States with the gift of the Statue of Liberty, it required our building a massive foundation on which to stand. This sonnet, now displayed proudly within, was written by poet Emma Lazarus to help raise the funds for that foundation.
Lazarus titled the sonnet “The New Colossus” to contrast it with the Colossus at Rhodes, which celebrated a military victory. Note how clearly the differences in meaning are set forth, and especially the name given this mighty woman, declaring her character and caring to all the suffering peoples of the world: Mother of Exiles!
Mother of Exiles
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus, 1883
for the Statue of Liberty
Let’s all stop, set aside the hot political rhetoric of our current moment, and try hard to remember who we are, and where we came from.
Our own families came through that golden door, many of them tired, poor, “wretched refuse,” homeless, huddled masses, tempest-tost, yearning to breathe free. And now that we are safe, taken in by the Mother of Exiles, we dare to refuse just the same welcome to those who follow after us?
Really? Is that who we have become? Are we now the angry neighbor that yells, “Get out of my yard!” at the family who fled their storm wrecked home or who escaped abuse and threat of death?
Mother of Exiles, open our eyes.
Illegal Aliens
“But they broke the law!” That may be technically true—just as those who drank from segregated water fountains broke the law, or those who sheltered Jews in Nazi Germany did. But legality is not the same as morality. Using the word “illegal” to redefine someone’s worth, to defame them and justify rejecting their humanity, is a tactic as old as fear itself. It doesn’t clarify the situation. It manipulates it.
When we declare something “illegal”—like a Black man drinking from a “whites-only” fountain—we take an act that’s neither immoral nor dangerous and declare it against “the law.” Now, conveniently, that person is a lawbreaker, a criminal. And once they’re a criminal, we justify what follows: beating, jail, lynching… or deportation without due process: without rights, justice or fair hearing.
And let’s be clear: “Illegal alien” is a double smear.
When we call someone “alien,” we cast them as “other.” Not one of us. Not our family. Not our responsibility. We act not like a nation founded by refugees, but like a classic mob—boss at the top, crew chiefs below, protection rackets, exploitations, bribes, enforcers: defending our own and shutting out anyone else. That becomes our morality: loyalty to the boss and the family, and disregard for anyone outside it.
Though immigrants have done nothing despicable or immoral—only fled cruelty, oppression and poverty, in search of safety and a future—we instead have defined them as alien. And we alienate them from the very rights that we ourselves claim are “unalienable” in our Declaration of Independence.
We claim that all people are created equal, with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—rights “endowed by our Creator.” These rights are not granted by citizenship but by our shared humanity. From our country’s founding, we asserted that no king, president, government or law could take these rights away from anyone. It is a moral betrayal—utter hypocrisy—to pretend these rights apply only to those we approve of, and deny them to those we don’t.
This is not just a matter of legality—it’s a moral and rhetorical shell game. Yes, entering without authorization violates current immigration law. But using that fact alone to paint all undocumented immigrants as criminals is misdirection—a reframing designed to short-circuit our natural empathy and reinforce fear.
This tactic lets political actors collapse vastly different people and situations into a single, threatening image: asylum seekers, visa overstays, undocumented laborers and the like, are lumped together with thieves and violent criminals into one “alien menace.”
And once this tactic is normalized, it’s dangerously easy to expand its logic: “They’re here illegally, therefore criminal.” And if any of them dare disagree with any politician’s actions—a right guaranteed to absolutely everyone in the First Amendment—then they are arrested, jailed, deported, or worse. And with no fair hearing, evidence, trial and judgement—rights guaranteed to absolutely everyone, not just citizens, in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? Really?
And that’s how nations have gone from “immigration enforcement” to ethnic cleansing. And how invaders have driven out, “relocated” or murdered the innocent inhabitants of the territories they coveted.
We are not the angry neighbor. We are the Mother of Exiles. We have to remember who we are.
The right question to ask about any immigrants isn’t “Why do I have to take care of them?”
It must be, “How would I want to be received if I were fleeing cruelty, oppression and poverty?”
What would I want and need? Decide what the answer is—then do that.
Let’s claim this insight. It makes us harder to manipulate—with propaganda, false narratives, manufactured enemies and fake heroes. It’s time for that to end.
Our question must never be, “How can we get that poor, wretched refuse, those huddled masses yearning to breathe free, out of our yard and out of our sight?”
Treating others the way we want to be treated, our first question must always be, “How can we help?”
The solution?
Don’t start with fear. Start with mutual care, instead. It always brings thriving and abundance.
And strategize it. Figure it out. Invest in caring, training, integration into our norms and culture, into who we are. It will always prosper us.
We can do this.
(Find an extended look at Fear of the Other and Helping Immigrants and Homeless, in Sources.)