immigration – Noodlings

Weekly Varia no. 25, 05/06/23

Posted on May 6, 2023May 6, 2023 by Josh Nudell

I never know quite what to do as a professor in the last week of the semester. When I was a teaching assistant in survey courses I dedicated this week to exam preparation, but my deep skepticism of that mode of assessment means that I almost requires students to sit final exams. I have students write papers instead, and, increasingly, I have moved key pieces of the assessment earlier in the semester so that the students are able to revise their work before the end of term. This change gives me more flexibility about what we cover later in the semester, but I go back and forth on what we should focus on given that the “new” content is not going to be assessed on a test. But neither do I want to leave a semester unfinished, so I have recently been doing two things to round out the semester.

First, I use the last couple of weeks of class to complete whatever thematic arcs we have followed from the start of the semester. I started thinking about my courses in these terms four or five years ago when I realized that doing so helped both me and my students approach the material as a discrete unit that layers and builds depth as the semester goes on. The last couple of weeks let us tie these themes together.

Second, I lean into reflection. For instance, in two of my classes this semester I showed the students their opening day Jamboard where I asked them to reflect on what they knew coming into the course. My Persian history class got a kick out of seeing how little they knew, while the Roman history course talked about how they had a lot of key terms or ideas, but as buzzwords absent context. In both classes, we then talked about what they learned and reinforced the themes for the semester. Predictably, my Persian history class ended up in a passionate discussion about the challenges of writing ancient history.

But when I step out of the classroom for the last time for the semester, whether tinged with sadness or relief that a particular class has concluded, I also feel like I’m stepping into an unsettling limbo. As much as I am often ready for a break at the end of a long semester, my work is not over. I will be meeting with students throughout the finals week and screening films for a couple of classes, and the “final” grading push has only just begun.

By next week, though, I might be ready to start looking ahead to the summer.

This week’s varia:

Paul Thomas has a good reflection on one of the core challenges of a good writing-intensive class: changing student perceptions about whose responsibility learning actually is. In his estimation, as it is mine, these challenges are systemic to American education, and COVID policies only exacerbated the issues where students often don’t avail themselves of the resources at their disposal and limit their revisions to the things specifically pointed out in the comments, even when those comments are representative of other issues. My hope is that because I’m doing this from my seat in a history department and frequently have the students in our major more than once I can help them break these habits even if it takes more than one iteration.
NAEP Civics and US History scores for eighth graders dropped last week, showing a modest drop from 2018 and 2014, but only back to the baseline for earlier years. There is some performative rending of clothes and tearing of hair about these scores (including on my campus), but these scores are deeply misleading. These are not good tests, to start with, and I could easily see how questions about “the rule of law” on a civics test might be shaped by the discourse filled with mass shootings, police violence, and attempts to overthrow the government. But even more damning is the data about social studies instruction that, even disregarding the frequently-true stereotype of the coach-teacher, the suggests that social studies education has lagged behind other disciplines in terms of time and resources. Unfortunately, this new data is being used to manufacture a crisis that can only have negative outcomes.
Stephen Chappell writes about his approach to digitally restoring the polychrome painting on the Apollo Belvedere for a French exhibition.
Pasts Imperfect highlights a history of philosophy podcast this week.
Modern Medieval features an article about a Carolingian coin bearing the name Fastrada, one of the wives of Charlemagne.
Baker Maurizio Leo, the author of The Perfect Loaf, asked ChatGPT to provide him a sourdough bread recipe. His assessment is that the AI produced a reasonable generic loaf, albeit with a particularly high baking temperature, but that the recipe lacked creativity. AI is a powerful tool and the pace of its development is truly impressive, but I also believe that even some of the “basic” tasks people are racing to offload onto the AI require more care, attention, and creativity to do well. In many ways, bread baking is a metaphor for life and “Great sourdough bread isn’t simply a pattern that can be detected and replicated; it requires a human touch to guide it in the right direction.”
AI machine learning translation tools that swapped singular for plural pronouns (and other little errors) put Afghan asylum claims at risk. I find these tools incredibly useful, but this sort of error underscores my primary concern with AI, namely that putting all your trust in the tools without any way to check or verify the accuracy will cause innumerable problems that will only be caught when it is too late if they’re caught at all.
The “Godfather” of AI left his job at Google and raised warnings about the future of the technology. His concerns are about ethics and bad actors, while mine lie more in the likelihood that most people are going to assume that AI can do more than it can in a way that is going to cause enormous disruption while eroding the imperative to learn the underlying skills and putting significantly more noise and misinformation out into the world.
Missouri’s Senate passed a proposal to raise the threshold for statewide constitutional amendments to 57% of voters (from the 50%+1 that in recent years rejected right to work, legalized marijuana, and approved medicare expansion, among others) or a simple majority in five out of eight heavily gerrymandered districts. The combination seems designed to curtail the power of voters unless they’re likely to vote the way that the Republicans want. His concerns seem rooted in
New reporting at ProPublica has revealed still more financial ties between Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, including more than $6,000 a month(!) in boarding school tuition for a grandnephew over whom Thomas had legal custody. Thomas did not report this financial relationship. At the same time, the Washington Post has a report about money that Leonard Leo funneled to Ginni Thomas the same year that the court was hearing Shelby County v. Holder, all the while directing her name be left off the receipts. There is not much more to say about this deep level of corruption in the Supreme Court, but it seems bad when ProPublica has a section dedicated to this series of stories. Sheldon Whitehouse is spearheading efforts to create accountability, so, naturally, Senators like Josh Hawley claim they are designed to intimidate justices.
Herschel Walker’s campaign appears to have violated campaign finance laws by acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars for his private business.
This week in “there are too many guns,” a baseball player for Texas A&M-Texarkana was hit in the chest by a stray bullet while he was in a game.
Greg Abbott described five victims of a shooting last week as “illegal immigrants” alongside a reward for the shooter in a bit of casual cruelty. At least one of the victims appears to have been a legal resident, as though the residency status matters.
A passenger on a New York City subway killed Jeremy Neely after putting him in a choke hold. I almost didn’t include this story in this list I had a hard time bringing myself to read about it and, especially, the discourse around whether killing someone was somehow justified. These posts are a curated rundown of things I read about during the week, usually that I have some sort editorial comment about. When one topic seems to have captured a particular zeitgeist I have nothing of particular substance to add, except to note that the grotesque discourse about under what circumstances it is acceptable to murder people in public absolutely terrifies me.
The story that made me think about the gun violence epidemic in the United States was when I heard the BBC World Service do a feature on two mass shootings in Serbia this week, with the rarity of the violence making international news. The level of gun violence in the United States is not normal.
Belgian customs officials zealously enforced the complaint from the Comité Champagne by destroying a shipment of Miller High Life after the trade group objected to the slogan “the champagne of beers” on the grounds that it infringed on the designated place of origin label.
Astronomers observed a gas giant being eaten by a star for the first time, doing it in one big gulp. Pretty cool.
Tucker Carlson has thoughts about how white men fight (McSweeney’s).
McSweeney’s has an imagined short monologue: “If elected president, I promise to slaughter Mickey Mouse.”

Album of the week: Justin Townes Earl, The Saint of Lost Causes (2019)

Currently Reading: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time; Martin Hallmannsecker, Roman Ionia: Constructions of Cultural Identity in Western Asia Minor

Go, Went, Gone

Posted on May 12, 2019May 12, 2019 by Josh Nudell

“Could these long years of peacetime be to blame for the fact that a new generation of politicians apparently believes we’ve now arrived at the end of history, making it possible to use violence to suppress all further movement and change? Or have the people living here under untroubled circumstances and at so great a distance from the wars of others been afflicted with a poverty of experience, a sort of emotional anemia? Must living in peace––so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world––inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?”

Without memory, man is nothing more than a bit of flesh on the planet’s surface.

I came to Jenny Erpenbeck in a roundabout way. I had been reading Stefan Zweig through the recent NYRB Classics series when an ancient historian on Twitter lamented that people were reading Zweig and neglecting the current master, Erpenbeck. So I gave Erpenbeck a shot. She hooked me with her first novel, The End of Days, which examines the twentieth century through a series of deaths. In Go, Went, Gone, Erpenbeck is back with a masterpiece about the gulf between the citizen and the refugee in our present time.

Richard, an aging widower, has just retired from his position as a Classics professor in Berlin. Go, Went, Gone opens with him emptying his office and retreating into the mundanity of everyday life where his days are spent making food and watching the news. With his newly discovered time, Richard learns of a hunger strike in the Alexanderplatz staged by refugees from Africa. Fascinated by these men who seem so out of place, he resolves to get to know them and begins showing up at their residence.

Few speak German, but all are multi-lingual, and Richard often converses with them in some combination of Italian and English. Richard begins by treating the men as his new project, but that quickly gives way to genuine warmth as he gets to know these men who literally risked life to reach Europe. One surviving an accident that killed most of the passengers on the over-crowded boat, another sends most of the money given to him to live back to his family. They cling to the friends they have made among their fellow refugees and just want an opportunity to work while being stymied by the impersonal bureaucracies of indifferent-at-best, hostile-at-worst governments.

Richard is methodical in his approach, trying to do his due diligence by not treating these men merely as monolithic outsiders, but even he has to be shaken from his complacency:

For the first time in his life, the thought occurs to him that the borders drawn by Europeans may have no relevance at all for Africans.

But for all of Richard’s conscientiousness, generosity, and empathy for the plight of the outsiders, I found his character distasteful, as though much of his charity was purely self-serving. The Richard we don’t meet, for instance, has his head in the sand about the world around him while he carries on an long-time affair. It is only in the boredom that comes from his retirement that he can be bothered to see what is happening. Likewise, he conceives of the refugees as an academic project first, and, early on, spends almost as much time wondering whether their attractive, Ethiopian German teacher would be interested in sleeping with him as he does trying to help. Richard’s actions are altruistic even if his motives are not, but he nevertheless struck me as a sort of narcissistic humanitarian who is mostly interested in what is in it for him.

Despite my problems with Richard, Go, Went, Gone is a brilliant novel. In one of the first scenes, Richard learns of a drowned man in the lake near his house, creating a massive disruption in his life. Similarly, the disruption caused by the reunification of Berlin, now almost twenty years past, looms large in his existence. And yet, these are minor changes compared to the trauma experienced by the refugees. Richard even struggles to reconcile the present quiet with the memory of Hitler when faced with questions from a refugee whose lived experience was filled with violence.

Politicians in Go, Went, Gone howl about the refugees and make plans to deport them back to Italy––or anywhere, so long as they are not in Germany––but in the world of the novel, the refugees are just people. (In a nice touch that inverts two centuries of racist presentations, Richard takes to giving them nicknames out of Greco-Roman mythology and northern European literature.)

Such is Erpenbeck’s triumph, sitting alongside recent novels like Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. The plight of the refugees is not exceptional––peace is. As a recent review brilliantly puts it: “this is not a world of citizens beleaguered by a tide of refugees, but a world of refugees trapped in the age of the citizen.”

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I just finished David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a riveting history from the 1920s where white guardians conspired to kill their Osage wards in order to deprive them of their tribal allotments, and have now begun Tana French’s The Trespasser, part of her Dublin Murder Squad series.

The America of Our Grandchildren

Posted on July 9, 2018July 9, 2018 by Josh Nudell

The following is the text of a letter that I sent today to my congresspeople, Claire McCaskill, Roy Blunt, and Vicky Hartzler as a response to the ongoing and largely unnecessary crisis at the US-Mexico border. In addition to the history lesson, my basic point is that the current policy makes the world more dangerous place for Americans rather than a safer one.

Let me tell you a story about a man who fled violence and religious oppression. He had already made sure that his wife and children could escape, but the same forces that oppressed him did not want to let him go. It was at great risk that he escaped past one checkpoint that wanted to keep him in and past walls that did not want to allow him through before finally joining his family in the United States.

Once in this country he opened a store, only to see it fail when the economy turned. So he tried again. And again. Eventually he succeeded in a venture selling furniture. His daughter became a teacher and his son-in-law a soldier who became a social worker. His grandsons became a teacher and a rabbi, and his great-grandchildren are educators, programmers, doctors, and engineers. Three of them have earned doctorates, including one right here in the state of Missouri.
I am, of course, talking about my great-grandfather.

This is a story I have been thinking about a lot recently because of the crisis that has developing along the southern border of the United States and the circumstances in which my great-grandfather arrived in this country. Had he been fleeing violence and oppression in the Soviet Union just a few years later, he would have been denied entry into the United States because the Johnson-Reed Act had severely restricted immigration from Eastern Europe starting in 1924. David A. Reed, the senator who gave his name to the bill, defended its implementation in an article in the New York Times on April 27 of that year, describing how the the barred immigrants from “the war-stricken countries of Europe…whose inexperience in popular forms of government would lead them to demand too much of their Government, and to rely too heavily upon it, and too little upon their own initiative.” He said that his bill would “mean a more homogenous nation” and “that the America of our grandchildren will be a vastly better place to live in.”

Senator Reed was wrong and the immigration bill was modified in 1952, but it is also the case that his rhetoric was not an outlier. Behind this immigration bill lay a tradition of concern over immigrants of one form or another that targeted, among others, Catholics, Asian-Americans, and Germans. It labelled them traitors, loyal to the pope or the emperor, called them dangerous anarchists or unskilled economic deadweight. For their religion, for their language, or for the apparent color of their skin, a belief laid bare by none other than Benjamin Franklin who asked in his “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (1751): “why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys [his word for white non-Anglo-Saxons], of increasing the lovely White and Red?”

Ben Franklin, like Senator Reed, was a flawed human being capable of being wrong.

Immigration is a fundamental part of the American experience, from our music to our popular culture to our food. If you have had a piece of pizza, the mozzarella cheese on it was considered an immigrant food a century ago. The same is true of the bagel and the taco.

America takes the best that immigrants have to offer and returns them the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness within a land of freedom and equality. America takes the best and returns in equal measure, giving those who arrive with nothing but the clothes on their back opportunities to fulfill their potential.

Senator Reed was correct when he said in 1924 that my great-grandfather was fleeing war-torn Europe in the same way that migrants across the world today are fleeing countries ripped apart by violence. Building walls is not going to change that fact and the United States cannot afford to isolate itself, economically or otherwise. Doing so, in fact, is only going to cause these wounds to fester.

Our freedom is our strength. Our diversity is our strength. Without one we don’t have the other. Isolating the United States only serves to create a more dangerous future.

I urge you to stand against the mistreatment of immigrants seeking asylum and against policies that stoke fear at the expense of actions that address the root causes of this global humanitarian crisis and prove to the world that American values are not just empty rhetoric.

Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

Posted on June 6, 2018September 1, 2018 by Josh Nudell

Online there was sex and security and plenty and glamour.

In a once-vibrant city hemmed in by an approaching civil war, two people meet while taking a night class. Saeed is fascinated and intimidated by Nadia. The former is quiet, reserved, and a simple traditionalist. Not a radical, but Romantic and nostalgic. The latter presents a formal, cloaked form to the world, but beneath it is a fiercely independent woman who veils her body precisely so that she may act as she wishes.

Their affair begins innocuously enough, but becomes increasingly fraught as war disrupts the routines of life. Together they exit west, passing through doors to other worlds. First they land in Mykonos, then London, and finally outside San Fransisco. Nadia and Saeed are forever linked, but where she becomes liberated, he succumbs to his nostalgia. The relationship is doomed to failure, but not out of malice. Nadia and Saeed cling to each other, first out of affection and then out of familiarity. Indeed, the shared trauma of dislocation extends an affair that could have ended as unremarkably as it started simply because people change.

Exit West is a beautiful and tender emigration story. Hamid does not name Nadia and Saeed’s home city, but it is a Pakistani setting that could also be a composite of Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs, all deeply torn by the Syrian Civil War that began in 2011. When the war closes the world open to people online and by phone collapses into the immediate concerns of survival, and the opportunities for sensuality, through sex and drugs and other forms of pleasure, disappear. Gone is the world that allowed Saeed’s parents to lead satisfying and well-rounded lives in the city and in their own home. The young lovers cling to each other to preserve what they can, remembering what might have been through their bodies.

Escape comes at a price and each time they they enter lands of plenty, it is with nothing to their names. Hamid’s focus in Exit West is the consequences of each move on Nadia and Saeed, and how they experience the world. News of hatred and war and political actions are dim observations rather than the central issue because that is how the protagonists experience these things. The result is a sad and sympathetic story of two people trying to find their way in the world.

Violence is omnipresent, surrounding and affecting Nadia and Saeed, but only directly touching them once. Each chapter of the main narrative is further divided by interludes that give a glimpse of someone and somewhere else. Doors and windows feature also prominently in these passages and serve to reinforce the transience and fragility of life.

Exit West is a story of loss and dislocation, remembering and forgetting, but it is also fundamentally optimistic. This emerges in the story’s conclusion (which I will not go into here), but also in the way in which the protagonists look at the world. Both Nadia and Saeed are looking for a better life, first in their intimate relationships and employment, but later in terms of safety and security. These ambitions drive them. They resist the temptation to turn bitter at the violence and hatred that they encounter, instead choosing to embrace the kindness and generosity of people they meet.

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I just finished reading Inventing Ethan Allen, a study about the cultural memory of Vermont’s founding “patriot.”

Write to your Senator

Posted on January 29, 2017January 29, 2017 by Josh Nudell

I spent a good portion of today writing a letter to Senator Roy Blunt (R, Missouri), because my conscience will not let me stay quiet. I wanted to make a case why the immigration ban in particular and other recent executive actions concerning national security more broadly ought to be met with bipartisan opposition. Since this is not merely a sticking point between liberal and conservative ideologies, I offered a short list of reasons why all elected officials ought to add the voice to curtailing many of the recent actions by the Trump administration.

I have my doubts about the efficacy of writing this, but, nevertheless I am going to compose a similar letter for my representative in the near future and am already planning letters on other issues. It may be shouting into the darkness, to be read only by a low-ranking staffer or intern, but so it goes. If it moves the needle at all, it will be worthwhile.

The transcript of the letter I penned is copied below. If anyone wishes to copy any portion of this to use in a letter to their own representative, you have my full permission.

January 29, 2017

Dear Senator Blunt,

I am a constituent in Columbia, Missouri (65202), and I am writing you today to express my concern over actions taken by President Trump’s administration on the issue of national security.

President Trump has moved aggressively and unilaterally. The highest profile action is the recent executive order that placed a temporary ban on people born in or holding the citizenship of seven Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Africa traveling into the United States, regardless of any other circumstance, legal status, or prior permission. The administration has insisted that this is the first step in enacting what the President touted as “extreme vetting” and will lead to even more sweeping measures to combat “radical Islam,” which, they say, will ensure the safety and security of the United States. Although the executive order does not explicitly restrict travel based on religion, it has been widely characterized as a Muslim ban, including by Mayor Giuliani, one of the architects of its language.

As of the composition of this letter the majority of the criticism of the ban by public officials has been by Democrats and Independents. President Trump’s rhetoric about national security does not make the United States safer and his early actions as president threaten both the wellbeing and the liberties of Americans at home and abroad. Opposition to President Trump’s unilateral action cannot be a partisan issue.

Allow me to provide a short list of reasons why I believe you should oppose both the travel restrictions and other actions on national security taken or proposed by President Trump.

Federal judges have ordered stays on the most extreme parts of the executive order, but there are multiple accounts of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection officers who have refused to follow these rulings. They are insisting that their only orders can come from President Trump. This is not happening universally, but already these are indications that the actions taken by President Trump pose a grave threat to American institutions and the sanctity of the American judicial tradition. I believe that this executive order is a violation of the Bill of Rights, but what worries me more is setting the precedent that when the courts decide an action is illegal, those rulings can be ignored.

The people who have been detained in US airports have already undergone years of background and medical checks. In many of these cases, these people risked their own lives and the lives of their families to help the US military, particularly in Iraq. Their willingness to help the United States continues to put their lives in danger in Iraq and, even if they had been living another country before being granted permission to enter the United States, they are at risk of being deported back to their country of origin.

This executive order is built on the premise that the gravest threat to national security is “radical Islamic terrorism.” Since the attacks on 9/11/2001 there have been passing few attacks against US citizens by radicalized Muslims and, including the 9/11 attacks, there have been zero attacks by any citizens of any of the countries on the current ban. ISIL and other radical Islamic groups such as Boko Haram are a serious threat to global security, but this executive order only superficially targets radical Islam. In reality, President Trump’s order has validated the worst characterization of America and Americans, immeasurably undermining our national reputation abroad and encouraging—not discouraging—further radicalization.

On the same issue: in an attempt to circumvent discriminating against immigrants based on their religion, this executive order is a blanket ban. It does not target Muslims or radical Muslims, but bans people who have been persecuted by the Islamic State, including Christians and the Yazidis, non-Muslims whose sons have been murdered and whose daughters have been given as sex-slaves to the men of the Islamic State. Along with most Muslims, these are all implacable enemies of radical Islam. This executive action leaves them vulnerable to ISIL predations and weakens the forces that oppose radical Islam in the Middle East and around the world.

President Trump maintained during the campaign that the United States should not be committed to NATO. There has been no public action yet, but, much like the immigration ban, such blunt and abrupt action threatens US national security. Our allies in Europe, as well as Turkey, are shouldering as much or more of the threat from radical Islam than is the United States.

Lastly, the executive order on immigration is indicative of a larger issue with the Trump administration that threatens American institutions. I am deeply concerned by the rapid rise of Steve Bannon, whose track record in public filings and at Breitbart reveals him to be a radical whose interests are not aligned with those of the United States. Particularly troubling is the recent news that he has displaced the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence on the National Security Council. It worries me that there is little vocal criticism of the radicalization of the Trump administration, of the continued conflicts of interest that cloak many of President Trump’s appointees, and of the lack of experience held by appointees to many critical positions.

I repeat: these are not partisan issues. The function of American government is predicated on a sharing of powers, with each branch of government serving as a check on the others. To stand passively by while the President of the United States threatens national security and runs roughshod over the protections enshrined in the Constitution is a serious abnegation of the responsibilities entrusted to all elected officials.