A Stopover in the Heartland
I left my California idyll, and soared into milky, hazy US skies.
I touched down to change planes in Minneapolis, which I recalled as having been the corn-fed, friendly Midwest.
I saw that now, almost everyone employed by the airlines, as well as everyone working as ground crew, was of Somali descent, or were recent arrivals from Somalia.
They spoke Arabic or Somali to one another, not even bothering with English; passengers and colleagues alike were greeted with a hand to the heart. The flight attendants for Delta, out of Minneapolis, wore chic little grey attenuated hijabs, pinned to their hair. (They happened also to be in furious moods.)
I have no problem with reasonable legal immigration; I have no problem with other religions. But I did wonder what had happened to all of the US-born former staffers that used to be employed in those fairly well-paying jobs. It was not diversity I was seeing now, but a new kind of hegemony.
I wondered what kind of security issue it might represent when an entire major US travel hub was now under the management of a single recently-arrived nationality; one that is not our own.
The fact that the entire sensitive Minneapolis-St Paul airport infrastructure — which I was surprised to learn is a joint civil and US military facility — is in the hands of Somalis, is an example, to me, of the chaos and vulnerability we import when we in the West lift humans wholesale out of their sometimes-dangerous, sometimes-abusive contexts, and re-situate them in influential Western contexts, with almost no acculturation, or assimilation metrics.
“The immigrant” is positioned always in liberal discourse as in need of “our” “help.” The narrative is always about “our” “responsibilities” to such immigrants, and all of the immigrants are always positioned within this narrative as being a/ helpless and b/ innocent. And C — the immigrants’ culture that is being imported along with the immigrant, is always supposed to enhance the United States’ culture, simply because it is “other” from the nasty, racist, homogenous culture of the United States.
In fact, this narrative actually to me itself seems to be quite racist; simply a new, NGO-reframed revamp of the condescending 18th-century European trope of the non-European innocent, admirable “Noble Savage.”
This narrative, indeed, reveals, in my view, a profound ignorance about the actual world — a lack of awareness of the kinds of struggles that peace-loving, justice-loving, freedom-loving people, living in failed states and under oppressive regimes, actually face.
Some societies are in fact neither helpless nor innocent.
At the level of leadership and of social contracts, and especially of the treatment of women and girls, Somalia, to take just one example, is a horrible, culpable society.
Individual Somalis no doubt are likely to be people of great decency. But look at Somali norms and society as a whole, which we are also importing when we resettle people en masse.
According to Amnesty International, all parties in that nations’ current civilian conflict, a confrontation between the government and a militia group named Al-Shabaab, abuse their own civilians and deprive their own people of human rights. In other words, no Somali party is innocent.
The crisis in Somalia is not currently derived from those cliches of racialized identities, “white against black”, or “colonizer versus colonized”. It is, rather, a crisis of Somali against Somali. And very specifically, it is a crisis of Somali men against Somali women and girls.
There are half a million internally displaced Somali people, 80 per cent of them women and children, who are suffering horrific abuses, including sexual assault, forced marriages, and “gender-based violence” — meaning beatings and female genital mutilation — at the hands of Somalis.
According to the European Union Agency for Asylum, female genital mutilation affects almost the entire female population of Somalia:
[Source: https://www.fgmcri.org/country/somalia/]
The chart above, exp
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