Migrants all?

Our freshman orientation program this year centers around questions of "identity and migration." (I've shared one of the five readings with you; the others were essays by Ralph Ellison, Francis Fukuyama, Suketu Mehta and James Baldwin.) The speaker, an anthropologist originally from Bombay, told us about the cover of the newest issue of Time Out New York (but had not, she admitted, had time to read the article - NOT the right message for incoming students!). The statue of liberty in a sari! Our familiar green woman now brown with a spot on her forehead! The caption:

THIS PICTURE...
__ thrills me
__ angers me
__ confuses me

Is it manipulative? Sure: they want to sell magazines. It reminded me of the far more inflammatory picture on the cover of Time Magazine a few years ago (below it's - more than a few years: 1990) - which showed a US flag whose white stripes had been replaced with stripes in various shades of brown. "America's Changing Colors" was its sinister and xenophobic title. (I remember because I sent a furious letter to the editor, not, of course, published.) But it also raises interesting questions, since the Statue of Liberty is our great symbol of immigration - but she was a gift from France, and faces across the Atlantic... And she naturalizes European hegemony in the New World: if those tired and weak and helpless welcomed in are not all European, at least the welcomer must look European... or not?!

After the talk faculty met with students for mock seminars discussing the readings and talk. My two discussions were friendly if pretty formless, but interesting as ways of helping the students get used to the idea that being in a seminar college means participating in discussion, listening to your fellow students, etc.

The students took the upshot of the readings to be that they, too, were migrants, an identification they cheerfully accepted. They generally overlooked the rather unhappy realities of exile and exclusion discussed in the readings... so the question I wound up raising had to do with the word migrant. It's a word used in Australia as we in the US use the words immigrant and, less commonly, emigrant; migrant, meanwhile, connotes migrant laborers who move back and forth but don't settle: itinerant, seasonal. (And it's pronounced not like immigrant but like migraine + vagrant / 2; it's not underogatory). Perhaps our speaker used it because of the new generation of transnational immigrants who move back and forth between homeland and here rather than leaving the one for the other...

I mentioned the difference in Australian usage (see, the sabbatical's paying dividends already!) and asked the students: if we say we're migrants are we saying anything interesting? Isn't the term migrant too broad and imprecise to help us understanding things? Too weightless and uncommitted? It may show unexpected affinities, but does it not make dissimilar things seem similar, obscuring as much as it clarifies? What could be more different than voluntary and involuntary "migration"? Economic and political and familial? Refugee and pilgrim and student? Similarities there may be, but the differences are great and important.

I think some students were a bit surprised to see me challenge, if indirectly, the suite of texts we'd been given. Welcome to college!