A Stopover in the Heartland, by Dr. Naomi Wolf

This one is tough to read in spots, but Naomi Wolf makes some points that have to be made about immigration. From Wolf at naomiwolf.substack.com:

Is it Okay to Love the America of No Cliterodectomies, No Fatwahs?

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.

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