No one in our family or the Philadelphia Greek-American community where Papou became a revered leader would have called him an “illegal immigrant,” but he was. And unfortunately, Malliotakis is not an outlier. Despite our own immigrant past, many Greek Americans, along with other white ethnic groups from earlier waves of immigration, are either partisans of the Trump-led GOP or immigrant-wary Democrats.
What does it take for people who hold precious historical ties of culture and place, as do many Greek Americans, to gain a sense of shared fate and common experience with others whom they consider “foreign” or even “alien” threats, like the Mexican immigrants at whom the right directs so much vitriol today — while also acknowledging the differences between groups’ historical experiences: distinct types and magnitudes of obstacles and varying forms of courage needed to overcome them? How can recognizing rough but imperfect parallels between migrant pathways help us approach the divergences with more nuance and understanding?
These questions have perplexed people since at least the rise of modern nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. But they feel acutely urgent today, not only in America’s knife-edge milieu but also in post-Brexit Britain, where I now live, and countless other societies, including the rising number of European countries where anti-migrant politics have given the electoral edge to parties of the right. I have mulled over these issues since I began doing research with Mexican migrant workers over 20 years ago. I’m a political theorist curious about how migrants caught up in abusive work arrangements find the wherewithal to fight for themselve and the lessons of those battles for democracy itself. As I learn about Latino migration histories through my research, the stories and sense experiences I have imbibed as the product of Greek migrants continually recur.
It is very easy to overstate both the similarities and the disparities when comparing the fates of different migrant groups, especially given the thorny issues of race that entangle modern immigration. But it is also politically indispensable to venture such comparisons, fraught as they may be — especially right now. I want to illustrate how this can work by placing my family’s Greek-immigrant stories side by side with stories told to me by several Mexican migrants whose paths converged in a formidable, if fleeting, union battle against the world’s biggest meat producer, Tyson Foods.