Mr. President is visiting my neighborhood. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised; presidents are always going and reading books to schoolchildren. Obama just happened to pick the one 300 yards from my house—the one for which they’re shutting down one of the two access roads out of our already isolated and (but not today) forgotten neighborhood.

I usually don’t take that road anyway. I usually cut across the tracks and slip between the sub-station and the factory, emerging from the trees right by the wastewater pump. But I imagine secret service won’t dig people walking out of the woods right next to where the president is speaking. It’s not their fault that locals improvise paths where urban planners hoped for barriers. That’s life. But still, I’m going the long way out today, just to be on the safe side.

It also shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Wright Middle School was picked. It’s the most representative of America’s breadth and depth of any school in the country: a huge immigrant population, mostly of Latin American (Mexican and Honduran, mostly) and Southeast Asian (Hmong, mostly) extraction, but also from Eastern Europe and Africa.

I used to walk the halls of Wright—we held our church services there for a few years—and pray for the children whose names were on the lockers, and marvel at this strange world.

Having grown up in Switzerland in rapidly-integrating Europe, I lived as a foreigner in a place where 20% of the population was foreign. Wisconsin doesn’t come close. But Burr Oaks Neighborhood, were I live, does. And nearly 40% of Wright Middle School does. It’s amazing and it’s really fun.

What’s not so fun is the poverty here. 85% of Wright’s students qualify for food assistance; people here are poor, unemployed or (far more frequently) underemployed, often on parole or with pasts. There are drugs here, of course, and the legal ones (cheap booze) dominate. Prostitution is all over.

But this is also a happy neighborhood. Probably not unrelated to the poverty, there are tons of children here, who play all over the streets, because they’re not, like so many middle-class children these days, being enslaved in endless after-school activities. That may be what it takes to get to college these days—cultural capital, they call it—but the poor never know these secrets. So the neighborhood is full of children’s laughter.

And people help each other. My next door neighbor borrowed my drill without saying what for, and used it to fix my gate. People walk around giving each other food all the time. The local crack-dealer, who was also a handiman, used to plow all our driveways in the winter, without being asked. That was before he died. I’ve signed court documents for neighbors, vouching for their good behavior.

Anyway, Obama is, through no plan of his own (his people most likely were looking for a school with a photo-op’s worth of diverse children), shining a light on a forgotten, cut off, segregated-away neighborhood—the neighborhood in which I’ve worked, lived, voted, shopped, attended church and at times all of the above for twelve years.

I use the occasion to welcome you.

I recently stumbled upon an amazing quote on immigration, one which, although spoken to a European audience decades ago, holds true for other countries and other times.

In particular I'm thinking of Latin American labor in the United States, which has a history of nearly two centuries but has almost always been associated with backbreaking work. Or Chinese labor, famously along the railroads that made an empire out of the US.

Or most importantly, black slaves, who, once emancipated, refused to return to "Africa," whatever that meant. We built this country; it's ours too, they said.

Anyway, the quote. It's Max Frisch, a Swiss novelist.

We called laborers, but humans came instead.

More Germans moved overseas last year than repatriated. This reports a Swiss newspaper.
In several 19th Century waves, hundreds of thousands of Germans left their homes for better lives in other countries, especially in North and South America and Australia and, after the German Imperial expansion into Africa, into today’s Tanzania.

It has been argued that part of the motive for obtaining colonies in the first place—never really part of German tradition—was a felt need to retain emigrants within the internal economy of the German empire.

From the vantage of today’s wealthy Germany, the economic engine of Europe, it’s hard to remember the brutal poverty in 19th century Germany, not entirely unlike that in today’s Africa. Germans were starving to death.

That’s why the very news of German emigration is eye-popping. The article doesn’t explain who these people are or why they’re moving. Without knowing better I’d guess a high number would be retirees moving to Italy or Spain, now part of Schengen’s borderless Europe. I’ve heard tell of German communities in Goa, India, serviced by German doctors and dentists.

Germans have a long-established culture of roaming and distance tourism; they gave us the word Wanderlust, after all. Still, it’s remarkable when a people loses interest in living at home.

Syttende Mai is this weekend. That’s May Seventeenth in Norwegian—Norway’s Constitution Day.

In the US Syttende Mai occupies similar social territory as St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, and similar days of immigrant ethnic memory and fervor.

Outside of Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and parts of Iowa and Washington, the concept of Norwegian-American is a bit of a mystery, but it is one of the most important stories of American immigration—in part because of the nearly complete (or at least apparently complete) assimilation to Anglo-Saxon society of a group previously thought would never assimilate.

Last year sheer curiosity led me to the colorful person of Waldemar Ager (wikipedia here), a journalist and community organizer who lived in a small city in Wisconsin. Ager worked hard to unify Norwegians, who until then largely identified by their regions of origin in Norway; he worked harder to preserve Norwegian as a language in immigrant families. His novel On the Way to the Melting Pot, written in Norwegian and subsequently translated into English, depicts that most familiar of all immigrant family sorrows: children who cannot communicate with their parents and grandparents.

Waldemar Ager lost. In all but a few communities, Norwegian Americans have melted into the pot, and America has both gained and lost from that development. But the story of how and why this took place is eerily similar to the stories currently developing among Asian, African, and Latin American immigrants in the United States.

We neglect the story of Norwegian struggles for and against assimilation to our own impoverishment and worse: we learn from scratch what we could much more easily learn by listening to those who tackled these problems before us.