What is the Scapegoat?
And Why are Immigrants Being Scapegoated?
Most Sundays I bend at the altar and hold the chalice of wine steady as small hands take the host and dip it into the wine before placing it onto their tongues. Every time I serve a child at the communion altar—next to their parents or grandparents—my heart feels it. The love for someone facing hardship. The fact is, people I love are being harmed; children I love are afraid. I don’t know how much young immigrant kids internalize the antipathy directed at immigrants in our country at this time. But I doubt they are unaffected.
I’ve wrestled these weeks, not even knowing how to write what I’m feeling and seeing. I’ve lived close to the experience of immigration and seen the deportation of someone closer to me than anyone at the time. In memory, I can relive the afternoon I received the call that he’d been picked up and was leaving (I have not seen him again and perhaps never will); of the letters and calls to and from a detention center where he remained for a month; of the hopeful times when I thought everything was going to get better—bipartisan immigration-reform bills proposed then not passed, elections that were supposed to make a difference then didn’t, and on and on.
Immigrants Villified
But what I’ve come to see is that many Americans force immigrants into a certain role in our rapidly changing, anxious, warring society: that of a perfect scapegoat. Some cast undocumented immigrants in particular as blanket law-breakers then dehumanize them in various ways, emphasizing that undocumented people violated immigration laws to be here. Once the undocumented are dehumanized and scapegoated, it’s not a big stretch to start scapegoating all immigrants, so that now supporters of deportations are accepting the apprehension, detention, and deportation of immigrants with legal status. More recently, we see green-card holders and visa-holders being taken away—even some citizens—and anti-immigrant forces cheer.
The whole process escalates. Most recently, the president talks of “remigration”—a stance associated with the ugliest parts of modern history. According to Wikipedia: “Remigration is a far-right European concept of ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation or promoted voluntary return of non-white immigrants and their descendants, usually including those born in Europe, to their place of racial ancestry, often with no regard for their citizenship or legal status.” A US Senator is forcibly removed from a press conference, made to lay on the ground and handcuffed; and the administration lies about what happened despite video evidence contradicting their accounts. The hopes being pinned on this current scapegoated group in the United States—hopes that their removal can purge the failures from our society—are so strong that according to this mindset, they must be banished.
Origin of the Scapegoat
I’m not big on Leviticus. But I wish more anti-immigrant religious people understood the concept of the scapegoat, and what they are doing by scapegoating people. Because it’s clear to me immigrants are the group onto which blame for our country’s wrongs is being placed. So we send them off to fates unimaginable. In Leviticus, a “scapegoat” is one of a pair of kid goats that is released into the wilderness, taking with it all of the community’s sins and impurities, while the other is sacrificed:
‘Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.’ (Lev 16:21-22)
Scapegoat-like rituals also appear in ancient cultures like Greece and others. Throughout history, many societies (and different groups within societies) have manifested the ritual metaphorically, placing the ills of their society onto the backs of certain “others” and banishing them. Left-wing groups scapegoat as well. Though these scapegoating groups don’t currently have the power today’s immigrant-scapegoating forces do, all scapegoating is pernicious.
The Highest Human Aspiration
Some have been conditioned in our current immigration discussion to say: Well, Group X just wants open-borders chaos. They want the border to be out-of-control! But control and an end to chaos should be what cooler heads across the board are hoping for. Control is not the same as militarization of the border and mass deportations—both of which leave chaos in their wake. Control has included policies like DACA, which legitimizes children brought to the country as youngsters. Control has included bipartisan immigration reform bills that failed to pass because they didn’t serve the political interests of those using immigration to divide. Control can include pathways to citizenship for millions of law-abiding undocumented people who are our neighbors and contributing to our country just anyone else. What the president and ICE are currently doing is out of control: making indiscriminate arrests while wearing masks and shoving people into blacked-out, unmarked vehicles; terrorizing communities; picking people up at immigration hearings when they are trying to do the control-of-immigration right thing; taking people to centers where no one can track them—even keeping their overflow in New York ICE offices where people are hungry and sleeping on the floor. These moves are chaos. And they’re being orchestrated to stoke more chaos because chaos serves the agenda of scapegoating and distraction.
This week I heard a story about an African migrant whose photo became famous as he fell into the arms of a Red Cross volunteer when he came ashore at Ceuta, Spain. Anti-immigrant individuals berated this volunteer, making racist comments on her social media. They looked at her image and saw her welcoming into their country someone they’d prefer to scapegoat, and they responded hatefully.
I look at the image and see the highest human aspiration: compassion for the stranger. I truly believe that decades down the line we will look back on our chapter of history and see the treatment of migrants as a moral stain. By then, we will see differently how we move around the world for all kinds of reasons (climate crisis being an ascendant one). Reader, one day you or I might be the one fleeing our homes. Acknowledging this and imaginatively putting ourselves into the shoes of migrants is the only way to combat scapegoating.
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Wren, winner of a 2022 Independent Publishers Award Bronze Medal
Winner of the 2022 Independent Publisher Awards Bronze Medal for Regional Fiction; Finalist for the 2022 National Indie Excellence Awards. (2021) Paperback publication of Wren , a novel. “Insightful novel tackles questions of parenthood, marriage, and friendship with finesse and empathy … with striking descriptions of Oregon topography.” —Kirkus Reviews (2018) Audiobook publication of Wren.
I know this must have been difficult to bring yourself to write, Tricia. And I'm grateful you did. I so appreciate how clearly you point on that what gets positioned as "bringing order" and "control" is actually the opposite--out-of-control maneuvers that result in more chaos.
And then there is this:
"By then, we will see differently how we move around the world for all kinds of reasons (climate crisis being an ascendant one). Reader, one day you or I might be the one fleeing our homes. Acknowledging this and imaginatively putting ourselves into the shoes of migrants is the only way to combat scapegoating."
It's so true. And it's amazing to me how few folks see this. We're all one wildfire or flood away from having to migrate. And we know how fast those are arriving these days.
I have migrated across borders, both domestic and international, for multiple reasons. I too, have moved my entire life and started over--for many reasons, which in large part boil down to economic survival, social safety, and physical health. Even with all the privilege of being white-skinned and educated, it's a difficult undertaking. Doing so without that privilege must be absolutely grueling.
Until we start actively taking responsibility for the extreme and intentional destruction of other countries that is caused by the United States' colonizer-and-war machine, we have no business raising a fuss about the brave ones who have fled the results of the damage we've caused their homes in order to come here in search of a life where they can meet their basic human needs.
Heartbreaking. Thank you for your clear eyed, tender hearted article.