Please join us at 9:00 am (CDT) on Thursday, September 12, for a Zoom round table on emigration and immigration – the abandonment of one sovereign and the supplication of a new one.
The August issue of our newsletter, Pegasus, proposed new ways of thinking about the status of those who flee the sovereign protection of the country of their birth to live under the authority of a foreign sovereign in another nation state. Who is a persecuted refugee? Who is an economic migrant? Who deserves asylum? Who deserves a work permit? Who can be a resident?
What moral and social duties do refugees, asylum seekers, foreign workers, immigrants – legal or illegal – and those escaping failed states to make a better life for themselves and their families owe to their new sovereign and those who are citizens of that national sovereignty?
When is the tie to one’s birth sovereign broken, abandoned or suspended? What tie to a new sovereign takes its place, if ever?
Here are two historical examples and one contemporary case of people between sovereigns:
The Pilgrim immigrants to Massachusetts in 1620, depicted with their Native American guests, including Squanto, at the first thanksgiving:
A member of the Patuxet Tribe of the Wampanoags, Tisquantum or Squanto, was likely born around 1580. When he encountered the Plymouth Colony settlers, he spoke English, having lived five years in Europe, including time at the home of a London merchant. He proved indispensable to the English settlers at Plymouth, but in the end, was reviled by some of his own people for his role in brokering a treaty that undermined tribal sovereignty.
But without Tisquantum to interpret and guide them to food sources, the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims may never have survived.
Secondly, here are Vietnamese fleeing communism in a boat out in the South China Sea, hoping for rescue or for a safe landing in Thailand or Malaysia (I actually took the lead in April 1975 to arrange resettlement for the first wave of Vietnamese who refused to live under a communist regime and later worked on resettlement for these boat people).
And just the other week, riots in the U.K. between Muslim immigrants and citizens who don’t want such strangers to be in “their” country.
To register, please email jed@cauxroundtable.net.
Event will last about an hour.