The Angry Raisins

November 27, 2021

Lately I’ve had migrants on my mind.

At the border with Mexico, the U.S. Border Patrol has been overwhelmed in recent years by hundreds of thousands of people from Mexico, Central America, and other countries attempting to claim asylum. Last week, thousands of people from Iraq, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries were encouraged by the dictator in Belarus to fly to his country and then try to sneak into the European Union via Poland. This week 27 migrants from the Middle East died while attempting to cross the English Channel from France. And a couple days ago I finished reading once again John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, about the poor white migrant farmworkers who came to California during the Great Depression.

I wish I could say that I’m always supportive of migrants, refugees, and other poor and oppressed people in this country and around the world, but the truth is that my feelings are mixed. Sure, I feel compassion for hungry, wretched people, and even for those who are not hungry and wretched but who just want a better life. But while tens or even hundreds of people on the move are not much of a disruptive influence in a society, thousands or millions of movers can be economically, socially, and politically destabilizing. And climate change is expected to greatly increase the exodus of poor people from Third World countries to the more developed societies.

Change can be scary, whether a person is a migrant or whether someone lives in a community with a large immigrant population. Mass migration has been disruptive and sometimes violent throughout human history, usually due to fear of the “other.” Migrants from Europe came to the Americas and slaughtered the native populations. But before the Europeans came, American Indian tribes warred upon each other over territory and food and water resources. And the September 11th hijackers were visitors from four Arab countries who came here to commit mass murder in the U.S.

So boundaries between nations, cultures, and individuals are understandable. However, territorial delineations are easier to transcend when the peoples share a common language, religion, or other cultural attribute. Middle Easterners are usually classified racially as Caucasian, but migrants from those countries were recently turned away from Lithuania, whereas other Caucasian migrants from next door Belarus are being accepted as political refugees. Why does Lithuania reject one group of white people and accept the other white group? The Middle Easterners are Muslim and mostly Arabic speaking, whereas the Belarusians are fellow European Christians who speak a similar Slavic language. So the Belarusians are easier to assimilate.

In Steinbeck’s historical fiction novel The Grapes of Wrath, the agricultural migrants from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and other states were white, but they were greeted with great suspicion and hostility by their fellow whites in California. The California ranchers, farmers, shopkeepers, bankers, and law enforcement saw the migrant farmworkers as a threat, using the derogatory term “Okie” to describe their fellow white Americans. The Californians worried that some of the 400,000 poor laborers might attempt to overthrow the local power structure and steal the wealth of the established landowners.

Steinbeck rightly felt great sympathy for the misery and suffering of the desperate people who were peacefully invading his native state. And The Grapes of Wrath is full of anger at the predatory bankers who helped force the Oklahoma farmers off of their own land, and anger at the cops and hired thugs who beat the migrants and burned down their shanty towns. At one point Tom Joad, a fugitive and protagonist in the novel, says that though he has to run from the police, “I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.”

Powerful sentiments in defense of underdogs everywhere.

The title of the book comes from the Civil War song, The Battle Hymn of the Republic: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord/He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” That song, and Steinbeck’s book, are a call for justice, and possibly even a call for vengeance. Steinbeck, like other writers before him such as Charles Dickens, was outraged by the vast inequality between the haves and the have nots, where the rich enjoy luxury while the poor starve. Steinbeck fervently believed that as a human society, we have to help each other.

But how many millions of impoverished, sick people can a society absorb? How can the U.S. or any other country take care of the housing, job, educational, and health care needs of millions of immigrants when we can’t seem to care for the homeless and poor folks that we already have? I can understand the fear and resentment that Steinbeck’s Californians felt toward the outsiders who were pouring into their state.

Years after Steinbeck’s death in 1968, his widow, visiting Japan, asked if a local bookstore owner had any books written by her husband. He thought about it, and then said yes, he had The Angry Raisins.

You gotta love the Japanese.

The wrath of dried grapes is a fearful thing indeed.