Thoughtful debut piece from The In-Between!

So important to identify and understand these interlaced threads of our shared histories. This highlights an agonizing symmetry of immigrant journeys. Empathy is the key to social harmony, which in a utopia could be built around those mutual experiences; but that common ground seems to erode all too quickly, all too often. Outsider groups that successfully assimilate into a new society quickly try to distance themselves from anyone else doing the same thing (perhaps out of a lasting insecurity that they themselves will be expelled instead).

This happens cross-culturally, but also interculturally as well, as you mention. From the same generation as yours, the immigrants in my family – mostly coming from a variety of Eastern European shtetls around the turn of the 20th century – have passed down stories of feeling an icy reception from the already-established Jews who had come in the earlier German Jewish waves of the 1800s. Beyond the omnipresent antisemitism that they were emigrating to escape, upon arrival they worried more about bias coming from their "own people" (though their sensibilities, cultural touchpoints, and languages... and certainly social status... did indeed differ widely. Country mouse, City mouse.)

Our varied ancestral experiences are often so much more similar than radical political factions throughout history are willing to admit. It's just easier to fabricate and demonize an "other" which the people can collectively fear, loathe, and attack. Power and social control are a cinch when you limit choices and reduce complexities. Oligarchs manipulate the lower classes by making them afraid of the even-lower classes... and with the innate tribalism of our species, it's just a short jump from fear to hate. It's a miserable cycle; due to rampant inequities that wildly imbalance the power structure, we seem to have no choice but to continually swear fealty to the ruling elites who are guilty of all this manipulation, and who have so much less in common with – and so much less concern for – the rest of us.