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The Wretched Strangers [1]
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Date: 2025-07-30
On May 1, 1517 in London - where I type this now - riots broke out, as an enraged mob demonstrated against an influx of immigrant workers. A large crowd, including apprentices, watermen, and porters, assembled at St. Paul's Churchyard and marched through the city, attacking the homes and businesses of immigrants. They targeted foreigners from various backgrounds, including French, Italian, and Flemish individuals.
The mob’s grievances were the same as in all ages: “here comes The Other, to eat our food and take our jobs.”
The migrants against who the mob was protesting were fellow Europeans - Protestants, Huguenots, and others fleeing widespread religious persecution on the continent. They were nevertheless unwelcome in England, producing waves of violence, government crackdowns, and widespread social unrest throughout the century, and into the next.
He who needs no introduction: Wm Shakes...
Eighty years after the 1517 “Evil Mayday” riots, a play was written about them. Called “Sir Thomas More,” it seems to have been censored by the government, as we have no record that it was either published or performed in its time.
In the play, Thomas More, who was then Sheriff of London, asks the rioters to imagine themselves in the place of the migrants they're attacking. This speech was very likely written by none other than William Shakespeare, who was among the group of writers who collaborated on the play.
These lines in particular…
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage, Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
…are so simple and so heartbreaking that surely only a monster would be impervious to them. Four and a quarter centuries later, they instantly conjure the bedraggled, bone weary, terrified newcomers who were ultimately met with violence and spittle-flecked rage. I sobbed the first time I read those lines, back in middle school, and to this day I tear up thinking of them.
Four and a quarter centuries after Shakespeare had More pose the question quoted below to the mob, migrants around the globe are still being treated with loathing, driven out, arrested, allowed no succor.
(Who s)hould give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders, To any German province, to Spain or Portugal, Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England, Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleas’d To find a nation of such barbarous temper That breaking out in hideous violence Would not afford you an abode on earth. Whet their detested knives against your throats, Spurn you like dogs,
Four and a quarter centuries later, the United States is turning still on the wretched strangers. The GOP - Trump, Miller, the fascist brutal lot of them - see the migrants as “illegals,” see their babies, and their poor luggage, and say “GET OUT.”
Despite being piss poor at deportation, the Trump Administration is bawling and bellowing their anti-immigrant stance for all they’re worth, making certain that everyone who is listening knows that newcomers are not welcome in the “land of the free” and the “home of the brave.”
And - surprise! - there is a climate change angle to this already TRAGIC story.
Climate change is already a driver of migration around the globe. From the PBS report linked in the previous sentence:
Each year, natural disasters force an average of 21.5 million people from their homes around the world, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. And scientists predict migration will grow as the planet gets hotter. Over the next 30 years, 143 million people are likely to be uprooted by rising seas, drought, searing temperatures and other climate catastrophes, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report published this year. (2022)
There are so many looming issues here, from the international definition of “refugee” (first codified in 1951) not including a peep about climate change, to the fact that the United States and industrialized northern Europe are still handling migration with all the finesse and compassion of a riled up 16th century mob.
I have read credible sources claiming that most migration due to climate is happening, and will continue to happen, within countries, rather than between them… but it is impossible to imagine that some refugees will not set their sights on the United States - because it’s close, or they already have family here, or because the upper Midwest seems so relatively safe compared to places that will be hotter and wetter and more drastically plagued by hurricanes and typhoons and unsurvivable heat waves. Or perhaps just because they just need to GET THE F*** OUT of whatever hellscape they are already experiencing, be it drought or crop failure or system shutdown or brutal weeks of 100F+ heat or infrastructure collapse.
The industrialized First World is a very attractive proposition for people who need to get out of wherever they are. It is not stupid to want to migrate someplace that, on the surface at least, seems less deadly and dire than one’s own immediate circumstances.
More people are coming. More migrants. More refugees. More “wretched strangers.”
More people who did not set out on their arduous journey with the stated intention of “stealing” Joe Sixpack’s job but who will nonetheless be seen by many as an existential threat to the American way of life. And will be cast by the current administration as a clear and present danger to American safety, American jobs, and American national integrity.
I fear that, as climate refugees begin to flood across borders, governments will deal with them as potential threats, as illegal, as The Other, and “spurn them like dogs,” as Shakespeare so brilliantly put it.
Do I have constructive thoughts? Offerings of a solution? Anything wise to say?
Well, no - I really don’t. I am watching the news just as you are, in shock and horror at the ICE raids and blatant lawlessness unfolding every day in the USA. I watch transfixed as masked thugs and obvious vigilantes descend on people just following procedure, showing up for scheduled immigration proceedings and being yanked off into virtual black sites in foreign countries with which they are not even affiliated. I see families being wrenched apart. I see suffering, pain, immiseration.
Here we are in 2025, the year after the hottest year on record on Mothership Earth, with Donald Trump somehow once again in office, moist-looking creep JD Vance behind him in line for 2028, and the Renfield-esque Stephen Miller whispering in GOP ears and setting immigration policy - which seems these days mostly to be bellowing “HIT THE BRICKS!” and terrorizing people, not to mention building mini-concentration camps in the devastating, brutal swamp-baked heat of the Florida backwoods and stocking the moats with alligators like psychotic 6th graders who just watched a video about medieval torture.
It’s going to get uglier. As the blows keep falling - drought, catastrophic flooding, wildfires, crop failure, heat domes - more and more people will be on the move. It only took a million Syrian refugees to Europe to contribute to a sharp rightward shift in politics.
I wish I had a clue what to do about it (in the USA or anywhere) other than to protest, resist, write about what’s coming, and VOTE.
These are terrible times. As are most times, of course, from a historical perspective. It’s just that, this time, well… all of human civilization (and much of the biosphere) seems to be on the line. Buckle up, my friends.
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