Why Migrants Matter

“In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live here,” said Donald Trump during ABC’s presidential debate on September 10, 2024. His comments amplified false rumors spread by J.D. Vance, the vice-presidential nominee, who claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating the pets of longtime residents. Dehumanizing and vilifying immigrants has been a mainstay in xenophobic rhetoric mobilized during elections in the US and Europe by mainstream and alt-right-wing parties alike.

Fabricated and baseless rumors about immigrants is nothing new. Like the Haitians of Springfield, the ancient Phoenicians—a Semitic population that had an extensive trade network that spanned from Assyria to Iberia—often faced negative stereotyping and prejudice. Ancient Greek sources describe the Phoenicians as wily traders and deceitful moneylenders. Even famous Phoenician immigrants suffered from such prejudice. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, one of antiquity’s most influential philosophical schools, was a Phoenician immigrant in fourth-century BCE Athens, originally from Kition on Cyprus. Although Zeno was a preeminent thinker in Athens, he was subjected to disparaging comments because of his migrant status and his Phoenician ethnicity. His teacher called him “little Phoenician,” a demeaning term. One of his biographers described him as stingy because he was a foreigner. A rival philosopher accused him of plagiarism, saying that Zeno would sneak in to listen to his lectures, steal his ideas, dress them in Phoenician style, and pass them as his own. Even after his death, one of his students wrote a funerary epigram trying to downplay Zeno’s Phoenician origin, writing: “What reproach is there if your fatherland is Phoenicia?”

If a prominent figure like Zeno experienced such discrimination, what indignities did most immigrants, who belonged to the lower classes, suffer? One political treatise from fifth-century BCE Athens complains that the notion of citizenship was eroding because immigrants and enslaved persons were indistinguishable from citizens in their looks, dress, and rights, when in fact enslaved persons had no rights and immigrants faced many legal constraints. A few decades later, several court cases dealt with similar issues. With flimsy evidence they accused the freedwoman Neaira of illegitimately claiming the rights of Athenian citizenship and alleged that Euboulides had unlawfully removed the plaintiff, a certain Euxitheus, from the citizen register. These and other texts discuss the supposed dangers posed by immigrants revealing the vulnerability of immigrant populations, even in a multiethnic city like Athens.

Such fears expressed by the more conservative parts of the Athenian population were reactions to Athens’ policies of rewarding immigrants with some or all citizen rights. Phoenician immigrants were among the non-Greek foreigners most frequently awarded with monetized gifts of gold wreaths, honorific positions, and a wide assortment of legal awards, such as the right to own property, tax exemptions, the privilege of better seats at the theater at state expense, the right to attend state-sponsored dinners alongside prominent citizens, the right to serve in the military, and even the rare grant of citizenship. Among the Phoenician immigrants who received some or all these awards was a certain Herakleides, who in 330/329 BCE had offered large quantities of wheat to Athens at a lower price and two years later donated money to Athens to help the state purchase grain, during a period of grain shortage. The Athenians eventually honored him with a gold wreath, honorific titles, the right to own property, and the privileges of participating in military service and paying capital taxes, as is recorded on a stele that survives today.

This system of award-giving was employed to attract immigrants, especially wealthy ones, like Herakleides, who could serve the state by carrying out various benefactions. Indeed, in a fourth-century BCE treatise on Athens’ revenue sources, the historian and philosopher Xenophon proposed that more social and legal privileges be given to immigrants because they would inject funds into the Athenian economy and would make Athens great again. All the legal rights Xenophon wanted to give to immigrants would allow “better” men to desire to live in Athens, where “better” stood for more useful to the state or wealthy.

This rhetoric of the good immigrants, immigrants who work hard and benefit the society in which they live, is a familiar trope today, too. Mike DeWine, the Springfield-born governor of Ohio, tried to put an end to the rumors regarding Haitian immigrants and ensuing bomb threats in schools, and hospitals. In an op-ed he wrote: “Springfield is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation … [in part] thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants … They are there legally. They are there to work.”

But migrants, documented or undocumented, are not just workers; they are also human beings. They mattered in antiquity, and they matter today, not because they revitalize the economy but because together with citizens they co-create and maintain the diverse societies in which they live. The Phoenician immigrants of the ancient Mediterranean introduced new ideas, such as Zeno’s Stoicism; they benefited Athens in times of need; they broadened what it meant to be a resident of a state; and they helped form multiethnic and diverse communities that thrived. While ancient Greek thought, politics, and society have been idealized, it is unlikely that they would have taken the form they did without the contributions of migrants in general and of Phoenician immigrants in particular.

_{Featured image by Henryy st via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.}