"Extremely Weaponized Immigrant" Self-Help
It feels good to hear from readers — and especially from readers who’ve been able to extract some therapeutic self-help benefit from my writing about weaponized immigrants.
Before I started thinking and writing about this topic just a few years ago, it was also hard for me to get a good grip on my own immigrant experience. It was always just a bit too squishy. It would slip out of my hands whenever I would try to firmly grasp it. Looking back on it now, it’s pretty clear my main problem was that I didn’t have the language to talk about it. I didn’t have access to even the most basic and crude concepts and terms that I could deploy to understand things and put them into context. I’ve had to come up with the language, more or less, myself.
As I’ve written before, America only allows one type of immigrant narrative — the narrative of the saved. And that narrative isn’t very helpful in understanding immigrant experiences similar to my own. The idea that American society, as a matter of routine, cynically exploits immigrant experiences is not something you’re supposed to talk about. It’s almost a taboo topic.
Anyway, what I want to say is that I got a short letter the other day from a reader named Mark whose own Estonian immigrant family fits firmly into my weaponized immigrant framework. I’d like to share it with you. I think it’s great.
—Yasha Levine
Hi Yasha,
Your work has proven itself to be quite revelatory for me. I hadn't heard the term "weaponized immigrants" before, and it was a bit shocking for me to process the extent to which my life has been shaped by them. In learning about the phenomena through your writing and podcast, I noticed how powerful the force is as it trickles down through generations.
My story is a bit different from yours. I am second generation American, having been raised by the children of extremely weaponized immigrants from Estonia. My parents and their siblings are overwhelmingly more weaponized than their parents were, and have internalized their fear of the "Red Menace" seemingly more than anyone who actually lived through the Soviet Union. In turn, I was raised in a paranoid, fearful way, ingesting the most fringe ideas to prevent "anything like socialism" from manifesting at home (I've been told that anyone remotely sympathetic to center-left politics in the Estonian community was labeled a "Pink" in the 50s-80s).
The implications and odd cultural tendencies that emerged from the weaponization are endless and incredibly interesting.