Scratch the surface of the current immigration debate and beneath the posturing lies a dirty secret. Anti-immigrant sentiment is older than America itself. Born before the nation, this abiding fear of the “huddled masses” emerged in the early republic and gathered steam into the 19th and 20th centuries, when nativist political parties, exclusionary laws and the Ku Klux Klan swept the land.
As we celebrate another Fourth of July, this picture of American intolerance clashes sharply with tidy schoolbook images of the great melting pot. Why has the land of “all men are created equal” forged countless ghettoes and intricate networks of social exclusion? Why the signs reading “No Irish Need Apply”? And why has each new generation of immigrants had to face down a rich glossary of now unmentionable epithets? Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as American as apple pie, slavery and lynching.
That fence along the Mexican border now being contemplated by Congress is just the latest vestige of a venerable tradition, at least as old as John Jay’s “wall of brass.” “Don’t fence me in” might be America’s unofficial anthem of unfettered freedom, but too often the subtext is, “Fence everyone else out.”
Wow, what an incredibly irrational article, no doubt fueled by emotion.
First of all, all countries have “forged countless ghettoes and intricate networks of social exclusion”. The fact that he thinks this is some sort of uniquely “American” problem is amusing in its lack of historical perspective. So no, “Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as American as apple pie, slavery and lynching” — it’s “human”, not American at all.
Furthermore, the “fence along the Mexican border” has nothing at all to do with that “venerable tradition” of disdain for the legal immigrant that he refers to in the paragraph above, and everything to do with respect for the rule of law. He has made a category error there.
I’m all for immigrants — why not triple our legal immigrant threshold, for instance? But I am utterly opposed to illegal immigration.
No, the forging of “countless ghettoes and intricate networks of social exclusion” is a matter of our human fallen condition — and it is universal, not “American”.
But that has absolutely zilch to do with the rule of law, and maintaining and supporting legal immigration.
I take immense offense at the unbalanced point of view expressed in this article. Virtually nobody that I have discussed the immigration issue with are anti immigrant. They are against wide open illegal access to the country. The latter point of view is not racist or jingoist, it is merely common sense in a complex hostile world.
I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for legal immigration so give us law and order types a break.
My mother’s great-grandparents came to the Philadelphia area in the 1870’s and one of the family stories is about the NINA (No Irish Need Apply) signs on construction jobs at that time. I’ve read a number of turn of the last century murder mysteries in which the villians are alwaus Italian. Ethnic prejudice is universal.
Tom Rightmyer in Asheville, NC.
Well, you may call it prejuidice if you want. I suppose in one sense, it is correct to do so. But from another point of view, it is self-protection. Southern Cal. has become a third world country; it makes no difference in this context whether the Hispanics are legoal or illegal. They have threatened a way of life successfully and altered permanently. Did the residents of southern Cal. have a right to protect themselves against this radical wave? I cannot see how they do not.
America has always worked this way (and I suppose other countries as well): The wave of immigrants have to prove themselves before they are accepted. The Irish were rejected, but they “fought” for a place, took all sorts of jobs no one else wanted, concentrated their political energy, elected their own – Bostonians know this story well – and finally made themselves Americans, not immigrant Irish. It took a while, but their intention was to become American. They had to prove it, and it took three generations. Why should they not have to prove they are Americans by meetiing the standards America has set? Well, they should, and we might remark that those who have developed a mindless passion for defending illegal Hispanic immigrants have said, in essence, “You don’t have to prove you can become Americans. You don’t even have to learn the language.” But the test remains, in spite of ninnies like the above writer. LM
I say we should make legal immigration easier, quicker and cheaper, and make illegal immigration so difficult as to be nearly impossible. Under a legal system of immigration, the country has some control over who comes in and how many. If we could eliminate the illegals, we could open our doors to many more deserving immigrants.
If the author does not outright deny the existence of persons like me, he insults my ancestors, who immigrated with respect for the laws of the United States.
Is it OK to question this guy’s patriotism?
My mother was a naturalized citizen, who came here in a much earlier wave of economic immigration. She did, however, have the courtesy to ask first, and comply with the rules of the day.
So, what part of illegal is giving you trouble, Mr. Davis?
First, I am for legal immigration. That said, I would like to mention the fact of accommodation of language. You talk about discrimination…….when we put up the signs, print the directions, etc. in other languages, to accomodate the immigrant, we keep them right where they are. Many an immigrants came to this country not knowing english….but they learned….and they succeeded. What better way to keep them doing the “jobs we Americans don’t want to do” than by making it easy for them not to learn the language……O.K. it’s not official, but we all know, no one is going to the top if they don’t speak english.
[blockquote]Sarah, #3: I’m all for immigrants—why not triple our legal immigrant threshold, for instance?[/blockquote]
Why not quadruple it? Why not quintuple it? Why not import the 40% of the current population of Mexico that says they want to move here? Here’s why: because if you import enough Mexicans, you are going to get Mexico, just as Miami has ended up importing Haiti and pockets of my city have imported Liberia and Nigeria. To be brutally honest, those “No Irish need apply” signs are precisely what you need to force the immigrants to adopt the prevailing culture so that, two generations later, there is no question that the new arrivals can lay full claim to the title of “American.” Unfortunately, “civil rights” laws take away everyone’s safe harbors and give the new arrivals a powerful legal club to bash their hosts’ over the head with, thus exacerbating inter-ethnic conflict. The fact that they are now allowed in such large numbers adds to the problem, along with birthright citizenship.
The United States was founded as an Anglo-Saxon nation steeped in English traditions of the rule of law and private property. Non-Anglo immigrants who adopted that ethic have thrived. But the Third World is tribal and oligarchic and generally contemptuous of the Anglo-Saxon social values of restraint and gentility. So with a potent legal arsenal at their disposal, the Third World immigrants are actually [bold]encouraged[/bold] to identify strongly by their homeland’s ethnicity rather than their status as American residents or citizens.
We also ignore at our peril the fact that there is a spiritual economy to the division of the world into separate nations. What kind of world do you think it will be once it is ruled by an international corporate and government bureaucracy with a global tax base? There will be nowhere to hide.
Perhaps, you folks might be able to answer a few questions that Kenneth Davis ignored;
* Did ANY of the immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ireland, etc… openly protest in our streets yelling the equivalent of “Reconquista” in a sea of their homeland flags?? Did they also demand imaginary entitlements? Did they openly threaten to effect our elective process? Was there a party represented in the Congress whom designed legislation that would fail in order to provide a landslide of new votes and gain unprecedented power?
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