A Nation of Immigrants With a Knack for Forgetting Who We Are

Too many of us have forgotten who we are.

“Migrants, or immigrants, have always been with us,” said Lisa Wagner, the executive director of the Unitarian-Universalist Mass-Action Network. Wagner spoke last month at a library in Quincy, Mass., below a mural with the legend: “City of Immigrants.” They come, she said, because we need their labor.

In fact those “migrants and immigrants” have not only been with us.

They are us.

Wagner gave a precis of America’s immigrant history. Indentured servants arrived even before the Pilgrims. They were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, to serve a colony of fortune-hunters while they waited for the rumored gold to turn up. Similarly indentured young apprentices filled up the workshops in Boston and other colonies in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

A second, even more valuable source of labor, slaves were brought from Africa to provide labor in labor-intensive agricultural industries such as tobacco, indigo and, especially, cotton. The first shipload arrived in Virginia in 1619, a year before the Pilgrims provided a somewhat more savory origins story in Plymouth.

Irish labor built the famed Erie canal and other 19th century public works such as the railroads that connected cities and towns in the Eastern part of the country.
The demand for labor on the vast transcontinental railroads drove companies to recruit Chinese men (women were generally barred). After the railroads were built, the federal government passed the “Chinese Exclusion Act” in 1882, one of our country’s first immigration laws.

In the 19th and early 20th century, Mexican labor was recruited for agricultural work in western states such as California. Later, when the Great Depression created massive unemployment, Mexicans and many US citizens of Mexican descent were deported to a country where they had never lived.

And today, of course, immigrants work in many industries, including construction, agriculture, factories, food service and hospitality — in jobs where the work is hard and the pay poor.

The common theme in the history of American immigration policy, Wagner said, is a word that many Americans remain uncomfortable with, even in the era of Trumpery — “racism.” Until the mid-20th century legal entry into the United States was limited to people who were “considered to be white,” she pointed out.

And who was white — and who wasn’t — was an ongoing discussion until relatively modern times. In some respects, I believe, it’s still going on.

And so we should not be surprised that in the second decade of the 21st century, 229 years after the founding of the United States of America, immigration remains a divisive issues. We are facing — or trying to evade — what might be called “the American Paradox.” We are, and remain, a nation of immigrants with a shameful history of hating and opposing each successive wave of “new immigrant” groups that arrive on our shores or cross our borders in conspicuous numbers.

The United States of America was formed from 13 Atlantic Coast English colonies. The nation’s British Empire origins means that English-speakers have always enjoyed in-group status here. If you wish to become a citizen or permanent resident of the United States, it helps to speak English. (In Canada, for contrast, it helps to speak French.)

English speakers weren’t the only national group on the Colonial ground before independence. Those colonies were home to Dutch, Swedes, French and plenty of Germans and Scots “settlers” — the term then in use — in addition to the English.

Settlers, of course, are people who come from afar to ‘settle’ a new land. Today we would call them “immigrants.” Only Israelis living on Palestinian land are known today as settlers, a term that declares the theft of that Palestinian land while seeking evade it, just as the European ‘settlement’ of North America evades the truth that this land was taken from the Native People living here for thousands of years before the Europeans came.

The conclusions is obvious. All Americans were all ‘immigrants’ once.

And we were all ‘undocumented.’

A case may easily be made that we were all ‘illegals’ in the sense in which that term is thrown around today since our European ancestors lacked permission to reside here from any legitimate authority. The Native People, it is certainly true, did not possess a single agreed-upon authority to give or withhold such permission. But it is also true that they never invited white Europeans to come ‘settle,’ occupy, ‘own,’ and live on their land.

And today those of us born in this country are citizens of a country whose prior inhabitants right regard it as the construction of squatters and stealers of land.

Many of today’s Americans, of course, are the descendants of those who came later, after the ‘settlement’ and land-taking was largely accomplished.

The history of immigrants who came her from Europe after the founding of the United States is particularly instructive and relevant to the current immigration crisis — the ‘crisis,’ that is, invented by the current administration and its white-supremacist allies for political gain.

Let’s look at that history of those who came to the new country and how easy (or not) those already here made it for them.

People of Northern European, Protestant backgrounds — English, Scandinavian, German, and the Protestant so-called Scotch-Irish immigrants — were largely accepted by the English-speaking majority of the new country from the late 18th century and on. People from other nationalities, even if they were European, faced antagonism, prejudice and a significant hazing period before they were accepted as American citizens ‘like’ the rest of ‘us.’

What ‘like us’ meant back then and continued to mean for the next 150 years — and, arguably, still does — is ‘white.’

The point is made by one of the first laws enacted by the new country known as the United States of America created by the adoption of the US Constitution in 1789. The Naturalization Act of 1790 defined newcomers eligible to become US citizens as “free white persons” of “good moral character.” From the start the USA was legally defined as a country for white people.

The concept of a ‘white race’ is itself a fiction since there is no scientific definition for the word ‘race.’ Human beings are all members of a single species, homo sapiens. The anthropologists who study the origins of the human species through genetic analysis and the fossil record tell us that we humans are all descended from ancestors who left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Those who study more modern history tell us that the concept of a ‘white race’ arose during the era of European exploration and colonization explicitly to distinguish an ‘us’ from the darker-skinned (or ‘black’) peoples encountered in much of the rest of the world.

This distinction was of fundamental importance to the United States, a country founded in part on denying the humanity of a different ‘race’ of people to justify enslaving them.

This point is highlighted by 19th century discussions on — for a telling example — whether the Irish could be considered ‘white.’

It is no secret that many ‘white’ Protestant Americans strongly resisted Irish immigration (the new country’s first large influx of Roman Catholics) in the 1840s and ’50s. As the historian Noel Ignatiev explains in his tellingly titled book, “How the Irish Became White,” the pejorative stereotypes used to denigrate the Irish were borrowed from those already abroad. The “drunk and belligerent foolish Pat and Bridget were stock characters on the American stage” in the pre-Civil War period, Ignatiev writes. The memes of this type — “happy, lazy, stupid, with a gift for music and dance” — were clearly borrowed from the racist typography applied to African-Americans brought to this country in chains. To which American anti-Irish prejudice added drunkenness and criminality.

While Irish immigrants worked their way into the fabric of the American mainstream within a generation or two — building churches, schools, laboring on the country’s ever-expanding infrastructure, claiming space in the big cities, electing councilors and mayors — a major new challenge to the definition of whiteness was posed by the heavy stream of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe drawn to the promise of work in American factories following the Civil War: Italians, Russians, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Slavs, Hungarians, Turks, and Portuguese, among others.

Writing on the prejudice faced by Italian immigrants (the single largest group of these ‘new’ immigrants) during this period, author Ed Falco states, “America has a proud tradition as an immigrant nation, but it also has a long history of marginalizing those it marks as ‘other.’” That darker heritage “includes suspicion, hostility, abuse and even death, leveled against ethnic groups as they arrived one after another in waves over the past 2½ centuries.”

Falco points to an egregious example of this racist prejudice:

“…(T)he largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn’t African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.”

Eleven men were dragged from a New Orleans jail and lynched, after a court found them not guilty of killing the city’s mayor. As shameful as this act was, Falco writes, the reaction of ‘white America’ made it worse. The victims were described by news sources in racist terms as “sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins.”

The crime was praised by Theodore Roosevelt as “a rather good thing.” The New York Times opined that “Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans.”

And the lynch mob’s leader was elected governor of Louisiana on an openly racist platform. Italians, he said, were “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous.”

It is hard today, of course, to imagine a United States of America without people of Irish, Italian and Jewish ancestry. Or without African Americans, Latin Americans and Asians — other groups historically regarded as inferior ‘races.’ And yet in the early decades of the 20th century, acting on the widely shared view that people from certain parts of the world — Italians, Jews, Asians — were “not like us,” “unable to understand democracy,” or “fundamentally inferior,” the American government passed restrictive immigration laws intended to limit their ‘contamination’ of American society.

The first across-the-board law to set up numerical quotas by nationality was approved in 1921; and revised in 1924 to base quotas on a percentages of Americans from each nation found in the 1880 census. In going back that far, Congress hoped to admit smaller numbers from European countries of the ‘new’ immigration — Italy, Russia, Poland, and the other countries of Eastern and Southern Europe.

US law has revised and altered the quota system repeatedly since, but the notion of national quotas and ‘favored nations’ persists.

Those Americans who trace their US origins back to a time before 1921 may claim their immigrant forbears were ‘legal’ and therefore their own legitimacy above reproach, but the claim is empty because back then few bars to entrance existed. Immigrants arriving by sea were inspected for health concerns when they arrived in US ports. If you weren’t carrying an infectious disease, the doors were open. Others arrived in the US by land borders, where even fewer checks existed.

Rather than ‘legal,’ then, the truer observation is that our ancestors were lucky.

There are many reasons today to argue that our country’s immigration and refugee laws need ‘reform.’ It has been well and widely argued that we should allow more people in, create a path to citizenship for those already here but lacking ‘papers,’ make room for a greater share of the world’s increasing refugee population, and expand our citizenship courses to include education for native-born Americans as well who, various studies suggest, clearly need them.

One large truth remains. The United States of America is a strong and prosperous country today because of immigration. People are our greatest resource. Newcomers contribute more to the nation’s wealth — as every study shows — than they require from it.

We should also face the truth that America’s in-groups have always resisted the arrival of the next ‘out group’ until the newcomers fit in, get by, prosper, become part of a new normal, change the mix, prosper and behave as selfishly close-minded toward the next group as those who had initially complained about their own presence in America.

These days some Americans complain about Mexicans, Central Americans, Haitians, Muslims, Indians. I live in a city (Quincy, Mass.), that has become one-third Asian in recent decades. Old-timers whine about presence of so many Chinese restaurants, apparently forgetting that that demand for housing by newcomers has doubled the value of their properties. Something in human nature drives this ethnocentric behavior.

But history also shows that new Americans get over old prejudices, and continue to grow this nation together. Evidence of prosperous communities of Latinos, Haitians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese and Muslims can be found all over the country. The county’s least prosperous regions are those with the least diverse populations.

All Americans came from somewhere else. And all of us, following in the footsteps of our ancestors, “built” this country.

We will do it more successfully when we get over the need to be ‘white.’