For me, it quite simply comes down to this- just seeing the look on the faces of the folks in that 1923 photo tells me that they and their descendants were going to be good for America.
9
We read about this with overwhelming disgust and bewilderment. How could thinking people be so ignorant and prejudiced? How did a whole culture buy into this kind of "group think?" How could they be unaware of the harm they were doing to fellow human beings?
Don't you wonder what our blind spots are? We think we are so overthetop enlightened as a people but certainly some will look back on our culture, see our blind spots and wonder, "What on earth were those people thinking?"
What do you think our culture's blind spots are?
9
Comical America. To be revered by Republican voters it’s imperative you be western Europe Germanic/Nordic race. However, if you are LIVING in any of those countries, you’re classified as enemies of trump. Y’all have deep issues.
18
Very scary. Revealed what the white elites and not so elite will write, say and enforce to limit ethnic and racial diversity.
Now, truth be told, we need another article that shows the same type of racist thinking that is present in those of color and other ethnic and religious beliefs. Muslims have pseudo-science and faith beliefs that discriminate against Jews and Christians. Jews have negative beliefs about Christians and Muslims. Notice not that you don't see Mexican, Cuban, our other Latino immigrants that establish businesses in the US hiring whites, blacks or Asians to work for them. Japanese make statements that reveal feelings of superiority over all races. My favorite, while visiting China, I had a Chinese student ask me in front of a class, "Why are American students so dumb in math?"
Racism and classicism is not the specific domain of whites. We need to get EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE, to stop thinking this way.
19
And you wonder why many don't believe the scientific community and the media today...I suppose those that didn't agree were called deniers...And were castigated by the elite and the media as ignorant fools...Should I take a good dose of mercury before bed too!!
4
This column should be - must be - the first in a series.
Vic Blue of Tampa in a Times Pick asks when and how did mainstream science see Eugenics as junk science.
I ask when will I read the first of 2 or more articles explaining completely what David Reich explained briefly in a March 30 reply to readers the following:
1) There is only one genetically unique modern human race.
2) The US Census Bureau system has no scientific or logical basis. It was the creation of racists. Reich in effect gave in to critical readers and stated that American "races" are political inventions (yes I know "socially constructed" is the American phrase but politically constructed would be more nearly the truth.)
Then begin discussion of ending the Census Bureau System.
One might think that Race/Related with new Editor Lauretta Charlton could take on this task but I am doubtful.
Better for the Times to enlist experts. David Reich, Svante Pääbo, Kenneth Prewitt, Dorothy Roberts, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Sarah Tishkoff with Times Carl Zimmer as coordinator.
Sweden ended consideration of classification by "race" and creation of a eugenics program when it realized that the founder of the Swedish Institute of Race Biology was a charlatan. Then the arrival of studies of the human genome, with Svante Pääbo as a major force put the final nail in the coffin of race-based thinking - in Sweden but not in the USA.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
7
Huge numbers of immigrants were welcomed in the old days because they were needed to crew the factories of an industrial America. This is simply no longer the case.
We ought to reinstitute the quote system, if only to control the tsunami of aliens.
8
It is absurd to measure biases of anyone in the past
by the standards of today.
The relevant measure is
measurement against contemporaries.
Measurement of knowledge or attitudes
in one place at any given time.
is properly measured against knowledge or attitudes
elsewhere at that same time.
How did the biases prevailing in the USA
100 years ago
measure against biases prevailing elsewhere
100 years ago.?
One hundred years ago,
no racist biases in Mexico?
nor in Brazil?
nor in Argentina?
nor in China?
nor in India?
nor in Japan?
nor in Thailand (Siam)?
nor in Egypt?
nor in Iran (Persia)?
nor in Ethiopia?
nor elsewhere in Africa?
nor in Italy?
nor in Spain?
nor in France?
nor in England?
nor in Germany?
nor in Russia?
nor in Hungary?
nor among Catholics?
nor among Hindus?
nor among Muslims?
nor among Buddists?
And how do biases prevailing in the USA today
measure against biases prevailing elsewhere today?
Today,
no racist biases in Mexico?
nor in Brazil?
nor in Argentina?
nor in China?
nor in India?
nor in Japan?
nor in Thailand?
nor in Egypt?
nor in Ethiopia?
nor in Nigeria?
nor in Iran?
nor in Italy?
nor in Spain?
nor in France?
nor in England?
nor in Germany?
nor in Russia?
nor in Poland?
nor among Catholics?
nor among Hindus?
nor among Muslims?
nor among Buddists?
Sure,
there is always room for improvement.
But the world never was, nor never will be, perfect.
Improvement --
including improvement in knowledge and in attitudes --
comes in increments, over time.
5
Keeping others out is as long as American history when Benjamin Franklin warned of swarthy Germans and so on to the Irish and every other group that came to the US.
It is unfair however to point to the US as the originator of walls. The Chinese built a wall to keep out its neighbors as did the Romans who built walls and limes to keep out uncouth barbarians from the north.
One thing all these walls had in common is that they all failed as do all walls eventually.
9
This piece illustrates the great whitewashing of “the North,” the east coast, and by extension America at large. The South is always the convenient scapegoat for America’s cancerous addiction to white supremacy, with its narratives about slavery (even though the North embraced slavery) and racial segregation (even though the North embraced segregation). Even now, with our current New Yorker in the White House propped up entirely by racial resentment, the narratives about Southern racism continue. Yet this whole time, it is all of America that has been complicit.
8
NYT, please, make analysis why people cannot get working visas. And why they do not want to. Poor people have a restriction for visa application.
2
Then, as now, the "desirables" didn't and don't want to come here. Scandinavians in particular and their socialist democracies. Zero interest in immigrating here.
Someone should ask Trump Mob officials why, don't you think? Why citizens of progressive socialist democracies shun this country? And just maybe the rest of us should be asking that question as well.
17
It's fascinating that we humans are endlessly surprised, shocked, even gob-smacked, at the "inhumanity" of humanity. C'mon peeps, we've been horrible to The Other ever since Cain slew Abel (or was it the other way around?).
3
In spite of the article, I still believe The Bell Curve is solid science. Study after study proves, to me, that humanity is stratified by IQ. Efforts to deny reality are doomed to failure.
16
@California Bill
Whether the Bell Curve is solid science or not, there is no evidence that this has any bearing on human progress, however you choose to define progress. Perhaps all progress is a result of those who are in the 6-sigma and above, and in this case your contribution (and perhaps mine) is no better than someone 1-sigma lower. Also, the Bell Curve was mostly about White Americans and African-Americans, Bell curve or not, I could honestly say that America's contribution to music, sports and modern literature would be a wasteland without African Americans,
15
This is interesting and valuable history. However, I am trying to understand the connection to the immigration policies supported and proposed by President Trump, all of which mirror the recommendations of President Clinton's Bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform, led by African-American, Democratic Congresswoman and civil rights icon Barbara Jordan?
For example, just like Barbara Jordan, Trump supports shifting to a skills-based immigration system like Canada and Australia; chain migration reform; elimination of the entirely random diversity visa lottery; reduction of legal immigration from the current record levels and most-generous-in-the-world rates of 1.3 million per year back to the 1980's average of 550,000 per year; strengthened enforcement versus illegal immigration, including mandatory E-Verify; and providing a path to citizenship for the 800,000 registered DACA recipients, as well as an additional 1,000,0000 illegal aliens who might otherwise have qualified for DACA but never bothered to do the paperwork.
It seems the connection to the actual concrete proposals supported by Trump is rather tenuous. Is the argument that Canada's merit-based system is because of racial eugenics? Or Trump's support for a path to citizenship for all DACA recipients and 1 million more, in combination with finally enacting the Jordan Commission reforms, is a form of racial eugenics?
13
@GRH. The connection between the eugenics back then and Trump’s policy now is that Trump has directed his entire focus against potential immigrants from the south, while statistics show that most illegal immigration is the result of people overstaying visas who had come here from many parts of the world. He has described those from the south as mainly rapists and made a southern wall a pillar of his campaign. The racism at the heart of his immigration plans is obvious to see.
9
@GRH Funny that a liberal lion is now a darling of the alt-right. Barbara Jordan was taken out of context, and had changed in her thinking even more before her death. Those who knew her well say she would be appalled at folks like you citing her as an example today. You can learn more about it in this very excellent podcast: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/665/transcript
@PJP, the alt-right? I guess if you classify someone who voted for Clinton in 1992; Ralph Nader in 1996; Gore in 2000; Kerry in 2004; and Obama in 2008 and 2012 as the "alt-right."
I lived through that era & Barbara Jordan tragically died at young age, in her late 50's or early 60's, as Congress was drafting the legislation. Bill Clinton (again, who I voted for in '92) strangely backed away from his commitment to the Jordan Commission legislation. As Boston Globe and others reported a little later, it turned out because of the illegal campaign cash the Chinese were providing to Clinton and DNC (via John Huang) for 1996 federal elections. It was an alleged quid pro quo. Chinese did not want chain migration reform or reductions in immigration; & they wanted normal trade relations via admission to WTO. Clinton delivered on both. Talk about foreign influence!
In contrast to Trump, Ms. Jordan and the Commission led with moral clarity and deplored the demonization of immigrants. She acknowledged the importance of immigrant contributions and role throughout US history. Democratic Party is absolutely correct to call out Trump for his abominable rhetoric (as referenced by Treetop in his above response).
That said, when it comes to the policy details, Trump is supporting the Jordan Commission. Has supported RAISE Act, based on Jordan Commission. Clinton unfortunately gave us Trump in '16 b/c betraying Jordan.
3
Contemporary Americans welcome LEGAL immigrants, but do not want ILLEGAL immigrants. They recognize that the US cannot afford (or choose not) to support our own citizens: the poor, the ill, elderly, disabled, veterans, et al., and that they and other US taxpayers cannot possibly support the hundreds of millions of foreigners who would like to come here.
US laws allow foreigners to seek entry and citizenship. Those who do not follow these laws are in this country illegally and should be detained and deported; this is policy in other countries, too.
The cruelty lies not in limiting legal immigration, or detaining and deporting illegal immigrants, or forcing those who wish to enter the US to wait for processing. What is cruel, unethical and probably illegal is encouraging parents to bring their children on the dangerous trek to US borders and teaching the parents how to game the system to enter the US by falsely claiming asylum, persecution, etc. Indeed, many believe bringing children on such perilous journeys constitutes child abuse.
No other nation has open borders, nor should the US.
163
@Mon Ray
Taking young children from their asylum seeking parents indefinitely and putting them in pens as a policy of deterence is indefensible and cruel, period. Why is that so hard to admit? The US does not have "open borders" and that has not been anyone's policy. Why do you think attacking this strawman justifies rank inhumanity and ethnic demonization?
236
@Mon Ray
Kidnapping is a federal felony. Forcing refugees to "wait for processing", with the intent to prevent them from being granted asylum, is a breach of the duty to enforce the laws that require asylum.
50
@Fresno Bob You are saying that "open borders" is a straw man yet that's the only consequence of your recommendations in this very comment. Obviously children cannot be housed in detention centers with adults. Then the only logical solution (to family separations) would be no detention at all, for anyone. That is open borders.
This argument always goes as follows: 1) "open borders" is a myth and a straw man; 2) any form of detention is wrong; 3) any form of denial of admission is wrong for asylum seekers; Unwritten conclusion: any form of immigration control is wrong but open borders is a straw man. This is gas-lighting.
25
If you have grown up in this country as a hyphenated American, you won't be taken aback by what this column conveys.
The United States ruling class and so-called mainstream America--descendants of immigrants from Northern Europe--have made no secret of the fact that they consider all others to be of an inferior race or ethnic background.
This is the engine that drives Trumpism. More precisely it's the fear that swarthy hordes are overrunning the United States, thus endangering the numerical superiority of "white" America.
The civil rights struggle, some degree of greater racial tolerance and Obama's election had lulled many of us into believing the dark and ugly disease of xenophobia and racism had been effectively tamed.
Trump's election proved that it had not and with this noxious man occupying the presidency, nativist and racist Americans were greatly emboldened and felt vindicated. Here, at last, was a president who unabashedly spewed racist bile and never backed away from what he uttered.
162
Another Friday.
Another misleading anti-Trump immigration article.
This is getting tiring.
Just to reiterate. Neither Trump, nor the vast majority of his supporters, nor the vast majority of Democrats, are against immigration in general. They are against:
• Illegal immigration and phony asylum claims
• Immigration based on family relations rather than merit
• Immigration of lower-wage workers who impact the current U.S. low-wage workers (which impacts all U.S. taxpayers)
Please give it a rest.
174
I recommend that people actually read the current immigration laws rather then rely on faux news synopsis, if there was a defined affordable way for people down the economic ladder, most would follow that. Remember everyone on welfare is a US citizen, no illegals there
53
But only one group took children away without a plan to reunite them as a deterrent policy. Do not forget to mention this one. Belongs only to one party.
121
@John
Well Jon if the case is that Trump is against immigration based on family rather than merit, he had better check with Melania's parents who got off the boat recently.
162
Can we make a distinction here about asylum seekers? I'm very much in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. But how does the current administration's policy of punishing asylum seekers, who have followed our laws (and international law) and presented themselves at the border, achieve anything but cruelty? Very few asylum seekers (less than ten percent) will be allowed permanent status, so this is not an issue of being "swamped".
2
As for the person who declared that he had “been asked repeatedly if my father was in the Mafia (by the way, many of these people were self-styled liberals),” there may be a reason for such a question.
I, a liberal at the time, asked that question of a woman I was dating. She said, “No.” I believed her.
Some time after I married her later, it became obvious her entire family was such. They tried multiple times to force me to become likewise.
Getting out of that family was one of the most important lifesaving things I ever did.
Since then I have made much better choices, including marrying into a fine family from Asia and a woman of mixed heritage from our country. BTW, I am a progressive.
“There is nothing unique about my story - it crosses all ethnic lines.”
In the long run, my life journey turned out well.
Fortunately. It could so easily have been a disaster.
1
There appears to be a confusion between “intelligence” and “culture”. And, when we are being exclusionary or racist, it is usually about a foreign culture. We don’t measure intelligence before we discriminate.
We are still evolving from when we roamed in clans and feared “the other” because they could bring diseases they weren’t immune to, or a physical battle.
What we are ignoring is the psychological comfort level, whether conscious or not, of the natives. If immigrants are coming in at a slow enough pace to not overwhelm the psychological comfort level of the community, they acculturate, and the natives feel they are still in control of their “home”.
Mass migration, throughout history, has been a destabilizing force....as other destabilizing events such as war, crop failures and plagues. Humans need time to adapt to change.
3
Too many deer strip the forest, making it harder for the others to survive. Why is it that we are so worried about Climate Change because it is inevitable that nature is on the run due to our actions, but fail to see that the natural laws also pertain to excess immigration being detrimental?
5
@Rodrian Roadeye
Overpopulation is the elephant in the parlor,
especially in the parlors of the pro-immigrant chattering classes in the Fourth Estate and the Pulpit and most of the Academy who pillory anyone in their midst who dares to challenge their prevailing PC conventional wisdom.
4
Post WWI a revitalized wave of cultural consciousness made its way into American society popularly identified as social reform movements. Out of which immigration law reform was determined to be an immediate need. For in many quarters a fear reigned. It was that the fabric of American society itself was at threat from an influx of European refugees fleeing from a war devastated European continent. Particularly those arriving from countries bordering the Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe identified with high alcohol consumption. And so Prohibition was finally enacted after long years of activist insistence, one which in essence represented a victory for racist elements in America. One allied to the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan who having effectively segregated the southern states turned their attention to the anticipated infiltration of America by undesirable foreign elements. Most shamefully scientists and academics in the social sciences entered in to both escalate and validate this realignment of societal focus. One where eugenics, the classification of humanity into those fit and unfit to live became legitimate scientific inquiry. It all worked to become the encore of what was yet to come. A world that would give rise to and accommodate the Nazi regime in Germany of the 1930s.
2
today, Republicans give us a reprise because it still sells.
Too bad Carl C Brigham couldn’t be here to see how his Frankenstein, the SAT has come around to shred Carl’s bias!
2
So it appears that eugenics was an American export, much admired by Nazi theorists. What are we exporting in 2019 that so excites haters worldwide? I think I know.
9
Comprehensive immigration reform passed by the bi-partisan Senate in 2013 (and not taken up by Bohner’s GOP majority in the House) would have gone a long way to solve the many issues brought forward by many comments on both sides of this issue for legal and illegal immigrants. Likelihood of getting a similar bill passed today into law and signed by this President now are nil. Why? We’ve become so polarized and propagandized by our respective political parties and sources of real and fake news and information that we can no longer see that we, voters, are being completely manipulated. The GOP wants the “illegal” hordes amassing at our border to stoke fear (and votes), as does Fox News. The Dems want mistreatment of human beings front and center of the 2020 campaign, as does MSNBC. Whichever side you are on, we need to vote in any candidate that promises comprehensive immigration reform, and then vote out anyone who fails to deliver on that promise. 2018 House Dems, I am watching.... and waiting. Quick fix, take the 2013 Senate bill in its entirety and pass it (yes, actually vote on it, like tomorrow) and send it to McConnell to see how serious the GOP Senate is to solving this problem. Then, WE, will decide the earnestness of their efforts in 2020. We need to believe that we are the solution to the problem rather than firing talking points at each other every time the issue comes up.
6
@Steve T
Comprehensive Immigration Reform is just a new euphemism for yet another immigration amnesty.
@Steve T
America needs comprehensive immigration control --
control at the border,
control in the interior,
and control at the workplaces
and government benefits offices.
America does not need
so-called "comprehensive immigration reform",
which is NewSpeak for amnesty and more immigration
and which always takes its cue
from J. Wellington Wimpy --
"I will gladly pay you Tuesday [i.e. never]
[and even then, only with half-way serious funds for serious enforcement]
for a hamburger [i.e. amnesty] today."
Biology does have something to say about the mixing of populations that have been isolated from one another by geography. Offspring of mixed parentage is healthier and more vigorous. This phenomenon is known as heterosis, hybrid vigor, or outbreeding enhancement. Hybrids express the best traits of the parent populations, as seen in plants and animals of all kinds as well as humans. The benefits of outbreeding are the flip side of the dangers of inbreeding, which we all recognize.
11
As I read the piece I see we have learned little from our past, and at times, sordid history.
However, in today's toxic political environment, and warfare, politicians need a common enemy to help galvanize their base of supporters.
And Trump has been very successful, as Coolidge was in his day. We have allowed ourselves to become as bigoted as those who were responsible for the Chinese exclusion, the banning of Indians (no, not Native Americans, but, that would start another discussion concerning their plight), the discounting of southern Europeans.
No, we have learned little and are just as racist with our nativism as many before us. And many cheer in delight.
As I stated before, Trump and his blatant racism against anyone Hispanic, including the Puerto Ricans who are citizens, has taken root and has proven beneficial to his campaign as evidenced in many of these comments.
Many of these immigrants were, and still are, responsible for building our factories, our railroads, our homes and we cannot see beyond our noses at these contributions.
We only see their nationality, their customs and the color of their skin and make a judgement.
Trump has succeeded in making America racist again. Or merely reinforced the racism we have.
8
Seems to me it's always the comfortable and privileged who are the most vocal about new arrivals. This wouldn't be because they feel their self-interests are being threatened doooo youuuu??
Joohn~
American Net'Zen
2
@John
Actually, it is usually the poor who are most affected by immigrant arrivals because they compete for similar jobs, housing and child schooling. The rich are cloistered from immigrants, other than to hire them at low wages, from nannies to workers in their factories.
6
@Lil;; True the poor take it in the teeth. They always do. But what I'm talking about is the subjective emotional reaction done by the elite privileged. All those who occupy the current power thrones in our country. They fear; so they pull up the ladder of opportunity as best they can on everyone else lower down on the societal rungs of the ladder of opportunity (so to speak).
They engage in the practices of exclusion rather than inclusion. They spend endless amounts of time, money and effort convincing the lower castes, the plebeians, that their fears are rational, just as they are doing today. This is not being done to the benefit of the lower classes. It is done to keep their position secure.
rich Americns no longer own factories - those are owned by shareholders or people who may have more than you, but are nowhere near truly rich. now, rich people own money, fungibly deployed.
The topic of immigration shows that people do not learn from the past or from their mistakes. We are all immigrants here except if you are native American and as each wave came the ones already here tried to stop it. The people pointing at the Statue of Liberty a hundred years ago trying to come here to better themselves are the ones shouting "Build a wall " now.
5
Mr. Okrent fails to note that many of the proponents of racial laws used the genetic arguments as a cover for bigotry.
During World War I, Jews were rated as having subnormal intelligence as a group based on the biased testing given to draftees in World War I. Within a few years, the children and siblings of those very same soldiers were the victims of quotas at Ivy League colleges because if there had been no quotas and admission was based on academic achievements, their classes would have been overwhelmingly Jewish.
In fact, Thomas Dixon, the author of the book which was the basis of the movie "Birth of a Nation" denounced the KKK in the 1920s because while he agreed with it that blacks were inferior and therefore discrimination against them was reasonable, he felt Jews were superior with regard to intelligence and achievements and couldn't see any rationale in discriminating against them.
What is the same today is that Trump has to make up arguments to keep immigrants out who are different from most Americans (we're too full; all Muslims are terrorists) to appeal to the bigotry of many of his supporters.
1
This is the line that perplexes me. "There was a time when even Ivy League scientists supported racial restrictions at the border."
What? Its pretty much always been this way, and it continues to this day. Its not a thing that went away. Who do you think are in the positions to enact Trumps racially discriminatory initiatives? Did Trump not hire, not appoint a bunch of Ivy Leaguers? Who do you think is trying to manipulate the laws, and such so to make his orders legally viable? Its not a bunch of Commuter College grads! Its top tier graduates, alumi, etc.
They're either directly under Trumps tiny thumbs, or they're in the various Trump supporting Conservative Think-tanks, and other "academic" organizations. These groups are NOT filled with Phoenix College grads (no offense Phoenix grads)
Lets be real! Racism is alive and well at the Ivy League, top-tier colleges and universities. Implying that racism is now absent the ranks of Ivy League schools, is akin to saying, that sexism is also absent. Its absurd!
Wake up! Racism trickles down from the elites, as much as it percolates up from the rabble.
8
legacies preserve it.
So what changed the ethos described in this article? At least in scientific circles opinions moved. The article seems incomplete without some mention of this. What made mainstream science see eugenics as junk science, or was it only a fringe group that purported it in the first place? Prejudice that comes from the privileged, credentialed top is just as insidious and wrongheaded as that which roils at the bottom? But why did that change, as much as it has?
46
@Vic Blue
It “changed” because we are losing our middle class throughout the West. A comfortable and large middle class is the best way to combat racism, and national exclusivity.
4
The"American race," was quickly supplanted by the greatest generation. A mix of the children from all races, ethnic, and religious backgrounds bound together in a fight against the horrors of fascist regimes defined by the concepts of national and genetic "purity" being superior. Biological laws were trumped by people bound together by moral and ethical laws.
81
Yet, sadly, today we are witnessing a demagogue whipping up these same misguided nativist sentiments.
8
This should make many Americans reassess any views that America has always been a haven for immigrants, and has until very recently always valued and taken pride in the idea of building a country based on diversity.
If it isn't enough to realize that the American Museum of Natural History was the "beating heart of the combined eugenics and anti-immigration movement," Edwin Black has exhaustively documented that not only was the eugenics movement begun in the United States, but that after it had been well established in the United States, it was actively spread to Germany.
It was in fact California eugenicists who began producing massive amounts of pseudo-scientific literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and then sending it overseas to German scientists and other medical professionals. By 1933, it was the state of California which had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was inspired by California eugenicists.
6
" exalting the “Nordics” of northwestern Europe. "
The article does not connect the dots with what was going on at Europe at the time: the rise of Naziism in Germany with its own talk of the "Master Race". It was the American version of a fascist movement sweeping the West.
3
Too true. Even after my grandparents had suffered through the Holocaust, America would still not let them in. They had to live for years in DP camps and then buy fake papers just so they could come here several years after the liberation of the concentration camps. It’s just disgusting.
6
Oh so sadly true. And also applied to Irish and Scottish and Welsh and ‘dumb’ Swedes . . . And to ‘frogs’.
4
It's interesting that this article is about using junk science to form immigration policy a century ago and in the comments section there is a lot of junk economics being used to rationalize similar bigotry today.
5
This is precisely, though a Zionist, I have no truck with the Republican Party or the American Right Wing. It was they who were the intellectual base of the Nazis. Nazi eugenics policy and the Holocaust started here in the United States as
Okrent points out. There is a term among Ashkenazic Orthodox Jews that is relevant here. It is Yichis, which means heritage. That from a racial point of view American Right Wingers have very bad Yichis. Their later day support of Israel is very suspect because their radical elements chant: Jews will not replace us.
4
Perhaps is was a US thing, but many cultures have attempted to keep their groups pure from outsiders...Exclusion and even genocide of other groups or tribes is common in human history as is written in the Bible. Other groups needed to be eliminated for God. Usually because they are flawed in someway, not worthy or chosen...Claiming that other races or groups are inferior certainly did not start here...Top scientists in many groups have deemed other groups inferior since the compilation of the old testament...Good technique for boosting a groups ego!
1
The only true Americans were here before invasion by white Europeans! Nuff said!
5
Not just at the border. Heck, liberal hero Woodrow Wilson implemented polices to keep blacks out of government and Princeton. Biggest lie of the past century is that only Republicans are racist bigots.
3
And Stephen Miller is a Jew!!!!
4
Miller has lost that honor by his beliefs and behavior. even his own family wants nothing to do with him. Miller is a moral leper.
1
Not to mention the links between American and Nazi German eugenicist theories and practices:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299061/
https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Eugenics-and-the-Nazis-the-California-2549771.php
1
Why did that ever change?
Immigrations should be more proportionate, not ALL have to be South American.
3
South Americans are rooted in the whole American Continent.
So it turns out that Trump's racist policies have long and noteworthy precedents. All discredited. But who needs facts?
2
“Hatred of illegal immigrants”??I beg to differ.There are thousands of them working at jobs homegrown Americans will not do.and are employed illegally by other Americans breaking the law.Both are complicit.
3
This is not an article about Trump or his policies. This article is describing a shameful history of how racism and white supremacy shaped immigration policy for many many decades prior to now. And how these attitude were embraced by prominent thinkers, scientists and policy makers. To my great shame, many respected geneticists such as Luther Burbank and RA Fisher supported eugenics. In fact, the Annals of Eugenics was created in 1925 as an outlet for scientific inquiry into this topic. It changed its name to the Annals of Human Genetics in 1954, nine years after the end of WW2 revealed the atrocities of the Nazi eugenics program. This article clearly detailed how the racist underpinnings of the immigration system persisted for decades under many guises. It's important we as Americans reckon with that history and seek to do better. Just knowing the history suggests that we as a nation are still likely to be engaged in racist immigration policies. This is a problem several centuries in the making that cannot simply be blamed on the Trump administration. Fixing this will involve thoughtful and deliberate effort.
5
Say what you will, and couch it in any terms you wish. It all comes down to the fear of what the “ other” will take from you. The need to feel superior to something without the work of understanding it.
4
The definition of fascism is spot on.
The 1920's Who's Who of America racist viewpoint that led to anti-immigrant legislation was startling and sickening to me. Yet we need history lessons like this to do right -- now. I'm getting the author's book.
1
Russian trolls on this thread, arguing against immigration that makes the United States bigger, stronger and more capable than the Russian adversary.
Since the 1600's immigration has made the country bigger and stronger, not smaller and weaker. If immigration weakened the country, the country would have failed before the United States was formed.
We have the best basketball players on earth because we have the best athletes on earth. Immigrants work to support themselves and their families. Genius PhD's work here, so we lead the world in technology by recruiting the most capable people from all over the world.
Race and hate are not reasons to exclude starving women and children, fleeing violence.
Are Trump's voters aware that they are being offered jobs as agricultural field workers? Trump's strategy is to deport 11 million people and move uneducated whites into undocumented jobs.
Our research and development economy, founded by Benjamin Franklin on the foundation of intellectual property, requires education and training to be employed in the middle class. Phony racism will not change the fact that only education moves people into the middle class. Lies to the contrary are expressions of stupidity and ignorance.
Let's not forget the genocidal Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by President Andrew Jackson, that allowed the stealing of Indian land by the white race. Trump put Jackson's portrait in the oval office.
3
And 50 years before that the Irish who were mostly Catholic had to hide their religion. There was even an Anti-Catholic political Party.
What this has to do with Trump and todays’ border crisis is absolutely nothing.
1
True, the racists of the 1920s were actually better educated and more literate than Trump.
3
Shame on us if we have not improved in 100 years!
Hard to quantify, but it's pretty appalling to scroll down the comments and see how many people leap to defend the bigots of the past, or to justify the "totally different" reasons to close our borders today.
5
America’s immigration policy cannot be characterized as racist this century.
According to the Pew Research Center, more than one million legal immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2016, the top country of origin for legal immigrants was India (126,000), follow by Mexico (124,000), China (121,000) and Cuba (41,000).
Asians are projected to become the largest U.S. immigrant group by 2055, surpassing Hispanics.
In 2016, only 1,114 Norwegians moved to the U.S., while 1,603 Americans moved to Norway, according to the Chicago Tribune.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/30/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-norway-trump-20180113-story.html
2
And yet we have:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
can one repatriate a statue?
@Joe
That poem was not originally on the Statue of Liberty when the French gave it to us. It was added in the early 1900s or so.
1
Thanks to Daniel Okrent for illuminating the extent to which American history is steeped in prejudice and ignorance. Combine this with revelations stemming from the Ferguson MO and other similar incidents and one can see that the work of bringing social justice to this country will last for generations. Until we can up our game in terms of education and dismantle the bureaucratic apparatuses of racism (like cash bail, court fines, inadequate police oversight, etc.) we will never measure up to the aspirations inherent in the Equal Protection clause.
1
I am so ashamed to be white,because of trump and his cronies we are trying to continue this revolting view. The more diverse the neighborhood the more fabulous are the people.
1
The article is dripping with contempt for the conventional wisdom of a century ago, as espoused by that era's top public intellectuals and the contemporary (early 20th century) editorial pages of the Washington Post and New York Times. I suspect that in one hundred years time the same level of contempt will be expressed for the conventional wisdom of today.
2
Bah! A famous in the 19th century biology Professor at Harvard, Alexander Agassiz the Father, believed that Africans and Afro-Americans were a different species of the genus Homo.
Good proof that DJT has old ideas.
I’m sure the true Americans wish they could have kept the degenerate hoards out of the country in the 1600’s .
3
“There can be no doubt that recent history has shown a movement of inferior peoples or inferior representatives of peoples to this country.”
Thus should have spoken the Native American when the white man arrived.
1
Now there is an eye opener!!!!
Madison Grant's extreme racism influenced both Woodrow Wilson even as he fought for the League of Nations and Hitler as he used Grant's book as a format for the eugenics in Mein Kampf. But these things were barely noticed and considered acceptable scientific ideas in a society convinced of its superiority. It was one reason why the Chinese as they built national railroad system in the 1880's were treated like expendable slave labor then expelled and Japanese Americans during WWII could be put into concentration camps with the blessings of our Supreme Court. Perhaps those of us who believe in universal human rights are radical ones and the rest just business as usual. As I examine my own thoughts occasionally racist i can not exempt myself, but awareness of our attitudes are our only hope of changing them.
4
@just Robert, and don't forget Anglophile Woodrow Wilson demonized German-Americans as well, in the lead-up to World War I, and then put many of them in concentration camps during the war. Yes, sauerkraut became "freedom cabbage" and all that nonsense. German-Americans were black-listed. Wilson's "Committee on Public Information" engaged in anti-German propaganda that was so extreme and turned out to be so false and exaggerated that it disillusioned an entire generation of Americans who lived through it. To the extent that people were then cynical and refused to believe the reports coming out during World War II about Hitler's Germany. And had Wilson not pivoted and betrayed his electoral promise to stay out of a war that did not involve America, it would have ended in stalemate without the harsh terms imposed on Germany that most historians say led to World War II.
1
The 1924 immigration act seems reasonable considering it is the same immigration policy practiced by East Asian nations today.
2
America was built by enslaved and separate and unequal black Africans in America on land and resources stolen from brown Native aboriginal American pioneers.
No Americans ever worked harder and longer for less return than enslaved and separate and unequal while black Africans in America.
No Americans ever had more of their lands, lives and natural resources stolen from them than brown Native American aboriginal pioneers.
What fair, just and moral God would ever bless the white European American Judeo-Christian enslavers, colonizers and conquerors who exploited Africans and Natives in America?
6
"Gangs of New York" - Herbert Asbury (and Martin Scorsese) The native Americans vs. the Johnny-come-lately Irish. That's when we were doing better with race relations: white people slaughtering white people.
In NYC, among the Latino population, Uptown - Spanish Harlem, Washington Heights - whatever the most recent immigrant group was, that was the most maligned and discriminated against. The Puerto Ricans discriminated against the Cubans, who discriminated against the Dominicans, who discriminated against the Mexicans, who discriminated against the Guatemalans...keep going.
It's so old it's new. And some social scientists posit that race is the primary motivating factor for most world conflict - not territorial acquisition, natural resources, or political differences.
The Japanese saw a Pan-Asian eastern hemisphere - run by them - and saw the Americans in the Pacific as a knife at their throat. All-to-familiar horrors were perpetrated on the Manchurians, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Siamese, and later on the white races in the Dutch East Indies, Burma, Singapore, the Philippines and India. Bataan Death March, Sandakan Death March, Burma-Siam railway forced labor.
All in the name of a superior race - who no one thinks is so terribly superior anymore - the Yamato people.
1
@Imanishi Kentaro
Your statement that the Latinos in New York discriminated against each other has no basis in fact or in scientific study. The Latinos in West Harlem and Washington Heights generally supported each other in myriad ways, from helping new immigrants get their driver’s license, to helping each other find jobs, tutor kids, petition legally for relatives abroad, etc.
Proof:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ooVn9hWZtac
Trump still believes in social Darwinism and eugenics. it's obvious in every word he says about immigration, legal or otherwise.
1
Immigrants continue to civilize America. Without immigrants, American universities would be filled with poorly educated, unmotivated, and intellectually lazy products of American high school education. Thank goodness for immigrants!
3
Each wave of immigration looks down on the group that comes after them.
2
Thank you for this reminder of a dark undercurrent running through our at times NOT so civil "civilization": tribalism is a natural but often very ugly part of the human condition: the tendency to mistrust, villify and discriminate against people percieved to be different enough from our friends and family, must be fought against tooth and nail because it stubbornly refuses to go away: it just takes different forms as out perception of who is "one of us", and who is "one of THEM" shifts. The eugenics movement, which culminated in the aborrent laws disriminating against people deemed "not like us, therefore inferior and unwelcome", was one of Hitler's inspirations - he commended the USA for the "progress" it was making in working towards a mythical "racial purity", then ran with the idea and took it to its logical conclusion: just murder anyone you deem to be inferior to your clan, "people" or "race" - kill as many as you can, enslave the rest and prevent "interbreeding". Sadly, there are still many today who believe that people of Western European descent are somehow "superior" to everyone else except perhaps Asians, who are now regarded by many as being smarter and more skilled than even "zee master race", lol. Synagogues and mosques are targeted for violence, Middle Easterners and those from Latin America are looked down upon, etc. Sigh.... it seems the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance.
Embarrassing, America is a Continent, not a Nation.
2
While endlessly hyperventilating over Donald Trump’s alleged malfeasance, Democrats tirelessly cheerlead on behalf of foreign migrants illegally trespassing into our country....costing American taxpayers $Billions, year after year.
Advancing the interests of illegal aliens over the best interests of American citizens, Democrats are, in fact, accomplices aiding and abetting this brazen and illegal disregard for our sovereignty...yet fail to comprehend their own outrageous hypocrisy!
2
I remember going from Philadelphia to a small liberal arts college in Ohio during the Vietnam War period. I was taken aback when my senior advisor explained to me that I was not chosen for sorority rush because people thought I was Jewish and their charter would not allow....
Guess my Greek face and sun kissed skin was not what a “Greek” organization was looking for...... I will always remember being “not white enough.”....and it doesn’t really ever go away...I can see it in people’s expressions ...
4
Someday we might understand that we're all the same species. We love. We fear. We hate. We worship or not. We pray. We hope. We hunger. We get sick. We travel. We work. We raise our children. Yes, our skin color differs. Some of us have slanted eyes. Some of us grow up to worship one god while others worship multiple gods. We grow up.
In the end we have more in common than not. And unfortunately for all of us, we forget how much we have in common when we go to war or we're afraid. This administration is playing on our fears. Nearly 80 years ago we didn't let in Jews because we were afraid. 6 million died for our fear. Do we really want to repeat that part of our history. We couldn't have taken in 6 million but we could have taken in more than we did. Fear makes fools of us all.
5/3/2019 7:40pm
5
Count on the NYT and "Ivy League Scientists" (in pseudoscientific fields) to get it wrong, then and now.
1
Those degenerate Asiatic hoards seem to be kicking Johnny All-American Boy's backside at our best universities.
One of the thing I take out of this. Even science is not free of preconceived prejudice. A healthy skepticism is always necessary. Luckily Science is somewhat self correcting, Religion and politics less so. Nowadays Religions and Political philosophy seem to be the biggest hate pushers in society, not really bad science.
9
The biologists and their publicists achieved what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.”
http://www.siyasat.pk/din-news-live.php
This spins the "Progressive" Liberal narrative that anyone who is anti-immigration is hateful, racist, deplorable, xenophobic, blah, blah, blah....... Nope, we just realize that in this time, we need to look to caring for our own who are already citizens, veterans, homeless, addicts and/or in need. But I guess the Liberal agenda really does put outsiders before their own citizens.
2
@Mystery Lits Which party is trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act - which party never wanted it passed in the first place? Which party is rapidly dismantling the rights of American women to control their own healthcare? There is no way you can argue that Republicans want to take care of Americans.
2
Xenophobia, racism, tribalism.....all rooted in fear.
1
And let’s not forget that the Third Reich looked for validation to the US in using sterilization and racial “purification” in promulgating laws for those purposes. Before 1933 the US already had 28 states with sterilization laws. As well, anti-miscegenation laws were on the books in many states. We have always been in the forefront of prejudice and hate and using “law” to justify it. Anti-immigration laws are an extension of deeply held, by some, core values.
Anthropology has a pretty sorted history involving ethnic discrimination. The intersection with the purportedly "hard science" of biology had particularly nasty consequences. However, you do have to understand how bad outcomes are almost inevitable.
Anthropology is the study of human evolution and culture. The entire field is dedicated to classifying and comparing human civilizations, past and present. It's hard to avoid creating hierarchies when comparing vastly different social organizations and complexities. We know just from looking, a modern industrialized nation state is more complex than !Kung bushmen. However, how much more complex and what does that even mean?
These are tough questions to answer. Anthropologists therefore have a tendency to rely on bad science to make essential points. The truth is though humans will always have more in common with each other than their differences.
Unfortunately, that truth is not politically expedient. Hence, even academics working in good faith often find their work co-opted towards nefarious purposes. They often start to believe the myth themselves. That's how we end up with eugenics. It's a form of human bias.
The more complicated question right now though is actually positive eugenics. If you can engineer a more perfect human being, should you? You might not think of something like vaccines as eugenics but what if you could prevent certain diseases genetically? What if you could select desired traits? That's eugenics.
1
This is why the study of history is so interesting and important since we see it repeated time and again as old prejudices and injustices rise again and the conflicts resume. True enlightenment of the human species will come when we can recognize the failures of our past and resist the urge to repeat them. Sadly, the attitudes that led to global conflict in the first half of the last century are rising yet again and may result in the last conflict of homo sapiens.
2
It wasn't so much eugenics as it was your personal definition of what is 'the true religion'. Eugenics was only a socially acceptable complaint. After all, it was science, wasn't it? The WASP knew of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Copernicus, et al. and that Italians and Slavs have just as much brilliance as any other ethnic group. Everyone knew that. Heck...if you had enough money (a la Newland Archer) you went to Italy for your honeymoon. What the ruling class of the US was afraid of was the changing text of American Christianity... was the future to be the 'good old time' religion of Calvin, Luther, Knox, Cotton Mather, Billy Sunday and Elmer Gantry or was it to be those corrupt papists in/from Rome?
And disdain of the Jew was the connecting bridge between all 'true Christians'. Scary how Father Coughlin jumped on that train.
One shouldn't study history - or read books for that matter. Makes you understand why Jonathan Swift loved horses.
7
Unsurprisingly, the usal mob of rabid, foaming-at-the mouth haters of immigrants, legal & illegal, has jumped into the thread, ready deport, starve, maim or slaughter anybody they believe doesn't belong in *their* country.
Here's a message from the rest of us:
As much harm as you wish harm to immigrants, legal or illegal, we wish to you. Maybe more.
2
Our country was pure and better off without the invasion of all alien peoples, there was an understanding between the natives and plenty for all. The invasion by the white races was unwelcomed ,all they did was bring disease and depravity and committed genocide on the true people of this land. Greed and depravity still prevail, and they still think for the most part, that they are superior to other peoples.It can only lead to death and the destruction of this once great country.
1
A must read article for everyone at Times Newsletter Race/Related, Charles Blow, and every comment writer who supports the US Census Bureau's archaic system for classifying us Americans. Only one thing is missing, as I explain at the end of this comment.
Perspective: Yes, as Okrent notes "In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping" contained Calvin Coolidge's fatal words: "Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend."
The next year, in Sweden, Herman Lundborg, a physician, created the Swedish Institute of Race Biology. Purpose? To measure the heads of 1000s of people living in Sweden and to use these to place people in groups, one of which, would become the Swedish Master Race. Lundborg visited Germany after Hitler had risen and gave Hitler his system.
Sweden learned from World War II that Lundborg's Institute and his plan to purify the Swedish population had no scientific basis and ended the institute and its plans.
Now, what is missing in this article?
Okrent does not mention that the USA still maintains a system created by racists using the terminology and concepts that 18th, 19th, and 20th century racists invented, a system to be used in the 2020 census.
White nationalists love this system which was created to put people "seen as white" at the top of a racial order.
Okrent should do what David Reich did, write a follow up column on this subject.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
2
@Larry Lundgren - If this entire thought is new to you, then here are the sources that led me to this proposal, beginning in 2013.
2013 - Former US Census Bureau Director publishes "What Is Your Race - The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans" and he also has an OpEd in the Times pointing to his main proposal from Ch. 11 of the book.
End the USCB system, classify Americans using SES data - economy, education, etc
2013 - Professor Dorothy Roberts publishes "Fatal Invention - How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century" She ends this book by making the same proposal as Prewitt but less completely.
2019 - October 15 expected publication date of "Self Portrait In Black and White: Unlearning Race"
by Thomas Chatterton Williams - Interviews and his essays tell you what you need to know - There is only one race
In addition a biography in Swedish by Maja Hagerman of Herman Lundborg explains in detail how he planned to gradually eliminate anyone in Sweden who did not match his idea of the perfect white-"race" person. Hitler picked up on Lundborg's ideas. Sweden does not classify people by "race" or ethnicity and its Genome research giant, Svante Pääbo has made clear that he thinks the USCB system is absurd or worse. So do I.
1
Call it what you want
But stupid is as stupid does
No $ for education-or prenatal care
No health insurance
Blame the other
Mix together stir and get :
No country worth living in
But make it great
Sell the fools on freedom
Watch them cannibalize each other and the ever shrinking pie
Right
If you don’t die first
2
I believe Hitler used his readings of American eugenics literature to create his Aryan race concept and justify his extermination of Jews and other inferior racial types. It appears his ideas were not original at all but derived from Ivy League academia, the head of the Museum of Natural History, and Calvin Coolidge of all people. It was even endorsed by this newspaper. It is amazing that the creator of the SAT tests came from this pseudoscience clique and it is ironic and deeply troubling that this test still has a definitive role in determining college admissions. Needless to say, Hitler was able to achieve the Holocaust and degrade the humanity of the Jewish people with shockingly little resistance by American politicians and government. The prejudices and folly of these pseudoscientists played a significant role in enabling that unimaginable calamity and America still suffers the consequences with so called populists playing with anti immigrant rhetoric and xenophobia to advance their political aims and power.
5
@IN, yes, and a large part of the lack of resistance by American politicians and government is because of what happened during Woodrow Wilson's presidency, about 20 years before Hitler. Anglophile Woodrow Wilson demonized German-Americans and created the "Committee on Public Information" to create propaganda about Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany that later turned out to be so false and such extreme exaggerations that an entire generation of Americans was disillusioned. The now-cynical Americans. who had lived through Wilson's propaganda, were then disinclined to later believe reports coming out of Europe about Hitler's Germany. The war-monger presidents who lied to push America into war, be it Democrat Woodrow Wilson; Democrat Lyndon Johnson; or Republicans George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (and their Democratic Party enablers, such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden), all should rank as the worst presidents the nation ever saw.
1
"God loves me a little more than God loves you. It's nobody's fault; it's just a fact."
Some of the "Nordic" races have extended this notion to horrifying degrees, but humans probably from the earliest days have invented gods so they could establish this "truth".
That the Nazi attempted genocide of the Jews is so much more horrifying than America's successful genocide of Native Americans, and the enslavement of millions of Africans, is about who gets to write history. Both had God on their side.
6
@Ralph Averill "Both had God on their side."
Yes and they forgot and still forget the God they worship is a Jew!
I don't know if it still is going on, but not long ago the so called Exclusive Country Clubs banned Jews from becoming members. I suppose on Sunday morning many of those members went to church and recited the Lord's Prayer suggested by Jesus Christ. Oh, the horror of it, the horror of it/ We won't invite the Jews into our homes, we will not socialize with them, let their children attend our schools, but we pray to a Jew, and we pray to a Jew who supposedly thought how can i bring life into actual existence, life that continues making life, and then the Big Bang, and it all began.
Even people who attend church regularly may never wake up to the fact that the Lord God they worship is an actual Jew. Oh, the horror of the thought. Jesus may have been born in an actual Jewish state, but we all know he's a Wasp. Right?
I once had a discussion with my daughter about her drive and ability to accomplish whatever she wanted. I attributed this to her Ukrainian immigrant grandfather who made it into this country very early in the 20th century. One can only imagine what it took to accomplish that journey,to establish and maintain a life in this country,against all unimaginable odds.
4
Emma Lazarus's poem on the Statue of Liberty captured the idealistic vision that had governed American immigration policy through much of the 19th century. The poverty and lack of education that characterized many immigrants, Americans tended to believe, stemmed from conditions in their home countries, not from innate inferiority. The opportunities offered by life in this country would transform them into useful citizens.
Groups like the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s had periodically challenged this optimistic attitude. But only the development of so-called scientific racism at the end of the century expanded their base of support sufficiently to provoke congress into passing the legislation described by Okrent. As the author notes, racist attitudes permeated all levels of American society, but now that prejudice seemed validated by the work of scientists, whose prestige was at its peak in American society.
Behind this intellectual debate, of course, lurked the practical issue of America's labor needs. Throughout much of the 19th century, the US remained an underpopulated country, with labor demand exceeding supply, first in agriculture, later in manufacturing. Employers also wanted a continuous influx of workers as a way to suppress wages.
By WWI, however, many observers concluded that the country no longer needed so many newcomers, and fear of radicalism convinced even many employers. This change in attitude also led to the 1924 law.
8
Immigration isn’t the problem. Overpopulation, climate change, destructive storms, and flooding will make it worse. There isn’t enough for all of us and the wealthiest among us are too selfish to support the public good. Their efforts are to pull the ladder up rather than invest in family planning, green technologies and pursue peace.
12
I am surprised that the article didn't mention William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, who famously said "My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment."
5
After reading the comments - both enlightened and racist, I return to the same conclusions I always end up with.
There are too many humans on the planet. We should have stopped expanding our numbers billions ago.
Teaching about birth control should be the central mission of every government and NGO.
As a species, we are doing the same thing that many other organisms seem to do - become too successful, overpopulated. Then the natural forces of destruction take over. Disease, lack of resources, competition within the species itself eventually solve the problem.
It's cruel. It didn't have to be. We have the intellect to control our numbers. We just don't have the will or the leadership. It's too late.
9
A timely piece on the history of nativist immigration legislation in the United States that focuses on Jews, Italians, Eastern and Southern Europeans.
The most virulently xenophobic immigration laws in the US targeted Asians, specifically the Chinese, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The impetus for this law, designed to curtail the threat of Chinese labor, originated in the Pacific Northwest but soon became national.
Exclusionary immigration laws and racist legislation—conceived to dispossess and disenfranchise racialized subcultures—promoted and safeguarded Western European culture and prosperity: Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848), Dred Scott (1857), General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) 1887, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act).
Those who deride “oppression studies” would do well to acquaint themselves with this history. And those who argue that the current immigration battle is about illegal immigration would do well to understand that immigration laws are still applied unequally. The President’s wife is a case in point.
And we haven’t even started in on the subject of political gerrymandering.
5
A warning to all who think that as trump supporters they are safe from the whims of the prejudiced. We must recognize where we once were and aim to keep moving ahead, never backwards. America has never been truly great in her acceptance of the equality of all. We have much to be proud of, but so much we need to apologize for. I am grateful to have been born a citizen, but I am constantly learning how much of our history that I was taught in school was whitewashed. I am proud of my grandparents who came from Italy (before 1921) and raised my mother and father and their siblings to be proud first generation Americans.
6
The US, and not just the US is suffering from a mass hysteria about immigration. It is a form of mental illness. As shown so well in this article, big human brains are very susceptible to delusional illnesses. AI can already pick out the characteristics from facial identification (and the AI is just getting started). It is real, not a metaphor. How can we deal with this epidemic? All I know is that the healthy must fight the contagion; much depends on it.
Very timely and important column Mr Okrent.
8
So, there's nothing new under the sun after all.
But its now time to move ahead of the past. Instead of the Wall, the USA should set up a better clearance and monitoring system for illegal immigrants and those seeking asylum.
Maybe they can be given an 'e-card' that allows them to 'check up' on the latest laws affecting their status, keeps them access to a different "set of rights" that allows for better facilitation and consideration of their 'questionable or limited immigration status' and still gives them an 'official recognition' from the USA government.
They should be able to access a separate 'legal and law enforcement' department for their specific problems and issues, and the protection due to them.
They should be given a specific credit rating for access to finance, and proper pay on the job.
Even employers should not be penalised for giving employement to them.
2
It may be useful to look back 100 years ago to see where America was at in terms of "welcoming new immigrants" almost entirely from Europe at that time. The stories are legendary over the xenophobia and hostility shown to the Italians; Irish; Jews; Polish; etc. that marked that era. What is notable is that prejudice lay mostly in the fact that these immigrants were overwhelmingly either Catholic or Jewish. The WASP ruling elite did not take kindly to this "invasion" of those foreigners. Fast forward to 2019. What has really changed? The Europeans; while not WASP`s; were at least white. Now it is the brown/ black skinned immigrants from the Third World who threaten the established order of the ruling class. Most of them not WASP. Not really hard to see the more things have changed; the more they have stayed the same. Fear the "Other." What has been learned in 100 years? NOT MUCH apparently.
12
It is interesting that the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act) that eliminated ALL racial and ethnic quotas was not mentioned in this piece.
That act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on October 3, 1965 at the Statue of Liberty with U. S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach standing beside him. Incidentally, that same Nicholas Katzenbach, as Deputy U. S. Attorney General, led to two African Americans students past Alabama Governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door” antics on June 11, 1963 to integrate the undergraduate segment of the University of Alabama.
That comprehensive legislation was, in part, one of several products generated by the fervor of the Civil Rights Movement.
9
It isn't hard to dissect "Make America Great Again" fondness. It's built on three planks:
1. The 1924 immigration act, which kept immigrant populations low well into the 1960's and 1970's;
2. Redlining and housing covenants, which let middle class and affluent whites grow up in a bubble where they never had to encounter a Black child or an immigrant;
3. Industrialization, which let any of the white beneficiaries of planks 1 and 2 get a family-supporting job straight out of high school.
It all combined to make a good gig while it lasted, but the gig faded away with the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, and then the 1982 Reagan recession finished it off. There is no bringing it back.
9
'When Anti-Immigrant Hatred Was Mainstream' - it seems it still is mainstream. It's too bad that human 'civilization' still has not moved beyond the us vs. them mentality. Humanity needs to wake up to the fact that we are all living on the same planet. We are increasingly dependent on each other. Hatred has a long history. Human survival ultimately may depend on moving beyond hatred and selfishness.
8
Hmmm. So who built your house, and made your clothes, and your food, and the TV and smart phone, etc?
Quite possibly a bunch of poor, undereducated folks. Living in your city, and perhaps in China, India or Mexico.
Having hired and worked with immigrants, form all parts of the world, the hardest workers hands down were those who had traveled the farthest and struggled the most. White Americans sometimes, but more often not.
There is inherently nothing wrong with being an immigrant, educated or not. These are honest, hardworking people. They care for their families, and want only the best for themselves and their kids.
Denigrating someone because of their immigration status or their ethnicity, is a disservice to everyone, because it denigrates the very nature of our humanness.
269
@Andrew B
"There is inherently nothing wrong with being an immigrant, educated or not."
That said, a country can only accept so many uneducated immigrants.
They saturate the unskilled labor force, preventing wages from rising. It's simple supply and demand, and an uncomfortable truth.
24
@Andrew B Nothing wrong at ALL in being an immigrant. Just come here legally. Don't gatecrash the country and then be given benefits while 100s of thousands of people (some way more educated) than these folks wait years, in some cases decades to be here legally.
27
@Joe O'Malley (Signs, rolls eyes, here we go again). Joe, most undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Remember this.
44
It's interesting that during the same time period described by this article - 1920's - most immigrant neighborhoods in smaller cities and towns were defined by their ethnic diversity. There simply weren't enough of one's own ethnic group to form a "ghetto", so the poor neighborhoods were forced by economics to accept diverse neighbors. In larger cities, where "Little Italies", "Chinatowns", barrios, etc. grew up, immigrant cultures via food, religion and relationships persisted a little longer, until the kids moved away and the elders died off.
Now, the assimilated 2nd and 3rd generation Americans of rural locales, having little cultural affinity with their ancestors, seek to identify and protect their mythical "new" identity - as mainstream Americans - Christian, white, hetero. The problem is that they're very insecure in this "new identity". It has few of the tribal markers humans are wired to rely on for bonding. These people thus fear incursion into their neighborhoods not just by job-takers, but by cultures they don't like, and people that don't talk, worship, cook or look like them. Unless, of course, they've achieved enough economic success to insulate themselves in whatever ways they prefer - by address, occupation and socially - they seek to protect their identity, however ambiguous it is, by excluding readily identifiable "others".
We are all still trying to find a place where everybody knows our name, natives and immigrants alike. Racism needs to be dissected.
63
The belief that they are being shortchanged of their due isn’t exclusive to older whites in rural locales. Urban millennials believe they are entitled to good job, swift low cost mass transit and college tuition paid for by others.
7
@Quite Contrary
I teach at a university which is populated by mostly white Long Island/suburban New Jersey students.
I knew my Eastern European grandparents--their language, foods, dress, urban ethnic communities.
These students are generations removed from their ancestors who came through Ellis Island, and the ethnic neighborhoods of New York and New Jersey. They are terrified of "the city", and know nothing of their own ancestry. Most cannot identify the origin of their families and could care less. I mourn this loss but they do not seem to care.
6
Okrent's use of the word 'hate / hatred' is blunt & inaccurate, either in describing historic events or what is happening today. Regarding immigration, first there are rightfully concerns about whether immigration is legal or illegal; We are a nation of laws, which is the very basis for the stability of the entire government and therefore should be enforced. Secondly, from a cultural standpoint, there seems to be a 'tipping point' as to how much and how fast immigration should occur to ensure that new comers can be successfully assimilated and so that citizens don't experience a profound sense of unease about their own culture and changes that could be forced on them by massive immigration (excessive taxation to pay for it, externalities like crime, etc). Societal stability is key.
114
@Cathy
The distinction between legal and illegal immigration is irrelevant to discussions of what immigration should be legal, particularly in the context of the 1920s when all immigration was legal except for some groups of Asians.
Assimilation also has nothing to do with the rate of immigration. Canada and Australia have much higher rates of immigration than America and their immigrants are assimilating just fine. The overwhelming majority of immigrants want to assimilate as they would not come here if they did not prefer American culture over their home culture. The largest obstacle to immigrant assimilation is when natives do not accept the immigrants. Restricting immigration can even make it harder for existing immigrants to assimilate by increasing discrimination and isolating them in ethnic enclaves (as happened to Chinese-Americans after further Chinese immigration was banned in the 1880s).
54
@Cathy Sounds like the "states' rights" arguments of the South: "This has nothing at all to do with slavery. We just need to maintain our culture."
34
@Aoy Not sure why you feel qualified to make that claim. Speaking as an Australian, our exceedingly high immigration rate is absolutely a hot button issue, for a host of reasons.
One can just as easily argue that increasing the rate disincentivises assimilation.
12
Daniel Okrent doesn't mention in the op-ed (although perhaps he does in his book "The Guarded Gate") that the notion of multitudinous distinct racial types was widely and uncritically accepted during the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- even by true progressives and humanists not obsessed with the alleged danger of "mongrelization" due to unchecked immigration.
To borrow from debates in zoological taxonomy, few persons in that era were "lumpers" who might consider several ethnicities to be part of the same race. Instead, the prevailing attitudes and assumptions (again, even among genuine progressives) were those of "splitters."
So, for example, it was common to split Caucasians into such distinct categories as Anglo-Saxon (English and their direct American descendants), Celtic (Irish and Scots), Mediterranean (Greeks and Italians), Slavic (Poles and Russians), etc. Thus, the basic assumption of the racists went largely unchallenged.
Okrent does give a powerfully disturbing example of how extreme was this "splitter" mentality in the statement of sociologist Edward A. Ross that Slavics "can stand what would kill a white man.”
And, of course, Jews were certainly assumed to be a distinct race, even by persons who were truly not anti-Semitic. Indeed, Nazi genocide in the 1930s and '40s is best understood not as religiously motivated nor primarily economic/political in nature, but first and foremost as a monstrous racial policy -- the ultimate "splitting."
42
@Richard
All this "splitting" also occurred among people who were not racist in the modern sense. Durants' multi-volume "Story of Civilization" acquainted Americans with the history of European and Asian cultures and their accomplishments, yet Durant casually threw around the word "race" to describe different nationalities of Europe.
4
The Nazis got their anti-Semitic pseudo science from the American eugenicists.
4
@Clio
Eugenics originated with Galton in England. The Nazis didn't have to read Americans to learnt it. Plus the anti-Semitism already existed in Germany before Galton, with Wagner and Forster
And primitive notions of eugenics had existed in Germany for centuries, as in the distinction they made between "full marriages" and "morganatic marriages".
.
3
Europeans were blocked indeed, but so were Asians. In fact, the Immigration Act of 1924 was really the culmination of a long chugging campaign across the country that sought the total exclusion of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and other Asians from entering the United States. Underlying these efforts were inane notions of racial incompatibility, inferiority, invasion, and, of course, contamination.
In 1924, the Japanese were the biggest targets of anti-Asian excluders. The Chinese were, to some extent, effectively barred from entry by the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Japan seemed a potential enemy to the U.S. in the Pacific. Japanese immigrants themselves were financially more successful than other Asian and European ethnic groups, and, like white Americans, readily organized for their interests. They also learned English better than other immigrant groups and went to great lengths to assimilate American culture. For all this, Japanese were crudely portrayed as a lethal menace to Americans.
It pains me to say that California, my beloved home state, was at the head of this campaign, that San Francisco was the heart of the anti-Japanese movement, and that it was California's congressional delegation that shepherded the Immigration Act's anti-Asian clause to passage. More hurtful is that this anti-Japanese phenomenon bore a direct influence on FDR's decision, many years later, to push the country's Japanese into America's very own concentration camps during World War II.
65
I believed in the notion of "race character" or racial eugenics growing up in central California in my teens and early 20s. Then I moved to Los Angeles with its fantastic and ever-changing kaleidoscope of people. In my first years here I was put off by all these "foreigners." Forty years on I get uncomfortable when I'm in places that are not so various. It truly boils down to nothing more than what we're accustomed to. The pseudo-intellectual rationalizations from the people named in this interesting article, as well as their heirs such as Charles Murray, are nothing more than a smokescreen for that simple primitive fact.
77
@Flaminia: I totally agree. I grew up in upstate New York which is essentially all white people, and absorbed the casual racism of a place like that. After 30 years in California the first thing I notice when I return from an out of state trip is the casual, no-big-deal diversity of my home state. There is no doubt that "we can all get along together." We live it every day. It's not a coincidence that kimchi tacos and a thousand other cultural mashups come out of California. We wouldn't have it any other way, and I only hope the xenophobes in our country can learn to get over their fears and embrace it.
48
This is why there is such a rural/urban divide on the suggest of immigration. Studies consistently show that the most vehemently anti-immigrant Americans live in the places with the fewest immigrants. They are afraid of the others. People who live in multicultural places know from daily experience that we can certainly all get along, and what's more, more variety of cultures actually means an improved quality of life. Nothing "elitist" about it--I think it is far more elitist to believe, without any reason to do so, that other cultures are inferior to the McDonald's/Wal-Mart way of life.
34
"Suggest" was supposed to be "subject." Didn't see that autocorrect.
My father, an Italian immigrant, jumped ship in New York in 1929 with nothing but what he was wearing and a small bag. He was, of course, illegal for several years. He eventually got his citizenship, owned a series of successful businesses, became a millionaire, and raised a family, with the family car being a Rolls Royce. Nevertheless, I remember growing up in fancy "exclusive" private schools feeling inferior because of the patronizing attitude of the teachers and staff and the mocks of the kids from the American aristocracy. Laws can change, but it takes generations for attitudes to change, if they change at all.
Let us not put all the blame on the elites, the politicians, and the power brokers, for they are merely a reflection of society as a whole. Many factors shape attitude and beliefs, not the least of which is the media. For decades, Italians were portrayed as criminals in movies and television; so, of course, I have been asked repeatedly if my father was in the Mafia (by the way, many of these people were self-styled liberals).
There is nothing unique about my story - it crosses all ethnic lines.
The best part of the story: my father eventually booked passage on an ocean liner for a trip to Italy with my mother - the same ocean liner from which he jumped ship as a cabin boy.
161
@Romeo Salta
What a story! What incredible determination he must have had! Your immigrant story may not be unique, but it's anything but ordinary.
7
@Romeo Salta My Italian family came just before the law went into effect. They were beyond dirt poor, treated with disdain, and the older children (at 10) all had to work immediately to survive. And work they all did, eventually as a family owning a successful custom home construction business and a plastics factory. The children of these immigrants included 2 doctors, 5 teachers, 3 ministers, 1 college administrator, and an entrepreneur who now runs a foundation to bring water wells to impoverished Africans. Not bad for people who "would never mix" and "represented the lowest of the low."
33
@Romeo Salta Different circumstances for your father....who I suspect came to USA, understanding it was a one-way ticket. And he most likely was committed to the concept of "America".....learn english, learn to become a citizen, build something new. IMMIGRATE and dont look back.
Over the years, America's attitudes towards the rest of the world has changed.....maybe mutated is a better word...for the change has not been for our own benefit.
Today, people seek REFUGE. America has actually shaped its laws to encourage Refugee status and DIScourage immigration.
And the refugee comes to America....not to become "american"....but to take advantage of a safe haven long enough to accumulate wealth and plot a return to the sacred homeland and destroy the refugee's enemies.
All of the arguments against illegal immigration I have ever seen depend on a zero-sum way of thinking about wealth and prosperity. As if success in America was a literal pie and if immigrants get a piece Americans will starve. This completely ignores actual economics. Wealth and prosperity are constantly being created...and hard-working "illegals" contribute to that prosperity as part of the American labor force. Their children and every subsequent generation adds more and more to our economy. Try to make the whole pie bigger instead of hoarding crumbs for yourselves while the rich take all of the filling.
107
@Benjo
More immigrants -- i.e. more people --
might mean that the economic pie might grow,
but, even if the pie grows,
the individual slices do not grow
-- not when the pie
must be divided among more people.
Just compare India and Canada.
India has a far larger "economic pie" than Canada.
But India also has far more people than Canada,
and the bigger pie in India
has to be sliced among far more people
into far more -- and far smaller -- individual slices.
Result -- Canada has a far better "economic pie",
even though it is not as big as the one India has.
Instead of "growing" the "economic pie
with more people,
the pie needs to be grown
by means that do not require more people,
such as more education,
more training,
more innovation,
and more technology.
You can even argue the various merits
of various traditional economic "tools",
such as this or that tax policy,
this or that fiscal policy,
or this or that business regulation policy,
etc.
But the argument that we need more people
for a better economy is pure nonsense.
A bigger economy -- a bigger "economic pie" -- maybe.
But not a better one -- not one with bigger slices.
18
@Benjo, economics from a GDP perspective, sure. GDP is only one measure. On a per capita basis, however, many other countries, with much smaller total populations and smaller population growth, beat out the US with higher per capita incomes. Harvard economist George Borjas and others have demonstrated that most of the financial gains on a per capita basis go to illegal aliens themselves and not to existing US citizens or legal immigrants.
In addition, the environment, in contrast to GDP, acts a little more like a literal pie. For example, the ever decreasing water in the Colorado River; Rio Grande; Oglalla Aquifer (under Midwest) as more and more water resources diverted to support an ever-increasing human population. Conversion of more and more farms, fields and meadows to housing developments and asphalt. There is only one earth and only one North American continent. That said, the Democratic Party at least supports global family planning efforts to extent possible.
14
@Benjo
Immigration increases total GDP but decreases GDP per capita when immigrants undercut wages. Those at the lower end - which includes a large proportion of Blacks and Latinos - are those who suffer from the reduced wages, while the affluent benefit from lower prices. Mass immigration of low-wage workers increases inequality.
5
The bigots come in every generation. Sometimes they come with nothing but hatred. Sometimes they pretend it's science.. Always, it's us vs. them. Our tribe vs. the other tribe. Not just in our country but all over the world.
It especially amuses me that so much of the hateful policy came from the brilliant minds in the elite universities. The same thing happens today, except now it's the scholars in the policy institutes, but their claims to scientific truth and accuracy are always proven false. And they never learn from their mistakes, never admit when they were wrong.
It's a post-truth world, and maybe it always has been, but we can do better if we try.
31
The days of creating a nation are long gone.
A nation has the right to decide who can enter,
and for the benefit of the nation -
NOT the refugees/immigrants.
5
Sadly, a few generations later, the offspring of the Italian, Irish, Polish, Eastern European Jewish and other once-reviled immigrants to the United States now dish out the same xenophobia, racism, cultural and religious intolerance to the migrants of the 21st century.
Stephen Miller, the great-grandson of Eastern European Jewish peasants who came here fleeing persecution and poverty, is a shining example of the genre. There are millions more crawling out from under the same rock Miller did.
18
The point of the article was not political or a debate on Trump's immigration policies on the southern border or any other regulations.
It was a historical look at the racist driven Immigration Law of 1924 supported by sociologists, biologists, eugenicists, and politicians.
America has always been exclusionary - starting with the Constitution at its founding and black slaves being 3/5 of a person and women being property.
Within a century, America's racists roots were once again legalized despite the 14th Amendment after the Civil War with the passage of the Chinese Exclusionary Act.
That Act was not repealed until 1943. The racist Immigration Act of 1924 was in effect until post World War II when the world changed with the massive number of displaced persons left with no where to go as a result.
Trump has halted all of the racial equity made since then. His intent is not merely to put up a wall on the southern border - he wants an exclusionary immigration policy where only white Christians northern Europeans can be Americans.
7
The US was more messed up back then. Harvard, Princeton and Yale are relatively conservative institutions.
Keep in mind that voting rights for African Americans were instituted in 1965. . .
2
What's crazy is that this is the kind of stuff Alex Jones has been talking about and he sounds so insane. But it's true. To think that the line of thought was completely eliminated, leaving no traces or scars is laughably naive.
1
And, presumably, this is what Mr. Trump meant when he announced that he was determined to Make America Great Again.
3
Of course, the vast immigration of the 40 years from c1880 to c1920 represented some of America's most explosive growth. And when it collapsed into the Depression at the end of the 20's, it coincided with the shutting off immigration.
It's no wonder that the same 3rd thinkers that influenced the rise of "biological racism" in Austria and Germany would poison the well here as well. Ironically, while Harding is normally considered one of the worst Presidents we ever had (he wasn't ) and Ronald Reagan idolized Coolidge (who was President when when Reagan was 12 until 18--formative years, when America seemed to prosper, until it didn't) had opposing views on Race. Harding actually may have been the first President to attack segregation is unjust, while Coolidge was clearly racist.
How often can people in power keep being wrong about EVERYTHING! Even the hot economy the White House is crowing about has the same signs of collapse as 1929, 1987, 1999, and 2008. And Trump is jacking up the racists, bigots and atavists.
Could anything more backward than Trump demanded that the newest carrier go back to a steam catapult?
2
And the 1924 National Origins Act was necessary to allow the existing wave of immigrants to assimilate. Nowadays, we have a continuous flow, and assimilation is neither necessary not required.
2
Since almost no one trying to enter the United States illegally is white, then any attempt at border control is immediately labeled racist. This is pure sophistry. Demanding a secure border is not racist. Insisting that people obey our immigration laws is not racist.
8
Contrary to the false narrative, Trump welcomes any ethnic group or race as long as immigrants arrive in an orderly and LEGAL way rather then gaming our system.
2
@DKC Then why does Trump want to cu legal migration in half?
@newsmaned, I believe because that is what President Clinton's Bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform (aka Jordan Commission) recommended in 1995 after spending 5 years doing a deep dive on the economy; labor markets; etc. They predicted the impacts from Reagan-era weakening of labor unions; from NAFTA, etc. And now there is automation and continued outsourcing (Jordan Commission was before China's admission to WTO). They recommended cutting legal immigration from the then-1990's average of 750,000 per year back to the 1980's average of 550,000 per year. The current rate is a record and most-generous-in-the-world at 1.3 million per year. Although Trump reportedly is all over the place. He has supported legislation based on the Jordan Commission, like the RAISE Act, but then he also seems to suggest he wants more immigration, like the 2013 "Gang of 8" proposal to increase all immigration categories.
Too bad President Clinton betrayed Barbara Jordan and his promises to her and his own Commission. Would have been better for the country if it had passed Congress in 1996.
1
Will the virulent new strain of "presentism" be sufficiently strong to erase the names of the "Great People" mentioned in this piece from buildings, foundations and other remnants of their influence? And from polite conversation?
And will the editors of The New York Times and the Washington Post issue apologies for their past blatant racism?
And what of the colleges and universities that furthered these policies? What consequences will they suffer?
Or is this a good learning opportunity about the intellectual bankruptcy of presentisim? Views change and norms change.
3
Even any casual student of American history knows there was a very ugly chapter involving exclusionary policies. The additional details in this op-ed are useful, to a degree. The background of ugliness, however, should not be used to confuse a reasonable effort to keep immigrations are a manageable level. This is a vastly different era with jet travel linking the world.
There are those who say that European-Americans have no culture to protect and therefore have no basis of objecting to unlimited immigration. There others who see Euro-Americans as nothing more than brutal invaders who pushed the Original Americans out of lands rightly theirs (all the while continuing to live on those lands themselves). There is an undercurrent of thinking that we are obligated to take almost everyone who comes. All of these suppositions are wrong.
It is not helpful to dwell on the ugliness of the old days because it is too easy to cast current attitudes into that mold. Yes, there is ugliness now, too, but we must realize that America's gates have been thrown pretty close to wide open in the last decades, even leaving aside border jumpers and others from Latin America.
1/3 of the county I live in Maryland is foreign born. (I chose the DC area because of its diversity, by the way.) No one knows where the tipping point might be where ethnic and economic divisions might cause social and even violent eruptions, but we need to both open to new comers and wise to managing social change.
9
This article pretty much nullifies the insipid idea that sovereign nations can't control their borders. It's all a matter of will power.
4
Genetic differences between races, ethnic groups, different groupings of people period (say between elite engineers and painters) and individuals and the impact advances in biology and big data will have with respect to such and the total effect on politics?
It's obvious there are genetic differences between races, ethnic groups, any type of grouping of people for a purpose (for example the group of accountants as opposed to rest of population) and individuals and this will become only more apparent as biological science advances. Furthermore, the concept of nurture or environment over biology/genetics will be found as it currently stands as a vastly overrated and negligible process similar to claims of a Cartesian mind over body effect or any other metaphysical effect; in other words, cultures, organizations, any type of grouping of people acts primarily out of the genetics of its members, is not formed in any great capacity by a nurture or environmental effect.
What this means for future politics is that all human organizations will become founded as sports teams are already to great degree founded: first you look to the natural talent, genetics, then you form, "nurture" the team. Of course this is going to be a nightmare of ethics what with people trying to say this or that group or person is inferior or superior or of desirable or undesirable mode or function (people will be scrutinized as never before in fundamentals and their flexibility) so we better be ready.
This article supports an important fact: There is no relationship whatever between a person's intelligence/education and their wisdom. If there was such a relationship, we'd never have heard of Monica Lewinsky.
Knowing only that someone is smart and well-educated tells you little about the person. Wisdom is the ability to make good decisions and so is the quality that matters.
4
Why not give people a virtual death sentence for breaking the minor law of overstaying a visa? The law is the law and must be enforced. I think we should shoot people on the spot for traffic violations too. Speeding and careless driving kill more people than illegal immigrants. The law is the law and must be enforced.
5
@Benjo
So,
all the rest of the world is a "virtual death sentence"?
Really?
Is that why there are 7 billion still living there?
Life there may not be as good as here,
but that does not mean it is a "death sentence" to live there.
8
No, the rest of the world is not a death sentence. But people who are trying to escape from places and people like MS-13 and oppressive regimes are basically running for their lives and if they go back, may well be sentenced to death. I was over the top in my post, but I was trying to make a point using hyperbole.
"Even" Ivy League scientists supported racial restrictions? Of course they did! The Ivys were long the bastion of the WASPs, the places the sons of the establishment went to learn to rule like their fathers.
23
@A Stor mo Chroi
Your quotes were misplaced. It should have read, 'Even "Ivy League" scientists...' since the Ivy League did not exist until 1954. Indeed, only the sub-heading of the article uses the term, which is Journalistic eye-candy.
@Chris Kox True, the term Ivy League did not exist until 1954 but Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania all existed prior to 1954. In the early part of the 20th century, these schools were dedicated to educating primarily American WASPs while excluding Catholics, Jews and people of color.
1
I guess this is a shocker to some seeing it was against people who are now wholly considered “white”.
If you consider the outright bigotry and racism for people who can’t pass for “white” and what they face daily it’s an eye opener.
I know people of Asian background (born and raised in America) tell me often people complement them on their perfect and “unaccented” English.
5
If people (Americans in this instance) really cherished diversity as much as they purportedly do then they wouldn't have segregated neighborhoods and schools.
5
@Vincent Tagliano, or have numerous Presidents of the United States who refuse to enroll their own children in Washington, DC public schools but instead insist on elite private school for their children, while imposing numerous mandates on public schools for everyone else.
I believe President Carter is the last leader to send his own child to public school. Bill and Hillary Clinton; George W. and Laura Bush; Barack and Michelle Obama; and presumably Trump and Melania now (with Baron?) all have "opted-out" and sent their own children to private school. Do as I say; not as I do.
2
If you happen to have a $100.00 bill on you, then you have a picture of the man who said this:
"Those who come hither [from Germany] are generally the most ignorant, stupid sort of their own nation...Unless the stream of their importation (can) be turned they will soon outnumber us (and we will not) be able to preserve our own language and even our Government will be precarious...Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and who will never adopt our language or sustoms anymore than the can acquire our complexotopm."
Yes,these were the words of Benjamin Franklin
6
@revsde
The relevant question is --
how does Franklin -- or anyone else in 1776 --
compare to his/her contemporaries??
The relevant question is not how does he/she
compare to men/women today.
So, in 1776,
what were attitudes about race and ethnicity
in Mexico or Meso-America (i.e. New Spain),
or in Spain itself,
or in France,
or in China,
or in India?
or in Egypt?
Or anywhere else in Africa?
Or Asia?
Or Europe?
The relevant question is not whether America then
was backward or wrong compared to today.
The relevant question is whether America today,
is backward or wrong compared to elsewhere today,
6
A century from now we won't need walls because disease and pestilence will have wiped out most of humanity.
4
Land of the free and home of the brave?
Nope, never has been, never will be.
Perhaps it's time Americans stopped believing the lies they peddle to the rest of the world about how perfect you are (we certainly don't believe them) and started being realistic about how unequal and racist America really is? Only then will you see real, positive change.
5
Highly recopied book by Stephen Jay Gould called "The mismeasure of man" documenting the shoddy science being claims of racial superiority.
4
John Scope’s biology text, A Civic Biology (1914), taught evolution with a eugenics perspective, and had illustrations of the hierarchy of man with whites at the apex.
2
That was then.
This is now.
Now, there are no racial restrictions on legal immigration.
But there are restrictions.
And the restrictions apply to all immigrants,
regardless or race.
And the restrictions ought to be enforced.
18
@sam finn, so it seems that, although you read the article, you are either incapable of or refuse to learn the lessons of the past that were presented in the article.
From a proud American from an Eastern, Central and Southern European lineage.
It's at least interesting that Democrats who support almost unlimited immigration which burdens social services and depresses wages at the bottom of the pay scale, also support higher pay minimums and expanded, though underfunded, social benefits. Do we like low wages to increase business profits, or do we want high wages to increase quality of life?Though there are laws on the books, neither political party seriously supports prosecuting employers for hiring illegals--why not? Dems especially might enjoy seeing jails fill up with capitalist employers. What's going on here, does White Man speak on this issue with forked tongue? There is no immigration policy, it's semi-intentional chaos fostered by both parties. The only person with an immigration policy is Mr. Trump, and we all see how much support he's getting.
13
As a practicing scientist who worries that too many people don't trust scientific opinion, I read this article with horror. Now I understand how people have come to look askance at the accumulated wisdom of the scientific experts.
12
@SHP
There is a long list of scientific and engineering WTFs, even if there are many times more rooted in allergies to science.
2
THIS has nothing to do with Populist-Nationalist rejection of science, and the kind of denial of human-caused climate change we see coming from the Trump Administration these days.
The modern villains are three
-The failure to teach basic sciences and social sciences - pushed out by those interested in cutting taxes and those who do not seem to want their kids learning things proven true. There are still those who fight evolution on the grounds that it’s only a theory of Charles Darwin - forget the hundred-thousand researcher-years that proved basic Darwinian evolution to be fact.
-There is the arrogance of ignorance - I don’t know how many times I’ve heard a person proud of ignorance throw down and reject excellent scientific research because a researcher published an article with a title mainly-he cannot begin to understand.
‘If the title of an article is meaningless gobltygook how can it be true’ is very popular line with these folks who use the collective ignorance of a crowd to attack science and technology.
The late Sen. William Proxmire was really big on this one, and used the argument to slash the US “Space Shuttle” budget in half, leading to the death of two crews, and the retirement of an excellent concept.
-Third is failure to teach students how to tell real news of any kind from junk - and the growing reliance on electronic media, where looks are the least important factor in determining truth and reality from absolutely false junk, dangerous when accepted.
1
It seems that you enjoy discussing the bad guys more than even mentioning the president who put a stop this--LBJ. He signed the immigration act of 1965 which prohibits discrimination in legal immigration on the basis of race, religion or country of origin. It is Donald Trump's least favorite law. This law is principally responsible for the enormous increase in the diversity of the US population in the last 50 years.
27
@James Ricciardi, this was an excellent and important law for the time. 1965. More than 50 years ago. It predates Reagan-era weakening of labor unions; NAFTA; admission of China to WTO; 9/11 (several of the hijackers had over-stayed their visas and others took flight-training school, in violation of their visa); globalization, including in-sourcing and out-sourcing; and the migration of an estimated 10 million to 22 million illegal aliens (depending on if one uses the Pew figure or joint Yale-MIT figure). Together these all unleashed vast changes on the labor market in the United States. The 1965 law also, of course, predates Trump's election itself. Is any other red flag necessary to indicate just how out-of-whack our immigration system is now?
In the early 1990's, the 1965 law was already considered outdated and in need of serious amendments or repeal and replacement. Hence, why President Clinton and Congress convened the Jordan Commission on Immigration Reform. Unfortunately, Ms. Jordan died before Congress passed the updates & Clinton then backed away from his promises to her.
To millions of supporters of the Jordan Commission, it is beyond astonishing that so many politicians still think there are no changes necessary to the 1965 law.
9
@GRH There are changes necessary, no doubt. But in my view the US is a richer and stonger country becuase of the 1965 law. We know what Trump would replace it with; only beautiful women from Norway could be admitted.
4
@James Ricciardi "Donald Trump's least favorite law."
Yes, and we all know that he zero support in this country.
I am tempted to say that my parents would not recognize America today but I don’t actually think that is true. My parents lived in a country where justice was even more inconsistent and defined by race and class than it is now. http://bit.ly/2Ln7ePz
7
@Aline Kaplan I wonder what your parents would think of all the traffic we have today. Or the giant island of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean that we are largely responsible for. Or the fact that there are far fewer trees, coral reefs and species now than when they were young.
6
The article is an invitation to read with critical minds current literature claiming the imprimatur of science -- especially that stemming from Ivy Leaguers -- lest we find ourselves, in the non-to-distant future, re-examining current thought.
6
No one can convince mankind that they don’t know everything but nature, luckily it has the time but we don’t. I’m sure it enjoys our musings on the subject for the short while they last however.
2
My daughter is 1/4 Sicilian, 1/4 Puerto Rican, 1/8 Lithuanian, 1/8 Polish , 1/8 Ukrainian, 1/8 English. That's a lot of genes intermingling. Good to mix it up sometimes.
47
Millions of Americans fit your daughter's profile, but without Black, Asian, and Jewish, she is barely picking up the rear. It is a major stretch to count Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Polish as 3 separate independent gene pools.
@Told you so, I agree. Let's hear it for the cocktails!
The sad part is, of course, many of those now railing against immigrants were once subject to the same thing and to this day talk about what they faced. People of Irish descent will talk of the days of "Irish need not apply" and anti catholic riots in places like NYC and will talk about how Irish Catholics were treated badly, yet many of them when you question their stance towards illegal immigrants say "That isn't the same thing" (not to mention, of course, that in cities like NYC, there are not small communities of illegal immigrants from Ireland, whose population swells when Ireland's economy declines). Italians, who were seen much the same way Hispanics are seen these days, as ignorant, criminals, only good for menial labor, not capable of 'better behavior', today are often firmly in the school that says the same thing about hispanic immigrants today. Sadly, Asians, once literally kept out of the US, are often some of the most vocal supporters of the mentality about immigrants from elsewhere. sadly, what is winning the battle is to leave our current, broken immigration system (which favors those who hire illegal immigrants, like Der Trump, allows them cheap labor with no recourse) in place but lock down the walls (but only to 'bad' immigrants like hispanics, while letting in 'good' immigrants even from places where we should have pause.
24
@music observer And let us not ignore that the only group who came not because they wanted to but were forced to is still discriminated against by all of the above.
44
@sleepdoc and @music observer 100% agree. Thank you both.
And these great grand children of “unskilled” immigrants also buy the lie that we don’t need unskilled immigrants. We do need them. We need them to staff our growing long-term care sector, our lettuce fields, all those lousy jobs Americans won’t do. We need their ambition and hunger to escape those jobs and make better lives for their children. Just as our ancestors did.
1
“The anti-immigrant fervor at the heart of current White House policymaking is not a new phenomenon, nor is the xenophobia that has infected the political mainstream.”
There is no anti-immigrant hatred in our country. I regularly walk past naturalization ceremonies near my place of work. I see nothing but joy, happiness, and pride on the faces of American citizens and on the faces of our newly-minted fellow citizens.
There is, however, intense hatred of illegal aliens — trespassing, cheating scofflaws whose mere presence cheapens the concept of American citizenship. The New York Times’ daily insult to its readers’ intelligence — purposely equating legal immigrants with illegal aliens — also garners a fair share of annoyance that is growing towards hatred.
54
@NorthernVirginia--There is indeed hatred of immigrants in this country. Many Hispanic-Americans, citizens who were born here, have been harassed and threatened, by both other citizens and police. They have been asked to show ID and prove they belong here. This anti-immigrant hatred has extended to Muslim citizens, and other citizens who look "middle Eastern." American-born women who wear religious garb are often harassed, assumed to be immigrants. Nigerian and other African immigrants have been mistreated. Many Americans do not stop to ascertain whether the subject of their harassment is an American citizen. They are harassed merely because they are assumed to be immigrants, and the usual assumption is that they are illegal.
13
@NorthernVirginia Fact remains that trespassing, cheating scofflaws are a pittance of those entering the nation and awaiting processing - and 98% of those return for their court dates and are processed. Where are these illegal folks you malign? You realize foreign-born persons commit a fraction of the crimes of natural-born Americans, right? Statistically. Facts.
5
@NorthernVirginia: Well, the hatred is pretty clear, yes. Of course, if you were to walk through a neighborhood, you wouldn't be able to distinguish between the naturalized citizens, and their undocumented neighbors and family members. It could be a real problem, not knowing which ones to hate...
2
As a resident of Arizona, I'm hoping that this argument does not get extended to the point of ignoring numerical reality. I once heard Eleanor Clift on the "McGlothlin Report" boast that her child's school taught in 23 languages. Well, if my overwhelmed Arizona public schools are any example, this is not feasible unless you have extremely well funded public schools. Maybe; we presently don't even have teachers that are fluent in the indigenous languages of Central America. And my public schools are already providing free meals to about 50% of their students, no questions about origin asked, all year long. Charter and religious schools are doing much better, and a cursory examination will show that our Mexican American citizens are also going that route out of concern for their children.
At the rate things are going, America will have another opportunity to take in educated, productive, Jewish and Christian Europeans, so maybe we can take them in this time, including the 30% of British Jews and 40% of East European Jews who feel they might have to flee as Europe becomes a third world Islamic outpost. If America once again doesn't like the idea, (and as Nazis pointed out after the war, they had no reason to think that America objected to the murder of Jews, not after the 1942 Wannasee Conference) I'll ask that she continue to support the existence of Israel, which once again today is having her borders stormed and fields and forests firebombed.
33
@Mary
Why should we take them in, Mary? Why should anyone take anybody in? Actually, why should anybody be allowed to leave their country of birth? Why aren’t there more borders and fences with guards keeping people in, where they belong? Why did we tear down the Berlin Wall when it did such a fine job of stopping people from coming in and going out?
10
@Tim
Fundamental differences --
Up and Down.
In and Out.
The Berlin Wall was built to keep people in.
A wall on our southern border will be built to keep people out (if it is ever built at all). It will not be built to keep people in.
2
@sam finn
Illogical argument.
Walls work both ways regardless of intention, just like tracer rounds.
The U.S. had immigration laws from the very beginning of this nation.
The time period in this article and concurrent calls by Americans to finally begin turning off the immigration spigot came after nearly 100 years of unchecked immigration that reached levels of 1 million per year.
These were mostly illiterate, unskilled excess Europeans, with more than a few criminals. They mostly flocked to and swelled urban U.S. cities, overwhelming municipal services, creating poverty and, criminal laden ghettos. So dire was this to the cities that the federal govt. instituted programs top clear immigrants out of cities with offers of free land west of the Mississippi.
All of this dreadful state of affairs was well-documented in the latter 1800s by numerous "muckraking" journalists and especially by photographer Jacob Riis. The industrial age manufacturing factories made use of all that cheap labor, much of it adult females and children, but all was certainly not healthy and well. The calls to limit immigration began in the early 1800s. Restrictions existed then and throughout the coming decades, till finally Congress did turn off the spigot at the outset of the 1929 Depression.
And then in 1965, LBJ and his coterie full opened the spigot. It has not gone well with that 1 million legal immigrants per year over this now 50 years + the 1 million illegals that also have poured in during the 1990s and 2000s.
The inn is full. No mas.
40
@Maggie And look at the result of the spigot being opened in the 1920's - we have American society as it is today - better and stronger than it was before, and a more diverse society with countless advances in technology, science, and the arts. No, this inn is not full...but it's interesting you use the same argument as those who refused shelter to three people 2000 years ago.
23
“...excess Europeans.” A quick internet search defines “excess” as an amount of something that is more than necessary, permissible or desirable. Your word choice is chilling.
13
"Illiterate, unskilled excess Europeans," is how you characterize those who came to the United States. I'm not sure how that squares with some of the finest minds -- in artist, music, education, science, and philosophy -- who either came here in this period or were their direct descendants. By extension, if these immigrants could not "flock" here, we would have a different country. I leave it to the imagination what that country would look like.
21
Racial profiling aside, it is interesting that this country's economy and middle class were peaking during the middle of the 20th Century at a time of very restricted immigration. It is also interesting that the beginning of a long period of middle class stagnation also coincided with the liberalization of immigration laws in the late sixties and early seventies.
9
@Chris - correlation is not causation. First there was a devastating crash and depression, then the second world war -- once that war was over and the United States was a world power, the economy boomed. It had very little to do with immigration.
9
@Chris, it is also a strange coincidence that just at the very moment that Congress finally provided for full rights for African-Americans, via the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act (and the Fair Housing Act a few years later), they simultaneously began to significantly increase immigration across the board, in all categories, thereby providing diluting the newly gained voting power and weakening the economic bargaining power of African-Americans. This was probably and hopefully an unintended consequence but something that people like African-American, Democratic Congresswoman and civil rights icon Barbara Jordan took serious note of by the early 1990's.
1
A few thoughts in no particular order:
Some immigrants, including those that came in as recently as the 60s, soon forget how derided they were and now they have "seniority", as if were.
I know some people racist to the bone and my theory is that (1) they don't have to do/know anything to feel superior but being white and (2) they dread being "confused" with those they deem inferior so they go overboard.
Racism and prejudice is alive and well, everywhere, if one just bothers to look. As a species, we are pretty immature, always looking for privilege and keeping others from getting it. Imagine properly funded public schools giving the opportunity to everyone to make use of their talent, as opposed as keeping poor people poor with difficult voting, underfunded schools, no public transportation, misery wages, unwanted pregnancies, predatory credit industries, etc.
I'm hopeful with young leaders like Mayor Pete and AOC. Just the other day he said his city of South Bend is built for 130K people and they only have 100K. So he'd love to get 30K more people to improve the economy, better the city, pay taxes, etc.
Everyone advocates for orderly legal immigration, but not everything is black and white. I think of dirt poor people with no resources and nothing left to lose. Most so-called Christians would do well in remembering the words written at the feet of the Statue of Liberty.
The tide has to change.
9
@JG The tide DOES have to change - in the developing world.
The more that these regions promote the servitude of women the more unsustainable their population growth will become. We can offer advice and aid but overindulgent immigration laws will only erode our quality of life.
7
@Armando Cedillo Women servitude is entrenched in the dominant religion and lack of education.
The country isn't full, there are still menial jobs US Citizens won't do, immigrants help boost the economy and are less likely to commit crimes than the US born population, so more people or quality of life isn't the problem per se.
People wouldn't risk everything (including the life of their children) crossing the Río Grande or the Mediterranean if they had a choice.
BTW, until not long ago the concept of "illegal immigrant" didn't apply to Cubans that made it to the US, they qualified for residency right away, so there are nuances.
Let's begin by curtailing the demand for drugs in the US that fuel the violence driving people to migrate. Let's focus on education, as in educate and empower women, train teachers and pay them a living wage, build schools, not bombs, empower unions for dignified working conditions, empower the ruled to hold the rulers accountable and get rid of corruption.
Keep in mind that much of the misery and suffering around the world stems from US meddling in foreign affairs for money and power. Helping overthrow democratically elected governments to usher in friendly military puppets, overthrowing dictatorships in oil-rich countries with no end game, leaving a power vacuum behind and spawning terrorist groups, etc. There are consequences to one's actions.
1
For me, the comments at the base of the Statue of Liberty, as well as full funding of the education budget and opportunity for all, are both gospel and my way of life.
By a retired and still active Christian minister.
The original English immigrants did not want the Scots-Irish to come here because they were such a "rough sort" and they also did not want English catholics. It was bad enough that French catholics were up in Canada. But by 1700, they finally relented and let the Scots-Irish come. Two centuries later, the Nativists and their movement of "Know Nothings" again did not want the Irish. At the turn of the century, we did not want Italians but were Ok with Germans. But after World War I, we changed our mind and decided to be nicer to the Italian immigrants who were already here, but meaner to the innocent Germans, even if they were merely a German speaking minority from a country like Romania, a WW I ally. We also did not want the Russian Bolsheviks, fleeing from the Czar, but by 1970, we were ok allowing anti-communists flee the Soviet Union, or from Cuba. It seems we Americans cannot seem to keep our mind made up as to whom we shall accept.
28
The most frightening aspect of this article is not being discussed in reader comments. Many Americans continue to believe the absurd concepts held by purported scientists and thinkers one hundred years ago. I have spoken to many who are completely convinced that certain races are intellectually and genetically inferior! Humans seem to need to believe their race is superior to others.
22
@Disillusioned
You know that bacteria feel they are a superior to humans. Of course, like all races and species there are good bacteria and bad ones. The problem is that too often you really never know which is which until it it too late and they have moved into your neighborhood. They just show up and multiply right under your nose (and sometimes in your nose). They eat you out of house and home and often end up eating your house and home, and eventually eat your family and friends. We need Congress to act now. Of course, the problem there is how to tell the difference between members of Congress and the bad bacteria? Oh, the humanity....or lack thereof.
2
I worked in the U.S., and for a time thought seriously about moving there permanently.
There is a tendency in articles like this to focus on the lowest-paid workers, and the natural resentment felt by the locals towards the new arrivals.
However, the U.S. is also dependent on managerial and professional workers from other countries, especially in the larger corporations that operate globally.
There are several reasons for this, but one of them is clearly visible in the U.S. educational system, where foreign nationals will soon make up the majority of students pursuing advanced degrees. The long term effects of this dependence are far from clear.
9
@Global Charm: The article is focusing on some of the highest paid people around: publishers, lawyers, scientists... a president of the United States... But it's true, the people these elite leaders were making their ill-informed and hateful judgements about would have included a lot of lower paid workers...
1
Anti-immigrant bashing did not start in the 1920's. Nativists were doing it before WWI. But bombings committed in 1919 and 1920 by groups linked to assorted anarchist groups, especially those born in Italy, gave the push for immigrant quotas a big assist. After the Wall Street bombing in 1920, Congress passed its first immigration quotas imposed on Europeans in 1921 and tightened the formula in 1924. For German Jews later fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany, the State Department made matters even worse as it dragged its feet approving legal immigrant visas for Jewish refugees within the German 1924 quota.
9
@Howard Jarvis
It is much worse than that, in the 1930s the Nazi regime was willing to let Jews emigrate out of Germany, there were serious proposals on the table to allow Jews to come to the US from the Nazi regime, and it died on the vine, religious groups from the US Catholic Bishops to the evangelical Christians , along with non religious anti semites, reacted with fury, threatened FDR and the Democrats with influencing their people to vote Republican in retaliation (think about the ties between political machines like Tammany Hall and the Curley Machine in Boston and the like, and of course the Southern Democrat/Evangelical ties), and the administration gave up.
To a great extent, it’s amazing we’re here in this place at this time (well at least certain parts of us!). Race and Racism was always part of the American DNA, but we always worked thru it, as History shows.
We’ll get through the current nonsense as well.
8
@Gabel "We’ll get through the current nonsense as well." Would that it were mere "nonsense". As Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong said at a conference I went to about 20 years ago: "The only question at times of great social change is how many people will die."
1
While the eugenics movement and racial profiling that Mr. Okrent so movingly portrays are both discredited and abhorrent, for the record it may be worth noting one small footnote: although Maxwell Perkins's "authors" did spout this nonsense, one of his authors unmentioned by Mr. Okrent, F. Scott Fitzgerald, ridicules the position of the racialists and eugenicists through the reference to "The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard" put into the mouth of the obtuse dullard, Tom Buchanan, in The Great Gatsby. If Perkins is to be discredited by the former, surely he is to receive some small credit for the latter?
5
@California independent: It would have been fascinating to hear any conversation the two had about that passage. I don't know that we have to give Perkins credit for everything his best authors wrote, but it's an interesting point.
3
I wish people could understand and appreciate that our country is a product of this period, no different from the period of colonialism, slavery, and large scale immigration in the second halves of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a part of us, whether we like it or not. Our country would be very different, for better or worse, if the Chinese Exclusion Act or 1924 Immigration Act hadn't happened.
3
All we ask is that immigrants come here legally and we do have a right to say if somebody can come here or not. That is the very basis of being a country. It's not about brown or black immigrants(though that is an issue for some people). It is accepted fact that 99% of the people illegally crossing our borders now are coming here to work and make a better life for themselves. The vast majority of them are fine, hard-working people and they can be welcomed AS LONG as they come here legally.
7
@Joe O'Malley: In many areas of life we Americans are not obsessed with the fine points of legality. If our laws are making life awkward for large numbers of fine hardworking people, then it seems there is something wrong with the laws, and, like many other laws on the books, they should be ignored in practice, until they can be adjusted to match reality.
4
@Joe O'Malley
Say it ain't so Joe because legally they are coming. It is legal for someone to knock on our door and ask for asylum by LAW. This same LAW allows for some to cross said border at any point even if that means crossing a river or jumping a fence because they fear for their lives. You may not agree with this LAW but this LAW is part of multiple countries agreeing through treaties to grant asylum. Had the trump administration hired more judges and lawyers to process the asylum seekers their would be less of a crises.
6
@John Bergstrom Right on, John! Paying taxes and obeying the speed limit come to mind.
3
Liberals' day of reckoning is approaching. You will not be able to have a society with liberal social polices AND liberal immigration policies. Why would anyone stay in a poor country if they could simply immigrate to the US and receive generous social benefits?
In the real world, resources are always limited. Technology has made the world a smaller place and traveling long distances to immigrate is not nearly as hard as it once was. If tens or hundreds of millions of immigrants came pouring into the US all at once--all demanding free health care, housing, and education, our systems would be overloaded.
Math isn't racist. Pointing out historical grievances and double standards regarding European immigration one hundred years ago won't make an endless amount of money magically appear. It also won't make millions of jobs requiring manual labor to magically appear. Just "taxing the rich" won't solve this problem either. The rich will simply leave and take their money with them.
25
@John Chenango: I don't know a single liberal who is for open border. The liberals I know generally want a clean and sustainable environment, universal access to basic health care, good universal pre-K care. But I don't see anything close to a consensus on liberal immigration among the progressives.
16
@John Chenango: Your thinking is based on false premises. Actually immigration benefits the country: the demand for "free health care, housing, and education" is not a big factor in the question of immigration. It's not that we have a system that would be fine if only we had fewer people, but that is "overloaded". There are plenty of real problems with the economy, but the presence of immigrants isn't one of them.
10
@John Chenango
"Why would anyone stay in a poor country if they could simply immigrate to the US and receive generous social benefits?"
Actually, they want to work. If you want to keep them out, enforce employer sanctions and penalize anyone who hires illegals. Conversely, if they are paid, they don't need benefits.
And in some sectors, they re brought to the US. This year, the Trump Administration doubled the number of H2A immigrants that employers can bring to the US.
As for generous benefits, illegals are generally ineligible. The only exception are Cubans.
There is also demand for more H1B visas.
Meanwhile, employers like the President bring H2B employees from the balkans to work on their properties. The Times has been doing a good job reporting about them.
8
What we think about this issue today is as inaccurate as what was thought about the issue back then.
7
This is an interesting--if depressing--history lesson, which the editorial board presumably chose to publish, because it somehow imagined it to be relevant to our current immigration debate. But it is not. Plain and simple.
Today over 87% of Americans approve of interracial marriages, whereas only 4% did even as recently as 1958 (see: https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx). Only the outermost fringe of our society today is arguing that we ought to limit legal and illegal immigration on racial or biological grounds. The grounds put forth today for limiting immigration are essentially these:
1. We cannot properly assimilate immigrants to this country at their current level.
2. Current immigration has a negative economic impact on too many native-born Americans (of all races).
3. Widespread illegal immigration undermines the rule of law (obviously, this concern has nothing to do with legal immigration).
One may disagree with these grounds for limiting immigration. It's okay if you do. But these are the grounds put forth, not some eugenics nonsense from close to a century ago.
12
@Dave The common thread being today's grounds are every bit the nonsense of those from 100 years ago.
@Dave: I'm sure the elite scientists of the 20's were careful to distinguish themselves from the ignorant haters of the 19th century. It's always easy to see how the prejudices of the past, or of other societies, are repellent: but ours, of course, are totally different. Not.
1
"What was different about the new, putatively scientific campaign was that even whiteness was no ticket to entry."
What the author fails to acknowledge is that Greeks, Italians and Eastern Europeans were not considered to be "white."
The definition of "white" has shifted constantly over time. It certainly did not include the Irish, the Greeks, the Italians, the Slavs, the Jews. Until it did include those groups.
Many Middle Eastern heritage folks think of themselves as white. More and more Asians in this country do the same. And "Hispanic" has always been a language designation, not a designation based on race. Middle income Hispanics largely think of themselves as white.
The heralded demise of a 'white majority' may well be offset by the always changing perception of who is 'white.'
The US citizens most harmed by 'open-borders' are poor people, they are also more likely to be "Black and Brown" people. If you don't think that many on the left advocate open borders, just have a listen to KPFA.
If we want to help US citizens who have few marketable job skills, allowing low skill 'immigrants' is not the way.
7
Sadly, it still is mainstream thinking, starting with the White House.
7
Though eugenics is debunked by real science, as has been said before, a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its pants on. Racist ideas still live out their zombie life in the fears of millions of people who clamor for a wall to protect them, and a leader who will voice their fear. Well, here we are again, dealing with new immigrants, new fears, new reaction, and we don't seem to learn the lessons of our history or go deep enough into our collective psyche to get to something like the truth of our fears.
12
It is not about hating immigrants today. Now, in 2019, is it all about economics. We cannot afford to keep importing more and more poor people. The low-skilled jobs all left and went to Asia. We need people who can get us to space. We don't need people to clean toilets - we need people to design better toilets.
10
@Doris Keyes: Maybe you don't need anybody to clean your toilet (I clean my own, too), but the reality is that the hospitality and service industries are a major part of the economy. No low-skilled jobs went to Asia or anywhere else, those people assembling cell phones would be considered skilled workers in this country. And even house-keeping isn't as low-skilled as you might think. And an economy based on a population of designers and engineers is of course, a fantasy...
9
The point of this article is not to bash anyone in particular. It does not bash today’s anti-immigration advocates although it may give them pause if they believe that they are original thinkers. It does not bash those in the 1920s for not grasping that the “science” they relied on would not withstand scrutiny. It is of course harsh on any scientist who misunderstood genetics or imagined that any finding of the scientific method was immutably true.
If we think as Okrent seems to me to prompt us to think, then we just have to take seriously that we are limited creatures, our understanding of the world is limited, and most of all, perhaps, that we behave like a herd, with the comical twist that all members of the herd imagine that they are independent and thinking for themselves. We’re just human: even the best may be lazy and not very kind.
4
@Steve: An interesting point, that the anti-Semite might be sincere in his belief that he has a "race" and its "purity" needs to be defended. I suspect that there is actually some valid bashing to be done here: not all invalid science is sincere, a lot of it starts with the prejudice and hatred, and builds itself around that. It's like when people say that in the days of slavery, "everyone" believed that slavery was OK: in reality, a lot of people in those days knew it was wrong, including of course those held in slavery. And many of the slave-holders must have felt some sense of bad faith.
I think Steven Jay Gould among others has shown that the bad science of those eugenicists wasn't a case of blindly following what seemed to be true, but was more about cherry picking specimens and massaging data in ways that the practitioners must have known, somewhere in their minds, was wrong.
1
Tribalism in all its incarnations is ugly. How do we move beyond the process that categorizes human being meaninglessly and get to a point where we understand that division eats away the very soul of this world? I don't have the answers, but the problem is very clear.
7
This extraordinary article helps place the glorious history of the US in true perspective. First, the country was built on slavery and tobacco. Second, the country’s laws and immigration were shaped by racism and junk science. And now the destruction of the environment is directed by climate change denial. And throughout all our glorious history, all of these movements have been sanctified by religious cults.
20
Yes, many bad things then and now.
But the question is: do we still need mass immigration?
And another is: Shouldn't we be in charge of our own borders? Meaning that the nation should be determining who is allowed in and who is kept out.
19
@Airborne Who is in charge of your "borders"? Someone else? If immigraiton ends, the nation dies. Obviously. And how was it for your family before they immigrated from wherever? Not great, I'd wager.
"Given the arguments presented by so many of the nation’s leading scientific figures, who could disagree?"
But enough about "climate change".
4
It is ironic that some of the European countries with the strongest anti-immigration sentiment or laws in the first half of the 21st Century were the targets of the greatest amount of bigotry in the first half of the previous century.
10
@Dave Vause Targets of? I think it was the reverse; those NOT anti-immigration (with immigrants arriving) were targeted by alt right and haters spewing unbelievable doses of bigotry.
I searched the article but could not find a reference to the percentage of foreign-born residents in the U.S. by year. That's an underlying phenomenon that has explanatory force. We are now seeing the highest percentage of foreign-born residents in the country since 1910. Is it a coincidence that the current backlash is reminding some of an earlier time? It's important to document the laundry list of ugly responses, but those are symptoms. Where is the sociologically informed discussion of cultural cohesion and the stress that occurs when a culture is a little too disrupted, a little too quickly?
16
@Blair A recent tweet-rant from a Bloomberg wrier named Noah Smith who was exasperated by a similar point made by a David Frum Atlantic cover story addresses your question on whether there is are examples in U.S. history where high immigration correlate with an erosion of social cohesion. The *golden age* of the low immigration in the U.S. were around 1967-1973. That was also the time of great social upheaval: civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests, assassinations of liberal political figures, riots in cities, bombings on a multiple daily basis within an 18-month period - and this was during the age of historically very low immigration.
7
@PChK Well, there are all kinds of problems, including structural racism born of legally allowed segregation. The rise of the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and Vietnam were full plates, indeed, but their existence doesn't mean that anti-immigrant sentiment isn't engendered by high rates of immigration.
2
@Blair I know your post is from Los Angeles, but as regards "Where is the sociologically informed discussion of cultural cohesion and the stress that occurs when a culture is a little too disrupted, a little too quickly?"
It seems to me that "cultural stress", at least in our current MAGA era, is felt most keenly in rural and exurban areas least exposed to immigrants. The metropolises seem to be coping just fine, as they did in the early and mid-twentieth century despite the Eugenicists.
The real cultural stress, I think. is borne by immigrants striving to become Americans despite all this hatred. The truer patriotism is theirs. Made more poignant because so many of their predecessor groups' descendants seem to forget how they got here.
11
Our racial theories were an unintended and unacknowledged importation of the Indian caste system, generalized to apply to all the peoples of the world. It is a mark of the hypocrisy of these theories that they did not lead to the admission of their original developers who had used such theories to explicitly structure their society.
It is important to make a distinction between science, scientists, politics and prejudice. The human faculty for discrimination or discernment is both innate and problematic to the social mechanism. Theoretical and technological advance is often followed by enthusiastic development driven by commerce, power, or competition for resources. We use discrimination to see that those who were once highly regarded were undeserving; and as a result of the civil rights movement, we can see that they were engaging in what we consider unlawful discrimination today. We have made significant progress toward social justice and away from tyranny and authoritarianism, but human nature remains largely unchanged. Science has afforded us the ability to command greater resources and to support ever greater populations. It is also the science of genetics and molecular biology that has disproved eugenics as valid. Science cannot stop us from manipulation and prejudicial discrimination in order to gain power and domination over other cultures, peoples, environments, and species. Science can only inform us, and only if we listen. Today we have crispr technology and globalized dissemination of information and a rapidly approaching technological singularity. All the more reason to strengthen our institutions that protect us against unlawful discrimination and to evaluate science on its merits, not its promoters or detractors.
1
This is the same sort of sophistry we saw in Ta Nehisi Coates' much lauded "Case for Reparations": using a litany of historical grievances to obfuscate the conditions that prevail today. Historical nativist racialism aside, there is absolutely no doubt that the increased immigration of the past several decades has produced enormous downward pressure on the wages of native born blue collar workers, particularly the semi-skilled and unskilled, many of whom are themselves people of color and amongst our most vulnerable citizens. No 23 year old Salvadoreno is going to be vying for Mr. Okrent job anytime soon. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for tens of thousands of U.S. bricklayers, landscapers, dishwashers, line cooks, laborers, and hotel and hospitality workers. Mr. Okrent is obviously entitled to assuage his guilt by advocating for liberalized immigration policies from his privileged perch. But he needs to own the social darwinism that regime engenders.
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@Glenn Baldwin
Agree with you about legal immigration and the working class, Glenn. Stats support your argument. And illegal immigration is, well, illegal.
But its hard to argue against the morality of slavery reparations, even if they would be logistically difficult and politically impossible. What "conditions that prevail today" change the fact that American capitalism was built on the backs of enslaved Afro-Americans?
4
@bobw
Reparations could have substantially been made in the 1930s when FDR's Federal Housing Administration mandated (not in secret covenants but openly and in writing) that no homes underwritten by that agency be sold or resold to "Negoes." The FHA and VA underwrote tens of millions of homes in that and the following decades. The family home is the source of most middle-class wealth. It's how the Irish, Germans, Italians et al. financed education and passed on inheritance. We are living today with the direct results of those laws and other public (not just private) discrimination. And this is unique to AAs. Mexicans, e.g., could buy houses. "Person of color" is a misleading phrase. I recommend Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
4
@Glenn Baldwin There may be "absolutely no doubt" to you, but to me, I have "absolutely no doubt" that downward pressure of wages was brought on by the 80s cancer (now metastasized) of "maximizing shareholder value." This led to downward pressure on those wages allowed to remain in this country, but as you and I both know, led to many more wages being exported out of this country.
9
I came to America as a legal immigrant in 1956. I came into New York Harbor on Christmas eve in a converted WWII Liberty ship. My family was allowed in because we fell into an obscure category immigration category that still had places left in its quota. When I got here I was picked on by bullies who used my immigrant background to deride me as inferior to them. The real irony for me was that I was Dutch and my tormentors were mostly Italian and eastern European. My parents who had lived through a Nazi occupation told me that people in the Netherlands were got somewhat better treatment than eastern Europeans because the Nazis considered the Dutch to be part of the master race. The fact that I was caught in a role reversal as the oppressed made it blindingly clear to me that any notion of racial superiority was complete nonsense. Its only real purpose was justification for exploiting others. Now when I see how Trump characterizes refugees at our southern border and asks why we don’t have more Norwegian immigrants the memories of what happened to me have come flooding back. It also reminds me that the difference between being legal and illegal can hinge on a small technicality. We need to stand against the reintroduction of racist exclusionary policies by Trump and others because it not only hurts vulnerable people it diminishes us as a nation.
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@JS I thought of Trump and his elevation of persons from Norway when I read this and wondered if he had hit upon this literature from the 20's and 30's extolling the virtues of one racial group over another. It rang familiar to me. To Trump, not only are people from Norway superior to others, they are superior to Californians because, unlike Californians, they are savvy enough to take brooms and go out en masse and sweep their forests to prevent forest fires from occurring.
14
@Rena W. But then you realized that trump
didn’t read the studies because.... that would require reading
25
@JS Thank you so much for this comment.
5
This piece is spot on, and extremely relevant today.
As the son of Holocaust survivors, I am well aware of my grandparents inability to immigrate to the US from Poland after 1921. They were eventually murdered by the Nazis during the war.
Today, of course, immigration should be legal, and not illegal. Illegal immigration is unfair to those who are patiently waiting to legally immigrate. Moreover, there needs to be a reasonable limit to legal immigration, because there is a limit to how many new people the US can absorb.
Unfortunately, these have not been Trump’s primary immigration arguments.
Who can forget Trump’s announcement for President, when he declared, without evidence, that México was sending us their rapists and criminals. If this was not an appeal to bigotry, I don’t know what is.
Trump has continued this appeal to bigotry by relentlessly continuing this mantra , against the evidence, that the migrants are dangerous criminals.
I’m sorry, but this is just thinly veiled racism.
As they say, history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
19
@Tigerina, much of the rhetoric has been outrageous and inflammatory. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party, which is right to call out this rhetoric, seems to play into his hands, however, by refusing to endorse any serious immigration reform. They say no to becoming like Canada and adopting merit and skills-based immigration system. They say no to chain migration reform, as recommended by African-American, Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. They say no to mandatory E-Verify (and in California, even prohibit E-Verify). They say no to eliminating the random diversity visa lottery. It seems the only thing they say "yes" to is supporting a path to citizenship for the estimated 10 million to 22 million illegal aliens in the US (depending on whether one is using the Pew figure or the joint Yale-MIT figure).
David Frum, who I am not really a fan of, given his role in supporting the Iraq War, nevertheless had an interesting article in The Atlantic recently on immigration. Basically, the Democratic Party is refusing to be the adult in the room or to support any real immigration compromise other than simply increasing immigration beyond the already record, most-generous-in-the-world rates of 1.3 million per year. Hillary and the Democrats decided in 2016 to give away the store by refusing to simply go back to the "Barbara Jordan" center on immigration.
3
Thank you for your thoughtful response to my post.
Reasonable people can disagree as to the number and qualifications of immigrants allowed into the US.
Once a politician brings bigotry into the debate, I’m not interested in anything else he has to say.
1
The subtle impact of decades of eugenics-based theories on the individual mindset and political culture of our country is woefully under taught. Despite mountains of evidence hiding in plain sight, most Americans have no idea that “common sense” notions of “the good old days” are based on fake science, magical thinking and very active, very well funded true believers. Racism endures because a lot of hard work goes into keeping it alive and present.
12
Restrictive immigration laws was shortly followed by the great depression, starve the economy of the desperate seeking opportunity and watch the economy implode. All in favor of overt restrictions will need the unwashed masses to change their diapers in nursing homes eventually.
6
People around me have been going on and on about "how bad it has gotten" and that it "has never been like this" as if we all are living in the very worst time of open racist division ever experienced in the history of America etc. Of course, this is false, as this succinct and powerful essay demonstrates.
It was so much worse, and not long ago. Practically every white person alive in the 1920's believed in white superiority, separation of the races and feared any non-white immigration. Lynchings reached their peak in the 1920's.
It was only the passage of civil rights and the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1965 that racist ideology was finally repudiated in the law and immigration democratized. The patriarchy, as represented by the conservative movement, has been fighting this ever since.
Racial discrimination and oppression by the white patriarchy has been used to control all facets of American society for most of its history. The theories of racial eugenics were once accepted as established fact by mainstream America. Many still hold them to this day.
Once again racist apologists and alarmists have gain an audience. As they are now, the still dominant patriarchy have periodically stoked nativist fears of immigration as the go to answer to almost any political problem. With it they still cling to power. Trump represents only the latest test of this strategy.
The question is: will it work once again?
6
It is absolutely specious to compare the eugenics movement of the 1920s to the current situation at the U.S.-Mexico border and government policies seeking to limit the caravans of people from Central America. Some of the people coming in, causing what Border Patrol describes as a "crisis," are trafficked by organized criminals; many also exploit children who are not there to gain entry; women and girls are sexually abused (see "rape trees"); some are members of MS-13; how many are literate and possess needed job skills?
Why should America be expected to "solve" the problems of other nations, including incompetent and corrupt ones like Guatemala and Honduras? Take a look at the people living in parked RVs and in tents along the sidewalks in downtown Los Angeles, which does not have near the housing to accommodate them. In the 1920s, there were factory jobs galore, but that's no longer true, and automation is the future. The U.S. needs legal immigration, but not just people filing in without money and employment or language skills. It's a different world.
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@Scott
We created many of the problems of nations like Guatemala and Honduras, with our policies that kept them from dealing with their income and opportunity inequalities in ways that would hurt the profitability of our investments. Now our carefully bred chickens are coming home to roost.
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@Scott
How much do you know about the political and economic history of Central America, and in particular the effects of US intervention in the region? Many of the problems that the region faces are directly tied up to longstanding and systematic actions of the US government and US corporations that for over a hundred years have undermined democracy in Central America (propping up vicious dictators, attacking pro-democracy movements) and created exploitative economic relations throughout the region (land expropriation, repressive labor regimes, environmental degradation...) for the benefit of these same corporate interests, which of course were and still are the main financial supporters of the American political elite, Democrats or Republicans. "Why should America be expected to solve the problems of other nations?" Well, when many of those problems, in the case of Central America, where created by US intervention or at least profitably exploited by US economic and political interests for over a century this country has a definite moral responsibility in this matter.
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@Héctor Lugo
Bravo Hector Lugo, a well thought out and accurate statement of conditions in Central America, history that so many Americans know little about. Do people ever wonder why they are called "banana republics," or why in Mexico there is a famous saying that translates into "Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States."
10
Did they also depict women as inferior too? People are more like sheep. They tend to follow along, afraid to think and speak up. This article was informative. Thanks.
6
Great article, need more like it. So many people today watch the propaganda on fox news and elsewhere and believe from doing that they have an understanding of economics, immigration, and other issues. Underneath all of the online trolling and and people spending all day on the internet spewing nonsense about the dangers of immigration is an underlying hatred of so called "illegals" and the perennial other. The same brand of nationalism that led us into the depression and World War II is what we see around us today. The ability to ignore the severe plight of refugees and to embrace the brutality of dictators in other countries very much mirrors what we see now, and it has already had consequences. Americas past was not always a rosy path to destiny led by wonderful people and that is obviously not the case today either. Can we ever actually learn from the pitfalls of history?
6
There's a good article about "the Lager Beer war" in Chicago (the pinnacle of the know-nothing era) here:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/history/ct-know-nothing-party-lager-beer-riot-per-flashback-jm-20150925-story.html
Although he was not an "Ivy League" scientist Samuel P. Langley was one of the great pioneer scientists of America in the era after the Civil war (he died shortly after 1900). And unfortunately he was also virulently against "Jews, Italians, Greeks and other Europeans" meaning primarily Catholics from eastern Europe, particularly Germans, Poles, and the Irish.
Assertions have carried down to today that as a young man he fought on the anti-immigrant side in Chicago -- but looking around I'm unable to find a clear citation.
4
Interesting, but totally irrelevant in any meaningful way to today's debate. Just another attempt to smear those who believe sensible laws addressing immigration should be passed and enforced and that we, as a country, should decide the issue, and not leave it to aliens who choose to come to the country. Keep on ignoring the real and legitimate concerns of those who voted for the president and you will assure him another 4 years.
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@Jim
If you believe that this President wants to address any legitimate concerns about immigration, good luck. He has found the mother lode of control; creating absolute chaos at the border. The worse he can make this, the better for him. Children are dying and he says nothing; nothing. Trump's power is retained because of his unrestrained ability to make all things worse; particularly for the most powerless human beings of all; refugee. His policies of cruelty may prevail, but you and I will, absolutely, sooner, or later, become targets of his madness too. It has nothing to do with immigration. Trump will never stop. Absolute power multiplies very quickly when accompanied with relentless fears of the "other." Putin is teaching him well.
7
@purpledot Children dying is regrettable and no one in their right mind wants that to happen. But why blame border patrol agents or the President(whom I do not support on most things)? The parents of these children are to blame. We can't just house and feed anyone who comes here illegally just because they are suffering. This is not a charity that we are running. We are talking about a country here and borders ought to be respected.
3
I'm struck by the parallels between the racist, xenophobic sentiments described in this article, and the current rabid support for Trump's wall.
In fact, many of citizens who otherwise consider themselves liberal, or progressive on other issues (equal rights, the environment, etc), have bought into the false "immigrant emergency" trope that propelled Trump into the White House.
An example -- while the majority of comments to columns in this paper are decidedly liberal, this is not true when the discussion is immigration. A cursory review shows that nearly half the comments here support Trump's vision of a whiter America. Oh, he calls it the
"Wall". but make no mistake - his goal is to reduce the number of brown-skinned people in this country.
Because this is really what the "immigration" debate is about. Race. Ethnicity. "Brown skinned hordes". It isn't about "controlling our borders" or recognizing that we can't "let everyone in who wants to come to this country." It was never about immigration. And it was always about race. It was in 1920, and the same is true here one hundred years later.
Whites here will never accept living in a country where they are no longer the majority. This is the undercurrent of Trump's support in everything he does.
And if it means trashing this nation, just so that it remains majority white, apparently most Americans are willing to get on that train. Sickening.
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@Henry Hurt I support immigration. Just the legal kind. Their race does not matter whatsoever.
3
@Henry Hurt Mexican is not a race.
It's fascinating to me that so many of these comments reproduce the arguments of the "learned gentlemen" of earlier times by arguing that it's not hatred nor bigotry but simple math that causes them to want to limit immigration. It seems apparent that so many Americans are ignorant, poorly-educated and incapable of any self-reflection. That's what elected Trump and will doom this country.
17
It may not have been your intent, Mr. Okrent, but we're veering a little too close to "See? It's OK, we've done this before.", don't you think?
For all the ugliness, for all the pain and even ghastly death, many alumni of this horrid experience are now on the other side. The have what they want, and they don't want to share.
I suppose the take away is that, for all the vile policy, for all the super-human effort, we could not stop the influx of foreigners, even the worst ones from Eastern Europe, Asia, and, ugh, Africa.
Thank goodness.
You inadvertently highlight the futility and the plain lunacy of Trump/Miller sickness.
4
In every era mainstream figures seem to hold some very objectionable views. It makes you wonder what sort of very objectionable views we hold that future generations will rightly see as objectionable.
6
@EL
You know what's heartbreaking?
That boatload of happy expectation and genuine hope, of deep determination, completely unaware of what America is about to do to them.
Its who we are, I guess.
5
I worked in a brass mill for many years,good pay good benefits. Full of immigrants. Americans could have had those jobs but they chose not to . The work was dirty,hard and sometimes dangerous. Young Americans came and went ,only the immigrants were dependable. This country has a long history of work only the immigrants would do. Go to the meat packing plants of the Midwest or the farmers of California or Florida. Full of immigrants. Immigration policy is at a standstill in part because immigrants are the wrong race,color or nationality.Remember ,Trump wants only people from the Nordic country’s. As long as Stephen Miller is in charge, there will be no workable policy. Over the last few years social service agencies and churches have brought in thousands of refugees from all over the world and placed them in economically depressed towns and urban areas where these immigrants have stabilized and revitalized these areas. We have no immigration policy because the Stephen Millers of the world don’t want one.
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The United States of America, whose country is it? Who owns it? Is "America" the proper name of the United States of North America? Is history important? Do natives of the land have more rights to the land than conquerors and immigrants? Are earlier immigrants entitled to rights that later immigrants should not? Have people who built the nation earned rights that people who enter later do not have? The history of the continent, America, and the history of the United States and those of all the other modern nations that occupy it, are intertwined. Many people in the United States today do not know that the Spanish language has been spoken in its territory nearly a century longer than English and that the oldest cities on the land were founded by earlier immigrants than the English. Many people who today want to cross the southern border of the United States descend from natives and earlier settlers of the land. Yes, this is a more authentic form of "nativism," but it takes some knowledge of history to understand it.
21
This is an important piece of American history. The racism in those immigration policies was abhorrent, true. But the article in the context of today's border crisis and illegal immigration crisis is a total straw man.
Modern immigration laws are racially blind. The fact is that it is very difficult to become a permanent resident (path to citizenship) in the US, especially through high skill categories. There are decades long lines of Indian tech, science and medical workers. Their children are being forced to leave the country even though they've played by the rules all along. Now, immigrating without a high skill or close family relationship is virtually impossible. Which is why there is a legal loophole in what is basically a child-trafficking operation. (Unless one claims persecution in Mexico, they are not acting in good faith if they apply for asylum. And that seems to be a vest majority of cases.) How is this fair to other "brown" people waiting for over 10 years?
One solution to the crisis could be if local regions with labor shortages could sponsor the potential immigrants. These regions should cover Canada, the US and Mexico. No picking and choosing. That's the way it already works for immigrant physicians working in under-served regions as well as for Canadian provinces with labor shortages.
In the absence of liberal immigration policy proposals (other than open borders), the hard-line conservative approaches will prevail.
13
@natan
There are still national quotas today. They may be “racially blind,” but there is only a decades-long line for certain countries (India, China, Mexico, Philippines). One solution I hope is advanced is to abolish all national quotas. A high-skill person from India should have the same chance and wait for legal immigration as a similarly high-skill person from Ireland.
7
@Aoy I know. That could be solved by a sensible point-based system, similar to the Canadian.
7
@natan When you write "Unless one claims persecution in Mexico, they are not acting in good faith if they apply for asylum", unless you're simply trying to make a narrow legal point, you're completely dismissing widespread reports and evidence of the conditions in the parts of Central America that those asylum seekers are fleeing from. Watch any one of dozens of reports on the PBS NewsHour if you still want to make this claim.
8
Unfortunately, humans the world over have divided themselves and rejected those seen as ‘other.’ Whether this is an innate instinct, a result of social circumstances, or a product thereof, is a fair question.
What’s wrong is that leaders today, especially in the United States and parts of Europe, still encourage such dangerous sentiments. History has shown the evils of codifying bigotry. We should all know better.
17
Bigotry appeals to the base common denominator, fear. The most effective tool to garner votes and assent.
This is in us... our makeup. All our attempts at government have been in the business of holding opposite interests in a room and hammering out agreement, whether by compromise or the hammer.
2
Oh, please. Nobody "hates" immigrants. They just recognize that there is enormous cost to an endless inflow of desperate, illiterate, unskilled immigrants. The same costs that liberals in good standing, such as Krugman, Obama, Barbara Jordan and others used to be able to publicly enumerate.
It is naive baby-talk that they "give more than they take." It is math - not a comment on the decency, humanity or race of these immigrants - to recognize that a couple who is making at or below minimum wage, often off the books, is not "contributing more" than it costs to send their children to already over-crowded public schools, or mitigating the enormous pressure on municipal health, transportation and social welfare resources which their concentrated numbers create.
Where they do "give more than they take" is in the Big E economy, that one measured by GDP and corporate profits, because they keep labor costs and services low. Its why the problem never gets solved.
We can not have both an endless inflow of desperate immigrants AND functioning government services and safety nets. It's one or the other.
60
@Livonian My grandparents were desperate immigrants in 1906. They were literate in their native language, but not in English. My grandfather was trained as a carpenter, but a bout of tuberculosis shortly after arriving made that profession impossible. My grandmother cooked, cleaned, took in borders-she did whatever was necessary to help them survive. They were discriminated against. Eventually, my grandfather got a job with an insurance company, and worked them for 40 years. Both my father and aunt went to college and graduate school. The people coming to the US are seeking the same opportunities this country has always offered people. And yes, many people hate immigrants, forgetting that their families were immigrants just a couple of generations ago.
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@JaneF
Your ancestors sound very similar to mine.
The difference is that back then America had nothing - nothing - like the kind of government services, social welfare and safety net which we have built in the intervening century, and wish to maintain for ourselves. Immigrants - like others here - sank or swim on their own.
Again, it's about math, not whether one "likes" or "hates" immigrants.
Again, what do we want: functioning government services and decent wages which support a healthy middle class, or endless influx of desperate immigrants? It's one or the other. Calling people willing to do the math "haters" doesn't solve anything but make ourselves feel good.
21
@Livonian Many undocumented immigrants pay taxes. The IRS has a provision for this. This does not entitle them to SS or Medicare, but pay they do. I wonder what the math would be without those tax dollars, especially as our leeching upperclass no longer want to pay theirs.
5
I sense an attempt by Mr. Okrent to draw parallel between the US society today with the events of the past. I don't buy it.
The US today the open, welcoming, and caring American society today as compared any of the current and former major powers of the world.
It is reasonable for the citizens of the US to want to preserve their sense of culture and identity (aka, the American Way) while humanely dealing with the waves of immigration (legal & illegal) due to various complicated factors. Restricting legal and illegal immigration humanely is a reasonable approach.
I don't think this is racist in any way like what happened in the past.
51
@Linus
I guess you didn't get the gist of the article. The point essentially was that they wanted to "preserve their sense of culture and identity."
Yes, this is every bit as "racist" as it was in the past. Only the "races" that they want to keep out have changed.
3
@Linus
"The US today the open, welcoming, and caring American society today as compared any of the current and former major powers of the world. "
I guess you missed the stories about separating children from their parents, the semi-automatic gun toting self-styled militia assembled at the border or the POTUS's rhetoric regarding criminal Mexicans and the lack of Norwegian immigrants. They don't seem so welcoming to certain groups of people who have the audacity to be born with brown skin and in need of asylum from some horrible conditions.
1
The sad thing is that many people still defend the 1920s immigration law. They are no less racially motivated than their 1920s forbearers; they just do not say it so openly today.
83
Couldn't help but notice that the author left Margaret Sanger out of this article?
6
Don’t despair - she’s in the book.
4
As diversity goes up, distrust and conflict go up. Simple social science. Introduce large numbers of aliens into Japan and watch this conflict emerge. Selectivity at the border does not amount to hatred; what is wrong with the author?
46
@aspblom....which is one reason why Scandinavian countries which traditionally were more homogeneous, ethnically & culturally were ALSO more stable, more peaceful etc. However, more recently, the huge upswings in immigration into these countries have also brought with it huge upswings in violence of all types, rapes, bombings, stabbings, etc. Social scientist across the board have observed that homogeneous cultures are more peaceful & stable, because the population buys into the same 'cultural compact'; They identify with one another. And so too, these countries NOW realize that it is of dire importance that immigrants get acculturated & assimilated immediately and not remain in ethnic ghettos. New immigrants have to buy into the native culture to maintain national stability.
11
@aspblom Yes, African states with no immigration and relatively homogeneous populations are conflict-free..
5
@aspblom
Ironic choice to cite Japan. They are in demographic decline and will need to open up their immigration restrictions if they’re going to survive.
7
The English wanted to keep the Scottish out; both wanted to keep the Germans out; they all wanted no part of the Irish and so on. E pluribus unum has always triumphed and hopefully always will for it is the ability to welcome and integrate the new that is the mark of a superior culture.
34
As a person who is descended from puritans and pioneers, slave holders and indian killers, I grew up hearing coded messages about this "Nordic" trash and what constitutes a "real American" pedigree or bloodline. I now hang my head in shame and take daily action to amend the actions of my ancestors.
We are a nation of immigrants. This is a big country. Of course immigration needs to be managed better-- but that's not what this article is talking about.
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@Milo People who constantly hang their heads in shame don't win elections.
1
@Armando Cedilla, I'm not running. But I am an active member of Indivisible!
5
As the descendant of refugees, I can only imagine how a conversation might go between myself, and an individual who believes that my forebears should have awaited their slaughter, prior to boarding a ship to the United States.
I imagine that I’d ask them how many of their relatives served in World War II, or maybe what distinction there is between a legal asylum-seeker, and an “illegal.” Maybe I’d even question how that person’s family came to arrive in America.
What I’d really want to know, though, would be how they slept at night.
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@ubique They probably sleep just fine, which is why their viewpoints should be ignored.
5
@ubique
The people fleeing slaughter during World War II fled to anywhere on earth they could go to, and those that could did. They did not "flee" only if they could get into a particular country, the country that is the #1 prefered destination for would be immigrants on earth. This is all however besides the point. Because practically not a single "asylum seeker" qualifies for asylum due to being persecuted on account of their race, religion or ethnicity, which is what asylum must be based on. When people in those caravans are asked why they want to go to the US virtually all say its for a better life, which is the truth.
1
Making practical decisions for the immigration policy of your nation is not "hate". I don't hate my neighbors yet I still don't want them sleeping on my couch.
43
The WASPs of early 20th century America didn't want the Irish to immigrate for any other purpose than to serve as maids and road builders and other such jobs that they did not want their children to do. They were not esteemed by the ruling class.
20
@A Stor mo Chroi
Discrimination against Irish goes back to long before the 20th century.
4
@A Stor mo Chroi Speaking of Irishmen, how different would America be if the Irish ancestors of good Americans such as Walt Disney and Henry Ford hadn't been allowed to simply walk across that open border from Canada?
Thank you for a glimpse into this important history. I look forward to reading the book.
44