The United States has always been a nation of immigrants.  Except for the very small percentage who can claim to be “pure-blooded” members of one of the Native American tribes, most people have a family tree with roots in immigrants.  And these immigrants came to this country for a variety of reasons — some involuntarily, some for economic reasons, some to escape religious persecution, some to escape ethnic persecution, some to escape political persecution, and some just fleeing political strife (whether internal to a given country or a conflict between countries).  Some of these immigrants came from English-speaking area.  Others came from areas that were not English-speaking and arrived with little, if any, fluency in English.  Many immigrants tended to settle in communities with significant populations from their home regions (and, if they did not arrive with much fluency in English, were able to cope by living in a community in which their native tongue was the predominant language).  Today’s immigrants are no different.

However, other than during the early years of this country (when we desperately needed immigrants to fill the areas otherwise occupied by Native Americans), this country has had a love-hate relationship with new immigrants.  In fact, one of the immediate precursors of the Republican Party was the All-American Party, a political party which was opposed to immigration by Irish Catholics.   Each generation, the undesirable group of immigrants was different, but there were defining characteristics of the anti-immigration sentiment.  First, it was almost always the “new group” of immigrants.  Second, the claim was always that this new group would not fit in and would somehow change the country if we didn’t keep them out.  Third, they were almost always predominately non-Protestant — sometimes Jewish, sometimes Muslim, and all too often Catholic.  So the immigrant haters have moved the target of their hatred from the Irish to the Chinese to Eastern/Southern European to Latin Americans to Indochinese and back to Latin Americans.  (And the shame is that some of the modern supporters of this agenda are the descendants of the earlier targets who are undoubtedly rolling over in their graves at the dishonorable conduct of their descendants.) 

This Fourth of July immigration is at the center of the news again.  On the one hand, we have an administration that sees anti-immigrant hatred as a way of winning elections.   And because immigrants have always tended to flock to urban centers (a/k/a blue areas in today’s politics), they are willing to tamper with the accuracy of the census in the hopes of being able to use an undercount of the immigrant population to stack the deck in redistricting in favor of the Republican Party. Continue Reading...