One of the hot topics in the recent US election was immigration. Pundits, like Lou Dobbs, are on a mission to “fix our broken borders” by cracking down on illegal immigration. They argue that immigrants are taking jobs from American citizens, refusing to assimilate, changing American cultural values, and engaging in criminal activities. As I listen to these arguments, I am always reminded of my class lecture on European American immigration patters. The rhetoric of contemporary nativist activists like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan is nothing new. In fact, it follows almost exactly the same rhetoric of earlier anti-immigrant backlashes. While Latinos are the primary targets of contemporary nativists, in the early years it was the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Jews, and the Chinese, and the “problems” were the same.
Before we can understand the significance of anti-immigration backlashes, it is also important to explore the variation waves of immigration and how they are shaped by policy and economic conditions. The earliest European immigrants were primarily English, and since the English became the dominant group, they were also able to set policies and social norms for other immigrants. ((Of course, I haven’t forgotten about the indigenous people of North America or the involuntary African immigrants, but the focus here will be on voluntary migrants.)) One of the primary social norms that British set was the norm of Anglo-conformity, which was proposed by Milton Gordon ((Gordon, Milton. 1964. Assimilation in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press.)) Under the system of Anglo-conformity immigrants were expected to model the English American customs and language to the point that they became indistinguishable.
During the earliest years, the US had a fairly open immigration policy. European immigrants were welcomed and encouraged to come to the US, and there were few laws or policies that limited immigration. Most immigrants in the earliest years came from England, Germany, and Ireland (along with a small contingent of Scandinavian immigrants). The German and Irish immigrants were very much vilified, as this quote from a recent Washington Post article highlights:
Still, European immigrants found plenty of backlash. Nativist sentiments ran strong, and white Protestant reformers championed English-language instruction and temperance, the latter reflecting the Establishment’s disdain for hard-drinking immigrants. The Germans set up 121 breweries in Brooklyn and Manhattan alone.
From the 1700s to the late 1800s immigration was open for these immigrants. Very few immigrants were turned away and there were few laws limiting immigration. As the Washington Post article states:
Until 1918, the United States did not require passports; the term “illegal immigrant” had no meaning. New arrivals were required only to prove their identity and find a relative or friend who could vouch for them.
Customs agents kept an eye out for lunatics and the infirm (and after 1905, for anarchists). Ninety-eight percent of the immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island were admitted to the United States, and 78 percent spent less than eight hours on the island. (The Mexico-United States border then was unguarded and freely crossed in either direction.) “Shipping companies did the health inspections in Europe because they didn’t want to be stuck taking someone back,” said Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at Hunter College and author of “From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration.” “Eventually they introduced a literacy test,” she added, “but it was in the immigrant’s own language, not English.”
In the later half of the 1800s the first major restrictions against immigrants were imposed. The Chinese were primary the targets of these laws, and the Naturalization Act of 1870 made Chinese ineligible for citizenship. This act also targeted the wives of Chinese laborers, and all people born in African or of African descent were made eligible for citizenship. Then in 1882 Chinese were banned entirely from entering the country. ((This ban on Chinese laborers was not lifted until the 1940s.)) The backlash against Chinese often stemmed from fear that they were taking away jobs.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s immigration from southern and eastern Europe skyrocketed, and there was also a backlash against these immigrants, which lead to much greater restrictions. In 1917, the restrictions against expanded to include an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” which extend over Asian and the Pacific Rim; moreover, immigrants were required to take literacy tests, and “anarchists” and other radical were also barred. This was one of several laws that lead to the National Origins Act of 1924. According to History Matters,
In response to growing public opinion against the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the years following World War I, Congress passed first the Quota Act of 1921 then the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act). Initially, the 1924 law imposed a total quota on immigration of 165,000—less than 20 percent of the pre-World War I average. It based ceilings on the number of immigrants from any particular nation on the percentage of each nationality recorded in the 1890 census—a blatant effort to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, which mostly occurred after that date. In the first decade of the 20th century, an average of 200,000 Italians had entered the United States each year. With the 1924 Act, the annual quota for Italians was set at less than 4,000.
This act radically changed immigration by setting quotas that gave preferences to groups that were already represented in the US. While there were other immigration restrictions imposed during this period, this law had the greatest impact. From the 1920s until 1965, the number of immigrants entering the US dropped dramatically and at it’s low point in the 1970s the percentage of the population that was foreign born was only 4.7%.
So the first major wave of immigration, which ended in the late 1800s, included immigrants mostly from western Europe, and these immigrants faced very few restrictions. The restrictions in this era were based on race and mental health, but complex immigration processing or laws did not exist at this time. It was until the second wave of immigration from the late 1800s-1924 that much greater restrictions were put on immigration. These restrictions were explicitly racialized and directed at Chinese and Eastern European immigrants. Over both of these waves of immigration similar concerns were expressed about the fitness of immigrants. Nativist believed that immigrants threatened the American way of life, and the arguments used are remarkably similar to those of the contemporary nativists like Lou Dobbs or Pat Buchanan.
Next in this series I’ll discuss the Immigration Act of 1965 and it’s effects on our current population.
Pingback: Pc privacy
This is a little misleading. The first naturalization act, which was passed in 1790, limited naturalization to “free white persons.” In 1870, in response to the Civil War and emancipation, a new naturalization act was passed. Some very radical former-abolitionists wanted to get rid of racial restrictions altogether, but they were overruled. They did, however, manage to pass new language which limited naturalization to “white persons and persons of African descent.” So the act only “targeted” those of African-descent in a positive sense. (It’s worth noting that Congressmen didn’t expect for very many African-descended people to emigrate, and in fact not many did until people started to come from the West Indies in the 1910s. Those people could and often did naturalize.)
Yes, I am aware of that restriction. What is fascinating about that restriction was that the only two groups it targeted were Africans and American Indians. However, many of the Europena immigrants and Asian immigrants were not considered White. At that very early point whiteness was extended to the English, Scottish, Welsh, and a limited number of the northern European countries, the other groups such as the Irish were not really considered whites in 1790. So what is fascinating about that policy is that it was very selectively enforced. Additionally, the early Chinese were welcomed into the country in spite of this policy. The labor demands and the desire to increase population superceded white “whitness restriction” until the anti-Chinese laws of the late 1800s.
It is also important to distringuish between “naturalization” and immigration. People can come and reside in the US as immigrants, but naturalization is the process through which they become citizens. My sense is that this law was designed to not to keep immigrants out, but to deny Black Africans and American Indians citizenship rights.
I’m actually just not convinced by this argument. I think the fact that there were no significant challenges to Irish people’s right to naturalize, even by people who truly believed that Irish voters threatened the survival of the republic, suggests that they were considered white and that their opponents either never considered making such a claim or knew that it would fail. Irish people were certainly racialized, but racially-inferior wasn’t the same thing as non-white.
I’m not sure what you mean here. The point of both the 1790 and 1870 laws were to define which immigrants could become U.S. citizens and to provide a process for them to do so. The 1790 law assumed that only white people were worthy of American citizenship, and the 1870 one assumed that only white or African-descended people were. (The 1870 law was a relic of the brief moment during Reconstruction when Congress considered African-Americans actual citizens.) Before the 1870s, there weren’t a lot of attempts to keep any immigrants out, because the government wasn’t really strong enough to pull that off. Until after the Civil War, all debates about immigration basically centered on the question of naturalization. The Know-Nothings of the 1850s, for instance, never proposed to restrict immigration, not because they opposed restriction in principle, because it was pretty much unthinkable. They would have liked for there not to be so many immigrants, but they couldn’t imagine a state big and powerful enough to police migration.
Just to be clear, I’m objecting to two things that you said here. The first is that the 1870 law “targeted” people of African descent. It didn’t: after 1870, people of African descent were treated like white people in immigration law. (Things got strange after 1924, but I won’t get into that here.) This mattered a lot when people of African descent started immigrating in big numbers. There was some irony about the fact that black immigrants to the North had citizenship rights that were denied to native-born black Southerners. The second, and this is a less-important point, is that you said the 1870 law made Chinese people ineligible for citizenship. It didn’t make that the case; it reaffirmed a previously-existing law that already said that.
Sally said, “Just to be clear, I’m objecting to two things that you said here. The first is that the 1870 law “targeted” people of African descent. It didn’t: after 1870, people of African descent were treated like white people in immigration law. (Things got strange after 1924, but I won’t get into that here.) This mattered a lot when people of African descent started immigrating in big numbers. There was some irony about the fact that black immigrants to the North had citizenship rights that were denied to native-born black Southerners. The second, and this is a less-important point, is that you said the 1870 law made Chinese people ineligible for citizenship. It didn’t make that the case; it reaffirmed a previously-existing law that already said that.”
I got what you are saying here. I need to rewrite word “targeted.” I also need to be very careful about distinguishing between who is allowed to come here and who is allowed to be a citizen. Asians were allowed to come to the US. What I am less clear about is how many were able to be naturalized. I understand your point about free whites and the 1790 act, but the concept of whiteness was contested. I suspect that Asians non-white status was solidfied more in the latter 1800s than the earlier years.
On the issue of the Irish, there is a very well know book called How the Irish Became White. Here is a quote from a review of the book that can be found at this site :
For those interested in fighting the current manifestations of anti-immigrant nativism, I highly recommend not promoting the ideas of Noel Ignatiev’s
(“How the Irish Became White”) and his “race traitor” followers. Going to (struggling) white working class people and lecturing them about how much white privilege they have is an utterly wrongheaded approach.
The left should put forth the ideas 1. that native born American workers conditions are linked to the condition of other workers both at home and internationally 2. that it’s in their interest to align themselves with immigrants and fight for mutual improvement.
Drydock,
From a political perspective I understand your view (very Marxist indeed)., but from a historical perspective we need to keep in mind that these sorts of arguments over immigration are nothing new. What Ignatiev’s work tells us is how whiteness shifts.
My own sense of this is that over the next couple generations Mexican Americans will become white, and they will end up following the same pattern as the Irish, Italians, Polish, etc. Asians, on the other hand, probably will have a much tougher time achieving whiteness.
My larger point here is that whiteness is a moving target, a floating signifier, and a contested terrain. We have to be very careful not to use our contemporary notions of race since race is constantly shifting.
“My own sense of this is that over the next couple generations Mexican Americans will become white, and they will end up following the same pattern as the Irish, Italians, Polish, etc. Asians, on the other hand, probably will have a much tougher time achieving whiteness.”
Asians just outnumbered whites in the University of California campuses recent freshman class, despite being far outnumbered by whites in California. Asians have an average per capita income higher than whites. I believe that asians are already white, and I believe that Mexicans and other Latinos of high socio-economic status are already white. The problem though with Mexicans becoming white en-masse is thier low average socio-economic status and other multi-generation problems as extensively studied:
http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1529
“Study sheds light on how young adult children of immigrants assimilate
Largest, longest study of children of immigrants reveals certain groups are left behind
Irvine, Calif., October 4, 2006
While the vast majority of young adult children of immigrants experience upward economic and social mobility, a new study finds that a significant minority are suffering from lower levels of education, lower incomes, higher birth rates and higher levels of incarceration. Furthermore, it is the U.S.-born children of Mexican, Haitian and West Indian immigrants who experience these problems in the largest proportions.
The study, led by sociologists Rubén G. Rumbaut of UC Irvine and Alejandro Portes of Princeton University, appears online this week in the Migration Information Source. The largest and longest-running study of children of immigrants yet conducted, the study also confirms the critical importance of education.
“The greatest educational disadvantage is found among children of Mexican immigrants and Laotian and Cambodian refugees in our sample – close to 40 percent of whom did not go beyond a high school diploma,” said Rumbaut. “Education is the key to successful upward mobility among children of immigrants, so the discrepancies that emerge in educational achievement among immigrant groups tend to persist in trends for income, employment and incarceration.”
The researchers also point to the influence of human capital (the skills and education of immigrant parents) as well as family structure, racial prejudice and government policies toward certain immigrant groups – particularly the undocumented – that influence this “downward assimilation” process.
The researchers found that children of Laotian and Cambodian Americans as well as Haitian Americans had the lowest median annual household income at just over $25,000. They were followed closely by Mexican American families, which had a median annual household income of about $30,000. On the other end of the spectrum, children of upper-middle-class Cuban exiles in Southern Florida reported a household income of more than $70,000, and Filipino Americans in Southern California had more than $64,000, followed by Chinese immigrants.
Furthermore, the study found that the most educationally and economically disadvantaged children of immigrants were most likely to have children of their own at a young age, compounding their difficulties at pursuing higher education. When surveyed at the average age of 24, none of the Chinese Americans had children, while in contrast 25 percent of Haitians, West Indians, Laotians and Cambodians did, as did 41 percent of Mexican American young adults.
Differences in arrest and incarceration rates are also noteworthy, particularly among second-generation, U.S.-born, males. While only 10 percent of second-generation immigrant males in the survey had been incarcerated, that figure jumped to 20 percent among West Indian and Mexican American youths.
“Unfortunately, these trends perpetuate the racial and ethnic stereotypes that contributed to their situation in the first place,” Rumbaut said. “On the positive side, we see that children of immigrant families with little money and low human capital can move forward positively in American society. But there is clearly a minority segment among the native-born children of some immigrant groups that is getting caught in a cycle of downward mobility, and we need to understand the trends that drive this process.”
There are more than 30 million U.S.-born children of immigrants. Rumbaut is continuing to explore the major events influencing the social outcomes of the immigrant second generation, focusing on early childbirth for women and incarceration among men.
About the Study: The surveys were conducted over more than 10 years with random samples representing 77 different nationalities originally drawn in 1991 in San Diego, Calif., and Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., of more than 5,000 respondents who were then in junior high school, The most recent surveys were conducted from 2001 to 2004 when the respondents were between the ages of 23 and 27. The surveys are part of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, which was designed to examine the in-depth interaction between immigrant parents and their children and the evolution of the young from adolescence into early adulthood. Results from the CILS surveys provide the most compelling current evidence to date of how the second generation adapts – from education and income to unemployment, family formation and incarceration. The study was funded with support from the Russell Sage Foundation. More: http://www.russellsage.org”
Because of sheer size (25% of population by 2050) and variability of hispanics, there will be enough high SES hispanics for it to be normal to see hispanics in positions of power, prestige, and influence. But as for the mean and median, asians are far more convergent to whites on a host of variables.
PJ Goober,
The stat about higher per capita income for Asians is incorrect. Asians have higher median family income but not higher per capita incomes. Additionally, when we make comparisons between Asians and whites of similar educational levels, the gap disappears or favors whites.
I think for Latinos (and Asians) we may see great variations in the path to whiteness based on ethnic groups. I think Puerto Ricans, Domincans, Laotians, and Cambodians are going to have a much harder time than Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos. This is, of course, trying to predict the future, but it will be interesting to see what happens.
I want to make a distinction, as a democrat, between the historical waves of
immigration into the United States of the past and the situation as it stands
today. In the immigration that occurred over 100 years ago, the United States
was a frontier country with a tremendous amount of available land space for
the people to settle in (with a little help from population transfer of the American Indian). Today, we have a situation in which we have 300 million people settling a country completely between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Our immigration policies have to be designed to admit people who will represent a productive addition to our society (along with legitimate political refugees from persecution) as we no longer have the seemingly unlimited frontier that our country had historically. I am in favor of a guest worker program and amnesty for the Latin immigrants out of the simple fact of life that we cannot
return ten to twenty million illegal immigrants to their home countries
without making the country resemble NAZI Germany but we are no longer
the country that can also absorb unlimited immigration. I am in favor of
encouraging the Latin American Countries to adopt economic reforms that
would encourage strong economic growth in such a way that is not
incompatible with standards of social justice. An example is the fact that
Argentina was a first world country at the turn of the twentieth century
rather than having now decayed to third world country economically via
a series of corrupt governments and military dictatorships. I think that one
of the most important things to encourage responsible economic growth is
the ensure the democratic rule of law in business and economic policy – and
this ranges from preventing the ruthless nationalization of industry on the far left to lawless capitalism on the right and make the presence of a safety net for those who fall between the cracks a part of society since one cannot get zero
unemployment.
Ignoring history is a mistake, taking history out of context as an example is also a mistake. If you put Post-Civil War immigration into context with labor you will get a very grim picture for the blue collar workers. I urge you to do so. An anti-immigrant backlash is one of the last things we need – and there is a difference between legal & illegal.
I’ll never understand the nativist right. Ever.
If you fancy yourself even mildly conservative in the fiscal sense, you should understand at the very least, that these folks (legal, or illegal) make up a corner stone of our economy
I want to make a remark to Chuck Butcher in 10. The plight of the blue collar
worker during the nineteenth century was not unique to the United States but
existed in all industrialized countries, including those from which our immigration was coming from. Yet the blue collar worker in the United States and Western Europe was far better off than Africa, Asia or Latin America at that time (this is why, even today, you have Mexicans willing to risk life and limb in order to get to the United States). This is why I think that the United States has got to take a major international role in encouraging responsible economic reforms in these countries, including the adoption of a market economy with a basic social safety net (yes – horrors of horrors, I am a democrat who believes that a market economy, handled properly with the rule of democratic law, is the best solution; and, yes, I do support labor unions).
Rachel– I agree that examing history is important and nativism is nothing new. However, when you say Mexicans will become white, it seems to me that your assuming that nothing has or will change in terms of race in this country. If race is constructed then it can be (and is being) deconstucted. No? Or does pessimism rule the day? And if Mexicans are on their way to “becoming white” then wouldn’t an anti-immigrant stance by blacks (and even other anti-racists) be justified?
Secondly, I believe Ignatiev’s argument (and correct me if I’m wrong) is that a section of the American working class (white workers) cut a seperate social contract (more privileges and benefits) with their American rulers in return for their loyality to the system. In other words to be white means that there must be someone who is cut out of this deal (blacks).
In previous generations because of anti-black racism, immigrants were able to come here and in a generation or two step over blacks who were welded to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Post civil rights these same conditions don’t exist. While there is certainly anti-black racism among Latino immigrants, the benefits of “becoming white” seem a lot less apparent at least materially (psychologically might be different discussion).
For example, while job hiring discrimination may exist against blacks but wholesale exclusion from industries doesn’t anymore. Further unions aren’t about to exclude blacks in favor of Latinos, which is the kind of thing that used to happen. Ideas about who is white may shift around, but the material and social conditions that give rise to these ideas also change as well.
I believe that asians are already white, and I believe that Mexicans and other Latinos of high socio-economic status are already white.
Asians are Asian, not white. And I was rather forcefully told this Friday at the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago’s annual convention by the Latino co-chair of the Diocese’s Anti-Racism Commission that Latinos are not white.
Maybe instead of trying to re-define races in a fashion that the members of those races themselves don’t accept, maybe we might try a different theory; that you don’t have to be white to advance in American society. What you do have to do is accept American law and work hard to get and apply an education?
RonF:
As Leonard Dinnerstein in Anti-Semitism in America and others have pointed out, Jews were not considered white people until well into the 1940s. Until that point, the discrimination that Jews faced was quite explicitly racialized. (I realize there are some who will aruge that Jews still aren’t really considered white people, and I have some sympathy with that position, but the fact is that, as things currently stand now, unless someone knows that I am Jewish and chooses to racialize that fact, I possess all the privileges and advantages that whiteness bestows.) Rachel’s point about the shifting boundaries of whiteness, in other words, is valid, and it is important to recognize that both in historical terms and in understanding the current racial dynamic in this country. The fact that Asians and Latinos, now, will argue quite strongly, and reasonably, that they are not white, does not mean that in another 40 or 50 years the boundaries of whiteness might not shift again to include them in some way.
I’m familiar with Igantiev’s book. I just don’t think it’s right. You can find lots of instances of people comparing Irish people to African-Americans, but whiteness was a legal category, and it just seems damning to his thesis that nobody ever tried to deny the Irish legal whiteness. Given how many elite people hated Irish immigrants and feared that they would ruin democracy, why would they “selectively enforce” racial laws that could have profoundly limited Irish-American political power? This isn’t a new and fascinating insight of mine: it’s been pointed out by a lot of historians, including more nuanced scholars of whiteness. I’m much more convinced by Matthew Frye Jacobson’s argument that what changed wasn’t whether the Irish were considered white, but whether all people classified as white were considered racially equal.
And again: “racialized” isn’t the same as “not-white.” Much of my mom’s family settled in the South in the first and second decades of the twentieth centuries. They were Ashkenazi Jews who came more-or-less directly from Eastern Europe. Plenty of people treated them like shit, but they were white. They became naturalized U.S. citizens at a time when naturalization was only open to white people and those of African descent. They sat wherever they wanted on the bus; they could eat at lunch counters and didn’t have to sit in the “colored” section of movie theaters; my grandmother, who started first grade in 1925, attended white schools throughout her educational career; and they voted without anyone thinking it was a big deal. They were white, according to the law, and in ways that truly mattered. That they were also racialized doesn’t change that fact.
Today, we equate “racialized” with “non-white,” but that’s anachronistic when you’re talking about the 19th or early-20th centuries.
Sorry. This is a particular pet peeve of mine.
Sally:
I wonder if we need to make the distinction between the legal category of whiteness and, say, the cultural definition of whiteness. Dinnerstein, in his book, brings more than a few examples of people referring to Jews as non-white. Some examples:
(These are excerpts from an unpublished essay of mine that refers to Dinnerstein’s book; the only parts that are quotes from Dinnerstein are the parts in quotation marks.)
It makes sense to me that there was a legal difference between being racialized and being considered non-white, i.e., that a group could be racialized and still possess white privilege in the legal sense; I am not so sure that I would agree that this legal difference defined, by definition, the cultural perception of whiteness and non-whiteness or that the legal category defined the only ways in which being white really mattered.
I also don’t think that the distinction you make necessarily undermines the larger point here, which is that the boundaries of whiteness, as a social/cultural category do shift.
Do white supremacist groups consider Jews to be white?
Jake:
As far as I know, no.
I just want to say that a comment of mine in response to Sally is awaiting moderation. Not sure why.
In other words, Richard, what you’re saying is that being white is not a matter of one’s ancestry, it’s a matter of whether or not a particular ethnic group suffers from racial discrimination or not. If they don’t, they’re white; if they do, they aren’t. So, therefore, by this definition, whites are always “privileged”, because if they’re not they not white!
I’m much more convinced by Matthew Frye Jacobson’s argument that what changed wasn’t whether the Irish were considered white, but whether all people classified as white were considered racially equal.
Thanks, Sally. I haven’t read Mr. Jacobsen myself, but this sentence and her example certainly illustrates the point. Instead of presuming that white people are always in a superior position, and redefining what “white” is from time to time to fit that, let’s instead look at the facts and see if they tell us that racism is not inherent in being “white” and that being racially discriminated against is not inherent in being non-white, but instead is something independent of the race of the people involved.
Who decides who is white, those that are already considered “white” or those that are “oppressed” by the whites? It isn’t uncommon to hear jokes about how “white” an individual of african decent is. Is there anyone here who hasn’t heard a Colin Powell or Condi Rice joke about how white they are? Is “white” simply a poor man’s way of lashing out at successful individuals? Is that different than poor farmers or factory workers lashing out at/about rich Jewish bankers? Is it possible that there are actually 2 seperate definitions/scopes of “whiteness”. One is racial/ethnic and the other is financial? Doesn’t it all just basicly boil down to jealosy and hatred of those more successful or different from ourselves?
In my experience a lot of the problem is exposure. We choose to socialize with those we are most similar to. I am not even sure the worst of it is racial so much as cultural. We look down on different cultures or subcultures. Do you think white “gangstas” get more respect from whites than black “gangstas”. Or black reublicans than white republicans. Maybe even less because of the sellout factor. We all know that the racial stereotypes don’t define us but we think it does for other cultures. We even revel in our stereotypes at times and joke about it internally even if it is taboo to do so in mixed company. Doesn’t that pass along the stereotypes to our children and society in general?
I am also confused as to why the immigration issue keeps getting skylined as a racial issue. If it were Romanians coming in in droves would the anti-immigration segment of society be more accepting?
What this post fails to mention is the involvement of foreign governments both then and now. In the now case, Mexico receives $20+ billion that their citizens send home, and they work very hard to make sure that money keeps flowing. Even the U.S. FederalReserve wants to take a cut of that money, most of which was generated illegally.
If you have the psychological need to continuously stress just how non-racist you are over and over and over again, perhaps you could reserve it for legal immigrants.
When I read this article and some of the other responses in the other article, it seems to break down simply to a few basic points:
1) historically, people were racist.
2) historically, people had different ways of thinking about race than we do now, at least in some instances.
3) historically, folks believed certain races/nationalities were problematic, and would not benefit society.
OK.
Sure.
Let’s say all of the above are true.
As far as I can tell, these are being presented to support the following contentions:
4) many of the historical predictions regarding the “bad effect” of various folks were wrong. THEREFORE, current claims regarding the potential “bad effect” of various folks (largely illegal immigrants) are also wrong.
This has some obvious problems. First of all, it’s difficult to judge the “would haves” or “could haves” even with regard to history (much less the current day). Would we be a better country today if we hadn’t let ____ immigrate? I dunno–maybe. How the heck do we know?
And even if so, how do we know that applies to current events? It’s easy to point out what happened in the 1800s and discuss the economy. But in the 1800s it was a slightly different world, ya know. Does that matter? The “parallels” suffer.
5) Historically, many people who supported those views were racist. Therefore, those views are racist.
I won’t even bother pointing out the logic problems with this one.
But in light of this all, i’m still a bit confused. So Jews, say, were (according to some) “nonwhites” for a while.
So?
Can someone explain what the official racial status of Jews in the early century has to do with whether or not we should be proponents of mass illegal immigration NOW?
And if the answer is “well, um, not much” then why the heck do people keep bringing this stuff up in response to opposition to illegal immigration?
Ok, but it seems to me to be really problematic to pretend that the legal definition didn’t matter, which is what the “how the [whatever] became white” line does. Irish-American history would look totally different had the Irish not been legally defined as white. The Irish naturalized at extremely high rates and used local government (and the patronage jobs it controlled) to gain a foothold in American society. That wouldn’t have been possible if they’d been declared non-white and therefore ineligible for citizenship.
As for your quotes, I don’t think they all say what you think they say. The only one that clearly says that Jews aren’t white is this one:
And this one probably did, depending on which system of racial classification the guy was using:
But the rest of them? Not so much. Nobody is denying that people talked about the Hebrew race or the Irish race or the Anglo-Saxon race. Anyone with any familiarity with the sources at all will realize that this kind of language was all over the place and was used by Irish and Jewish people as well as by people who didn’t like Irish-Americans or Jews. And nobody is denying that many Anglo-Americans saw Anglo-Saxons as purer white people than lesser folks like Slavs or Jews or (sometimes, but not always) Celts. The question is whether most people saw Irish or Jewish people as not white, or whether they saw them as members of the many distinct and unequal races that made up the white population.
I don’t think that’s what Jacobson would say at all. I think he’d point out that race has always been about power and hierarchy and that being defined as white has always carried certain extremely important privileges. Chinese immigrants, who were not defined as white, could not become naturalized American citizens. They could not vote. They were subject to anti-miscegenation laws that made it hard for Chinese men to marry non-Chinese women, and they were subject to discriminatory immigration legislation that made it very hard for Chinese women to immigrate to America. That meant that the overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants were unable to start families in America. They were frequently legally barred from owning land. They were sometimes barred from testifying in court, which made it very difficult to prosecute instances of white-on-Chinese violence, even if it was witnessed by large numbers of Chinese-American people. After 1882, nearly 40 years before the immigration act that ended nearly-open immigration for Europeans, Chinese immigration was almost completely outlawed, something that did not change until 1965.
Despite prejudice and discrimination, Jews managed to create a reasonably strong and lasting community in the U.S. Chinese-Americans did not, until immigration laws were changed in 1965. To a very large degree, that’s true because Jews were legally defined as white and Chinese people weren’t. Whiteness utterly defines the Jewish-American experience, just as the denial of whiteness utterly defines the Chinese-American one, at least until the late-20th century.
Responding to William Romine’s post in #9 – the immigrants complained of by the nativists didn’t settle in the frontier – the Poles, Italians, Jews, Hungarians, Ukranians, etc. settled in Eastern and Midwestern cities. (The frontier attracted Scandinavians and some Germans, although many Germans did settle in cities.)
There should be more organized systems of admitting Mexican immigrants to the United States to stop the charade of Mexicans crossing the border, then being employed by companies looking the other way at false identity documents. Too many people are blaming the illegal immigrants, but turn a blind eye to those who knowingly employ them.
A remark to Aaron V. in 26. The problem is that we have ten to twenty million
illegal immigrants and even in the issue of employment, it is reaching the
point at which one would have to set up an economic police state in order to find
out who is illegally employed and enforce any laws in any meaningful fashion.
One also has to have some humanitarian compassion for people who are willing
to risk life and limb to come to the “land of milk and honey”.