The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
The Dark side of American immigration history
The 2008 Essay by Larry L. Dill revised with a new introduction by the author.
I began to think seriously about writing about American Immigration Policy in the Spring of 2008. Specifically, during a Presidential debate in which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were the frontrunners in a fierce battle for the democratic nomination for President of the United States.
Senator Clinton--who I was supporting for president-- struggled that night with a question by the moderator about how she felt about granting illegal immigrants drivers licenses. The question seemed absurd in one sense. Sort of like whether inmates in a prison should receive hot or just cold showers, one or two or three meals a day. A blanket and a mattress or just a blanket and no mattress. Etc., etc. In other words in one way it seemed a matter of simple human compassion. In another way it seemed like coddling criminals. In still another way it seemed a possible way of documenting undocumented workers and thus controlling them.
Being born and raised in Texas, I had no illusions about the immigration issue. My father who worked as a civilian aircraft mechanic at a U.S. military base in San Antonio, referred to all people of Mexican or Latino descent as “wet backs” because of the well known practice of Mexican nationals entering the United States by swimming or wading across the Rio Grande river into Texas to get work.
The fact that many of those people’s ancestors had lived in Texas for hundreds of years, if not thousands, before any European white man ever set foot there was not something that my father or I had ever thought about, much less discussed. I loved my father. I respected his opinions and that was that. “Wet backs,” he taught me, were good at cleaning out flower beds and pouring concrete. They were hard workers. And he often had one come over on Saturday to help him keep his yard and gardens in order. I, myself, was sometimes ordered to help the “wet back” get the job done. Sometimes the "wet back" turned out to be an American citizen who was an employee of the US Department of Defense just like my father, but who had a second job on the weekends cleaning out flower beds for his supervisor.
The civil rights movement of the 1960’s changed everything for me. I began to see that there were many faces of racism. Not only the legacy of black slavery and its brutal modern aftermath that lived on into my own lifetime,, but the ongoing discrimination against a native American population that was nearly invisible because it had suffered near genocide less than a century before I was born.
Suddenly staring me in the face, was the racism against Latinos that I had been surrounded with my whole life. I had gone through elementary school and graduated from a high school that forbade (by state law) the speaking of Spanish anywhere on campus except in a formal Spanish class. No one ever talked about whether someone was a legal or an illegal immigrant. In my circle of friends if you were a Mexican (or “Meskin” as it was pronounced by "whites") you were a “wet back.” End of story.
I learned about the Latino struggle for survival in the US by following the career of Cesar Chavez as I had watched Martin Luther King, jr. lay out the plight of African Americans. Again, in that period, the public debate was not focused on immigration so much as whether a farm worker, working dawn to dusk doing backbreaking work cultivating and harvesting vegetables was or was not entitled to the same rights as American workers who worked in factories and air conditioned offices.
Over time, some progress has been made in work safety, housing and hygiene. But in the end, almost all the food you place on your table every night (tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, carrots, onions, squash, watermelons, peaches, apples and on and on not to mention America‘s opulent meat industry) has been grown, harvested or processed by undocumented workers who have come to the United States to work. They would come here legally if they could. But America’s history of racist immigration quotas have left them no choice nor have they left any choice for family farmers, agricultural conglomerates or for ordinary Americans who want high quality food at affordable prices.
The essay reprinted below, spawned by that 2008 presidential debate, and written in the summer that followed, was an attempt to clarify some of the historical roots of the immigration crises we face today. It features some unlikely actors: my dear friend, the educator and social activist, Deborah Gaddy, the tireless advocate for immigration reform, President John F. Kennedy and the daughter of one of America’s most respected social critics, Aviva Chomsky, a respected academic and social activist in her own right.
As in so much else that controls the social order and civility of our lives, in the end it is the elephant in the room that everyone wants to deny: Racism. You be the judge.
---Larry L. Dill
August 1, 2010
Asheville, North Carolina
The Dark Side of American Immigration History
By Larry L. Dill
Exhibit A:
(May 21, 2008)
Two weeks ago, North Carolina’s community college system was cast into the center of a national debate when it became the first in the nation to announce it would no longer admit illegal immigrants to any of its 58 campuses.
Attorney General Roy Cooper ruled May 6 that community colleges should immediately cease admitting undocumented students to degree programs. Since November of last year, illegal immigrants have been allowed to attend the schools, though they had to pay out-of-state tuition rates. Before that, the decision to admit illegal immigrants was up to the individual colleges.
Out-of-state tuition costs are prohibitive to many students… In-state tuition for a full-time student is $632 a semester, compared with $3,512 for out-of-state.
The argument over allowing illegal immigrants to enroll in community colleges is largely one based on principal, since in reality the number of students affected by the ruling is low.
The state’s community colleges have only 112 undocumented students out of a total enrollment of 279,000. The numbers in Western North Carolina are low too — one undocumented student is enrolled at Haywood Community College.
Deborah Gaddy, who works with ESL students and heads up the adult education program at HCC, said she was “very disappointed,” to learn of the ruling. She could not say enough about her dedicated students.
“Talk about good citizens. Even though they may not be citizens of this country, they’re incredibly dedicated and loyal. They rarely miss class. As far as our instructors are concerned, these are the preferred classes. They’re there not only because they want to be, but they have a drive to succeed. It’s a joy to work with adults with purpose and reason — they are always trying to improve themselves,” she said.
That will be harder now, says Gaddy. Though the number of undocumented aliens who can afford out-of-state tuition isn’t large, a few still took advantage of the chance to go to school.
“We have had a few that have wanted to start credit classes and have to pay out-of-state tuition, and now that opportunity is not even going to be possible for them,” she said.
Gov. Mike Easley, University of North Carolina system president Erskine Bowles and the U.S. Department of Immigration have all decried or contradicted the attorney general’s decision.
“I’m happy that Roy Cooper has come to a decision to close the door on illegal aliens,” said William Gheen, president of the North Carolina chapter of Americans for Legal Immigration. “We know that schools are magnets and incentives for illegal aliens to come.”
Excerpt from an article by Julia Merchant in the Western North Carolina regional weekly The Smoky Mountain News. Read the full article here.
Exhibit B:
To the Editor of the Smoky Mountain News:
Deborah Gaddy, who works with English as a Second Language students and heads up the adult education program at Haywood Community College, said she was “very disappointed“ to learn of the ruling. She could not say enough about her dedicated students: “Talk about good citizens. Even though they may not be citizens of this country, they’re incredibly dedicated and loyal. They rarely miss class. As far as our instructors are concerned, these are the preferred classes. They’re there not only because they want to be, but they have a drive to succeed. It’s a joy to work with adults with purpose and reason, they are always trying to improve themselves,” she said.
Huh! What is she smoking? “They’re good citizens“? They aren’t citizens at all! “They’re incredibly dedicated and loyal“? To what? Certainly not to their own country that they abandoned to sneak into the US! They may be dedicated to the destruction of the United States by bringing untold diseases, by siphoning off health benefits from legal citizens, by lining up for every financial assistance available, by learning to work the system to get on the entitlement bandwagon, but they don’t give a rat’s behind about the health and welfare of the legal citizens of our country and are certainly not dedicated and loyal to those people. “They rarely miss class“? So what! I never missed class either, and I don’t think that is anything that goes above or beyond what is expected of any student. “They’re there because they have a drive to succeed“? Succeed at what? Displacing more Americans so they can send more money to another country? “It is a joy to work with adults with purpose and reason; they are always trying to improve themselves.”? Yes, at the expense of American citizens who are toting the bill for these free-loading invaders! Margie Cummins
Eastern Baltimore County, Md.
Letter to the editor that appeared in the Smoky Mountain News the following week.
White Like Me
The key word in the immigration debate today--if you can call contemporary American anti-immigration demagoguery a debate--is the word “illegal.” “I’m not against immigrants,” they say. “Just illegal immigrants.” I would venture that most people declaring their aversion to illegal immigration would be hard pressed to explain the details of current U.S. immigration policy or the racism, nativism, economic injustice, political and religious discrimination, in short, the moral ironies that have marked America’s unique immigration history. We hope in this essay to make some of those details a little clearer.
According to the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights, “the expression ’illegal migrant’ should not be used. It contradicts the spirit and violates directly the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which clearly states in Article 6 that ’Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.’
--Aviva Chomsky, Immigrants and the law, “They Take Our Jobs! And 20 other myths about immigration”
The term “illegal” is currently used by anti-immigrationists to demonize those modern immigrants who by birth or circumstance do not possess nor would they ever be likely to acquire the “proper” papers to enter this country under a system originally devised in the 1920s that no less an American statesman than John F. Kennedy said “lacked both logic and reason.”
But also the term seems to be the modern manifestation of the historical distinction between the “old immigrants”--the millions of Europeans who flowed into this country in the 19th and early 20th centuries when there were essentially no immigration restrictions (for “white” people at least) and the current flow of “new immigrants”--Hispanics, Africans and Asians into this country in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st. After major legislation in 1924 and 1952 the fate of non-whites not being able to come to America as freely as the “old immigrants” had--the white European immigrants-- was sealed .
Before 1924 anti-immigration was simply a matter of overt racial discrimination. Today that same ethnic racism is merely called “illegal” because the immigration laws of this country are essentially an institutional form of racism. In other words, racism (the same racism that allowed for African slavery and American Indian relocation and extermination) has always been at the root of American anti-immigration attitudes. By the end of the 19th century the pressure of former major immigrant groups (so called “old immigrants”)-- mostly Irish, Germans and Italians--together with nativist whites of English, Scottish and Dutch descent, to stop the free flow of immigration (so called “new immigrants) that had been a key provision of the Declaration of Independence--these social pressures led eventually to the first major legislation in 1924 to create a quota system for U.S. immigration. This race based quota system--a formula derived from the 1920 U.S. census was specifically designed to insure that America remained a “white” country forever.
In his book “A Nation of Immigrants” (published originally in 1958) President John F. Kennedy (then still a U.S. Senator) wrote a concise and informative history of American immigration policy and the central and ongoing role that immigrants have played in American history. He was working on a revised edition of the book in 1963 when he was assassinated. The revision was completed and published in 1964 with an introduction by his brother, Robert, (then Attorney General) who stated that “it is my conviction that there are few areas in our law which more urgently demand reform than our present unfair system of choosing the immigrants we will allow to enter the United States. It is a source of embarrassment to us around the world. It is a source of anguish to many of our own citizens with relatives abroad. It is a source of loss to the economic and creative strength of our nation as a whole.”
John Kennedy begins his book by pointing out that the seminal document in American history, The Declaration of Independence, listed the unfair immigration restrictions of the British monarchy as one of the reasons for an American revolution. Later in the book he expands on this salient fact and on the theme of the positive value of immigrants that ran through the speeches of many of the founding fathers.
Immigration, or rather the British policy of clamping down on immigration, was one of the factors behind the colonial desire for independence. Restrictive immigration policies constituted one of the charges against King George III expressed in The Declaration of Independence. And in the Constitutional Convention James Madison noted, “that part of America which has encouraged them [immigrants] had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.” So, too, George Washington in his Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1795 asked all Americans “humbly and fervently to beseech the kind Author of these blessings…to render this country more and more a safe and propitious asylum for the unfortunate of other countries.”
Kennedy goes on to chronicle the massive migration of northern Europeans into this country during the nineteenth century, focusing especially on Germans, Irish and Scandinavians. He details their contributions to American development, industrialization and agricultural expansion and their successful integration into the American mainstream.
But Kennedy also tells the darker side of America’s immigration story.
But emotions of xenophobia--hatred of foreigners--and nativism--the policy of keeping America “pure” (that is, of preferring old immigrants to new)--continued to thrive. The increase in the rate of immigration in the 1820’s set off new waves of hostility, directed especially against the Irish….
In the 1850’s nativism became an open political movement. A secret patriotic society, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, founded about 1850, grew into the American party, whose members were pledged to vote only for native Americans. [Kennedy means here, native born white people, not American Indians]. When asked about their program they were instructed to answer, “I know nothing about it,” so people called them the Know-Nothings…
The legacy of the Know-Nothings lived beyond its life as an organization. The seeds of bigotry, fear and hatred bore fruit again in the years after the Civil War. The Ku Klux Klan launched a campaign of terrorism against the negroes…The First World War led to another outbreak of nativism. A new group, adopting the program of the Know-Nothings and the name of the Ku Klux Klan, came into being, denouncing everything its members disliked--Negroes, Catholics, Jews, evolutionists, religious liberals, internationalists, pacifist--in the name of true Americanism and of “Nordic superiority.”
Kennedy goes on to warn that though the KKK failed to take root in mainstream American society, such impulses continued to run just beneath the surface of American attitudes. Writing about these impulses 50 years ago this year, Kennedy’s words remain as fresh and frightening today as they were when he first wrote them. The irony is that official U.S. immigration laws and policies as well as public and private attitudes toward immigrants has continued to follow the underground river of white supremacy that is never discussed in polite conversation. Its peak (or perhaps we should say its nadir) lead inevitably to the Act of 1921 that limited new immigration by establishing a quota system. ”An era in American history had ended,” Kennedy writes. “We were committed to a radically new policy toward the peopling of the nation.”
The 1921 system, formalized in 1924, revised in 1929 and again in 1952 was based on the 1920 census and so the allotments per country were heavily weighted in favor of northern Europeans and severely limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe and Asia. Kennedy lists six motives behind the act of 1924. They were:
(1) post war isolationism; (2) the doctrine of the alleged superiority of Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic “races;” (3) The fear that “pauper labor” would lower wage levels; (4) the belief that people of certain nations were less law abiding than others; (5) the fear of foreign ideologies and subversion; (6) the fear that entrance of too many people with different customs and habits would undermine our national and social unity and order.
The use of a national origins system, Kennedy concludes is “without basis in either logic or reason. It neither satisfies a national need nor accomplishes an international purpose.” Emotion and xenophobia, buttressed by unjust and irrational laws had transformed the lines on the Statue of Liberty from “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” into something that should read, as Kennedy put it, “as long as they come from northern Europe, are not too tired, too poor or slightly ill, never stole a loaf of bread, never joined any questionable organization and can document their activities for the past two years.”
With the arrival of the quota system involving national origins came the term “illegal immigrant.” The Acts of 1921 and 24 barred Asians and “all people of color.” Interestingly western hemisphere immigration was not yet regulated--in part because, as immigration scholar Aviva Chomsky put it, “Congress couldn’t figure out what “race” Mexicans were.” But also, Chomsky contends, because Latin Americans, especially Mexicans, were needed as lower caste agricultural workers in the southwestern United States in the same way that blacks continued to play essentially the same lower caste roll they had played as slaves.
As Kennedy had pointed out, race and ethnicity had always played a key part in U.S. immigration policy. The exclusion of American Indians and African slaves from full citizenship until well into the 20th century are two of the darkest chapters in American history. But equally racist attitudes toward all “non-white” immigrants are well documented. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 deepened the discrimination against Chinese immigrants in that whereas Chinese immigrants needed for labor had been allowed to come to the U.S. to work but were not allowed to become U.S. citizens, the 1882 law simply denied them the right to come here at all. Chomsky quotes the political scientist Aristide Zolberg as calling the treatment of the Chinese over next half century, “the only successful instance of ’ethnic cleansing’ in the history of American immigration.”
But the Japanese and all Asians suffered as well. According to Chomsky, “California and ten other states banned Japanese residents from owning land through a prohibition on land ownership by ’aliens ineligible to citizenship’. Arkansas was even more specific, declaring that ’no Japanese shall ever purchase or hold title to any lands in the state of Arkansas’.” In the 1920s a U.S. Supreme Court ruling forbade Asian Indians from citizenship. The federal government made the policy retroactive stripping already naturalized Asian Indians of their citizenship. It was not until the 1940s that some non-white immigrants were allowed the right to naturalize and by 1952 all racial/national restrictions to citizenship were lifted. “Part of the probable impetus for expanding the categories of those eligible for citizenship,” Chomsky suggests, “was embarrassment at being the only country in the world besides Hitler’s Germany to uphold such a racially exclusive definition of citizenship.”
Despite some progress in the past 50 years, insofar as the myth of the American Dream goes and the historical philosophy of Manifest Destiny, little has changed in American immigration ideology from the racialization and colonizing impulses expressed in the 19th century by writers like Josiah Strong in whose book, “Our Country,” wrote that the Anglo-Saxon had “an instinct or genius for colonizing…He excels all others in pushing his way into new countries…This powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down on Central and South America and can anyone doubt that the results of this competition of races will be the survival of the fittest?”
From the conquest of Mexico by the U.S. and the taking of more than half their land in 1848 to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) now in force, to current efforts to build a wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean to keep Mexican’s out of “our country,” Josiah Strong’s prophecies about Anglo-Saxon subjugation of Mexicans have played themselves out in a seamless web of racism, criminalization and injustice toward the Mexican people. As Chomsky puts it, commenting on Strong’s philosophy,
Anglo-Saxons, then, were supposed to migrate, and to conquer everyone in their path. Non-Anglo-Saxons were supposed to stay put and be conquered--unless Anglo-Saxons decided to move them around to serve as a labor force.
The way in which the United States gained undisputed control of Texas and acquired California, Nevada, Utah , Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Wyoming is illustrative of the imperialist ideology of Manifest Destiny. Stephen F. Austin, the so-called “Father of Texas,” was allowed to immigrate to Mexico with a group of U.S. citizens (around 300 families). That small colony turned into an “illegal” flood of Anglo-Americans into the Mexican territory of Texas. Austin said in 1835 that “Texas should be effectually and fully Americanized in language, political principles, common origin, sympathy and even interest.” A year later Texas declared itself an independent Anglo-Saxon country and less than a decade later was admitted to the United States as a slave state. The borders of Texas were still in dispute when the U.S. invaded Mexico after a failed attempt to buy California and the rest of the area that is now the states mentioned above. The battles that ensued were essentially no contest and Mexico was paid less than half the amount originally offered and with that Mexico lost about 55% of its territory.
Among the U.S. military officers who took part in the invasion were Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S Grant. In his memoirs Grant had this to say about the U.S. annexation of more than half of Mexico.
I was bitterly opposed to the measure and to this day regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.
Grant later told a reporter,
I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. The wickedness was not in the way our soldiers conducted it but in the conduct of our government in declaring war. We had no claim on Mexico. Texas had no claim beyond the Nueces River, and yet we pushed on to the Rio Grande and crossed it. I am always ashamed of my country when I think of that invasion.
The use of African slaves in Texas continued through the Civil War and the use of Mexican peasants in a pattern of lower caste wage slavery that began with the arrival of the first ‘undocumented” Anglo-Saxon immigrants into Mexico and continued into the 1960s is as wicked and as clear a case of racial and social injustice as Grant had said the Mexican War itself had been.
The current “crisis,” confusion, and conflicting opinions about Latino immigration into the U.S. is the legacy of morally ambivalent attitudes that “white” Americans have had about lower caste workers--documented or undocumented, slave or free man--since this country was founded.
After the shameless land grab of half of Mexico, Mexican workers moved freely back and forth across the newly established “border” until well into the 20th century. Their industrious character, hard work and cheap price made them an essential tool for the Anglo-Saxon farmers and ranchers who developed the agricultural industry in America nto one of the finest in the world. It could not have been done without them and cannot be done without them today.
But what government and big business needed then and what they need now is a way to control the flow of immigration to to their own advantage--not the needs or aspirations of Mexican immigrants themselves. In 1924 both the Border Patrol and the term “illegal” immigrant came into being. The fear of deportation or incarceration without legal rights, the terror of the breakup of families--parents taken, children orphaned--became a normal part of the lives of Mexican workers in this country after 1924 regardless of whether their status was documented or undocumented immigrant, temporary migrant or bona fide U.S. citizen. During the Great Depression, for example, when jobs were scarce for Anglo-Saxons due to failed government and business policies, over 400,000 workers of Mexican decent were deported. 60% of them, according to Aviva Chomsky, were legal U.S. citizens. The reign of terror for undocumented workers continues to this day. Just this month, here in my own community in southern Appalachia, raids on local businesses have taken both Mexican men and women into custody and transported them to undisclosed locations in a nationwide network of private prisons under contract with the government. Mexican communities here are working to find relatives or foster care providers to care for the traumatized children. These raids can only be compared to the early treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.
The Southern Poverty Law Center(SPLC), whose mission is to expose illegal activities of racist hate groups, has documented violence against Latinos by a host of anti-immigration, neo- Nazi and white supremacy groups. In an article by Brentin Mock published on the SPLC web page in November, 2007 lists dozens of violent attacks on Latinos by ‘skin-heads” and other groups and individuals. Mock writes that the FBI reported that anti-Latino hate crimes rose 35% between 2003 and 2006. Mock suggests that such crimes are fueled by the likes of Laine Lawless, one of the founding members of the Minuteman movement, a largely discredited vigilante organization dedicated to patrolling the U.S./Mexican Border that has nevertheless garnered the support of high profile pubic figures like the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself a northern European immigrant. Mock quotes Lawless exhorting the leadership of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement to launch a campaign of violence and intimidation against Latino immigrants.
Steal the money from any illegal walking into a bank or check cashing place… Discourage Spanish speaking children from going to school. Be creative…create an anonymous propaganda campaign warning that any further illegal immigrants will be shot, maimed or seriously messed up crossing the border. Make every illegal feel the heat of being a person without status.
In Maryland near where the author of the hate letter about Deborah Gaddy’s praise for her immigrant students lives (Exibit B above), Mock documents the following incident in August 2007.
AUG. 23, 2007
Montgomery County, Md.
Victor Hernandez, a Honduran immigrant dishwasher, is walking home from work when he is kicked into unconsciousness by teenagers who rob him of $160. The two teens arrested tell police they were "amigo shopping" — seeking vulnerable Hispanic workers to rob. The Washington Post reports "alarmingly common" anti-immigrant crimes in the area of Washington, D.C., and its Virginia suburbs. Police from Montgomery County, Md., and neighboring counties tell the newspaper that the majority of local robbery victims since 2006 have been Latino.
In a foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of Kennedy’s “A Nation of Immigrants” Abraham H. Foxman of the Jewish Anti-defamation league (ADL) writes,
While racial superiority is no longer the parlance of our time, today hate groups rail against non-white immigration and urge Americans to “fight back” against the perceived “invasion” of the “white” United States by Hispanics from Mexico.
ADL has also become increasingly concerned about the virulent anti-immigration and anti-Hispanic rhetoric employed by a handful of groups that have positioned themselves as legitimate, mainstream advocates against illegal immigration in America. Unlike the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazis, and other white extremist groups who make no attempt to hide their racism and bigotry, these anti-immigrant groups often use more subtle language to demonize immigrants and foreigners. They are frequently quoted in the media [see William Gheen‘s comments in the Smoky Mountain News story above], they have been
called to testify before Congress, and often hold meetings with lawmakers and other public figures. However, under the guise of warning people about the impact of illegal immigration, these anti-immigrant groups often invoke the same dehumanizing, racist stereotypes as hate groups.
In her xenophobic letter to the editor (again, exibit B above) Margie Cummins claims that illegal immigrants may be destroying the American economy. But far from being a burden on the system, the facts show that undocumented Mexican workers pay billions of dollars every year in sales taxes, income taxes and social security taxes that they will never be able to recover or enjoy the benefits of. In North Carolina alone a recent study by the University of North Carolina School of Business concluded that undocumented Latino workers in the state contributed over 4 billion dollars to the North Carolina economy in 2004.
One of the most disturbing anti-immigration arguments comes not from right-wing white supremacists, ordinary bigots or xenophobes like Margie Cummins, but from a small but vocal contingent of left wing environmentalists who have attempted to twist genuine human population control issues into issues of immigration (see my 2004 essay on this topic elsewhere on this website.) In the essay collection, “Arguing Immigration“ Nick Ervin of the San Diego Sierra Club writing in 1993 quotes the human population expert, Paul Ehrlich, to buttress his argument for a “no net increase” in U.S. population growth policy.
Even the less well-off [immigrants] quickly acquire American super consuming habits. They tend to bring with them the reproductive habits of their societies, so that they also produce larger families of super consumers than those of us whose families immigrated earlier.
We see in this comment the same thread of “old” versus “new” immigrants that Kennedy followed throughout his account of the history of American immigration policies and attitudes. The argument of Ervin’s essay turns out to be just another thinly veiled attempt to demonstrate that largely “white” organizations like the Sierra Club are a good example of why we need to keep America “white.” We are obviously more enlightened!
The stresses that we all face today are in large measure problems of personal space. In the 1959 film of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” two Jewish families are forced into hiding in a hidden attic room in Amsterdam during Hitler’s reign of terror. Tempers flair of course in the overcrowded conditions. It was an ordeal for everyone. But there was a clear distinction between those who were willing to compromise and share and those who were petty and peevish. It was a moving human story and it was inspirational to watch the courage and generosity of some under such terrible conditions.
The reason that anti-immigration environmentalists seem so self-righteous is that the coin of their own trade (my trade as well) is the recognition of the finite resources remaining on the planet. There is no question that it is humans that are degrading the earth. But it is disingenuous and ,frankly, savage to want to wall off one small part of it to save a few forests and quite by accident give us Americans the space we have always felt we deserved by divine right. If we had listened to the Indians before we savaged them, occupied their lands and ’deported” them to nether regions far from their homelands, we might not be in the mess we are today. But we’re in it now and the belief by “white” Americans of European ancestry that poor Latinos, Asians and Africans don’t have as much right to live in this country as they do is a disgrace in a long line of disgraces that white racism has perpetrated on this planet. The “White Man’s Burden” is not his responsibility for the planet it is his lack of responsibility and the self-delusion of his moral superiority. “Be kind,” the poet said., “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle.” That seems a message that falls on deaf ears of many in the immigration debate.
I’ve tried to show in this essay that America’s immigration “crisis,” is a moral crisis. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free” is as John Kennedy pointed out, an ideal with far too many unspoken qualifiers. At the end of her book, Aviva Chomsky quotes the Uruguayan journalist, Eduardo Galeano, as saying,
The precarious equilibrium of the world depends on the perpetuation of injustice. So that some can consume more, people must continue to consume less. To keep people in their place, the system produces armaments. Incapable of fighting poverty, the system fights the poor.
As I write these lines, Barack Obama, a man born of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan woman, has just been nominated to run for President by the Democratic party. He has many of the same ideas about immigration reform and much of the idealistic vision that Kennedy had, and many people are hoping that the perspective of America’s first non-white president, will finally effect the implementation of a generous and just immigration policy in this country. As Kennedy put it,
Immigration is by definition a gesture of faith in social mobility. It is the expression of a positive belief in the possibility of a better life. It has thus contributed greatly to developing the spirit of personal betterment in American society and to strengthening the national confidence in change and the future. Such confidence, when widely shared, sets the national tone. The opportunities that America offered made the dream real, at least for a good many; but the dream itself was in large part the product of millions of plain people beginning a new life in the conviction that life could indeed be better, and each new wave of immigration rekindled the dream.
--Larry L. Dill
Waynesville, North Carolina
August 28, 2008
References and Related Material:
John F. Kennedy, “A Nation of Immigrants, 50th anniversary edition, Harper, 2008.
Aviva Chomsky, "They Take Our Jobs” and 20 other myths about immigration, Beacon Press, 2007
“Arguing Immigration,” edited by Nicolaus Mills, Simon and Schuster. 1994.
William Hoagland "Our Founding Illegals". New York Times, December 27, 2006
Barack Obama’s Position on Immigration www.barackobama.com/issues/immigration
Time Magazine Essay on Immigration, "On the Backs of Blacks" by Toni Morrison www.time.com/time/community/morrisonessay.html
Full article by Bretin Mock: Immigration Backlash: Violence Engulfs Latinos
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/immigration-backlash-violence-engulfs-latinos
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger praises anti-immigrant Vigilantes
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/29/GUV.TMP
Pew Hispanic Center’s Reports and Fact Sheets on Immigration http://www.pewhispanic.org/topics/index.php?TopicID=16
Larry L. Dill’s 2004 article on anti-immigration issues in the Sierra Club
www.newhopejournal.com/sierra.html
Larry L. Dill’s poem Home Depot www.newhopejournal.com/feb08.html
August 2008 New Hope Journal
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copyright 2008 by Larry L. Dill