Italy was once a ‘s--thole’ country

Italia: Land of prosciutto. parmesan, pasta, vino rosso, Tuscan hill towns, Roman ruins, Sophia Loren on a Vespa. What a s--thole. Given the romantic view modern Americans have of Italy, it’s hard to imagine that, a century ago, our forbears would have considered it fit for an outhouse. But they did.

There’s an old saying that “Those who know history are doomed to watch idiots repeat it.” For any historian of immigration, this week’s talk of “s--thole” countries and Norwegian superiority eerily echoes the rhetoric of our last great anti-immigrant crusade a century ago.

Around the turn of the last century, an influx of Italians from southern Italy (and Jews from Eastern Europe) created an antiimmigrant hysteria in the United States. Intrinsic to this hysteria was the belief that those of Northern European descent were genetically superior to those of southern and Eastern European descent. The “pollution” of “American stock” by the newcomers was seen as the first step in the downfall of a racially superior “American” race.

Sen. David Reed (RPa.) authored legislation to do something about this by establishing a quota system wherein the number of immigrants from any particular nation would be based on the percentage of each nationality recorded in the 1890 census — a strategic choice aimed at excluding immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, who mostly came after that date.

Reed did not beat around the bush when explaining the purpose his proposed law, writing in The New York Times that “our incoming immigrants should hereafter be of the same races as those of us who are already here, so that each year’s immigration should so far as possible be a miniature America, resembling in national origins the persons who are already settled in our country.”

In other words, few (or preferably no) Italians or Jews allowed.

Reed’s legislation would pass the Senate and become the National Origins Act of 1924, which would severely restrict immigration to the U.S. for the next fourplus decades, until it was largely repealed in 1965.

It worked: Thanks to the 1924 National Origins Act, the annual quota for Italy was set at less than 4,000, effectively choking off the flow of “mongrel” ethnicities.

And the policies that grew out of that hysteria would have tragic consequences. America’s doors were closed to Jews desperately seeking to escape the Nazi regime, leading us to do things as drastic as send back boats full of refugees — like, in 1939, the St. Louis, many of whose passengers later perished in the Holocaust.

After the law was repealed, the 20th century Southern Italian immigrants who were able to begin lives in United States left behind enormous challenges in their home country. Immigrants from places such as Sicily and Sardinia were fleeing crushing poverty caused by political and social turmoil.

They faced continued hardship when they arrived penniless in the United States, being unable to speak the language, having left family members behind and encountering open and often violent discrimination. Through their hard work and sheer determination, as well as the culture they brought with them, they were able to assimilate and have, of course, been key in shaping the identity of America today (think about the last time you ate a slice of pizza).

As awful as their conditions were, they pale in comparison to what many ordinary people in Haiti and El Salvador are experiencing, and trying to flee, today.

The 2010 earthquake affected the lives of 3 million Haitian citizens; approximately 220,000 people were killed and 1.5 million were made homeless. Similarly, in El Salvador, gang violence fomented by corrupt politicians has left the country with one of the world’s highest homicide rates.

Ordinary people from these nations, and from African countries, are running for their lives to the U.S. — when they can find a way to get here, which itself is no easy task.

America has always been a beacon of hope to those living in countries with limited opportunity for advancement or where freedom was hard to come by. And those lucky enough to make it to our shores from such nations have often been undyingly grateful for the second chance America afforded them, becoming some of our most patriotic and accomplished citizens as a result.

It’s a feature, not a bug: Our gleaming city on a hill has in no small part been built by people from s--tholes..