Nation of immigrants?
The immortal words of poet Emma Lazarus, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” inscribed near the Statue of Liberty seem rather empty today in view of President Trump’s anti-immigrant stance. We Americans have generally accepted immigrants, but with reservations.
Historically we have encouraged immigrants mostly when we needed them, and often grudgingly even then. British and Germans to farm the Midwestern frontier, Irish for lowskilled construction jobs, to clean the houses of the wealthy and to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War, Scots-Irish to settle the southeastern frontier, Scandinavians to farm the more northern and colder states, Italians and eastern Europeans to mine the coal and iron ore and work the steel mills of Pennsylvania, Jews for the garment industry, and Chinese to build the western railroads. I didn’t mention Africans to work the southern plantations since they weren’t exactly immigrants in the true sense of the word.
Throughout our history we have tended to favor immigrants who look, talk and worship like the original American settlers: more British and German Protestants and less Irish, southern European and Latin American Catholics or Asians. During the mid-nineteenth century Irish immigration was even rumored to have been a conspiracy by the pope to Catholicize America. Sound far-fetched? Google up “The American Know-Nothing Party” and see for yourselves.
By the third generation immigrants have usually become less bound to the old countries and cultures and more Americanized. And by then they are usually accepted as real Americans. But this is rarely the case in Europe and is probably the cause of much of the current ethnic unrest there. But American feelings toward recent immigrants are not always welcoming either and Trump has been playing that for all it is worth politically.
Trump was right in saying most illegal drugs come into the U.S. through Mexico. But he failed to add that they do not enter by the same route as immigrants. Most drugs are ingeniously concealed in legal shipments aboard tractor-trailer rigs or hidden away in passenger automobiles. Just ask yourselves, would drug dealers entrust their valuable cargos to poor people fleeing hunger and poverty?
Trump claims high violent crime rates for the immigrants crossing our southern borders. But immigration records show that relatively few illegal border crossers have criminal records back home. And once they get here their crime rates are less than half those of nativeborn Caucasians. These statistics are based on FBI arrest and incarceration data for California and Texas, the states with the highest non-white immigrant populations.
Although it would be presumptive to suggest a causal relationship here, between 1990 and 2013 the U. S. foreignborn population grew from 7.9 percent to 13.1 percent, a 65 percent increase. At the same time the number of illegal immigrants more than tripled from 3.5 million to 11.2 million. But during this same period FBI records indicate that the U.S. violent crime rate declined by 48 percent and property crime by 41 percent. Does this mean that to further lower our crime rate maybe we should adopt a policy of open borders as our president falsely accuses the Democrats of favoring? That would certainly fit in with some of his other convoluted thinking.