The New Exchange » When People Flee to America’s Shores

Goose · 1/28/2017 12:42 pm

When People Flee to America’s Shores

We are a nation of immigrants and refugees. Yet we always fear who is coming next.

By Jamelle Bouie

On Monday, at the same time that Republican lawmakers and leaders urged the country to close its doors to Syrian refugees, President Obama called for compassion. People, he said during a press conference in Turkey after the G20 summit, should “remember that many of these refugees are the victims of terrorism themselves.”

“That’s what they’re fleeing,” he continued. “Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values. Our nations can welcome refugees who are desperately seeking safety and ensure our own security. We can and must do both.”

Obama’s remarks on the refugees are in stark contrast to what’s driving the national conversation. “Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country. Who knows who they are—some could be ISIS. Is our president insane?” asked real estate mogul Donald Trump, who leads the Republican race for president. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said basically the same, using more colorful phrasing. “If you bought a 5-pound bag of peanuts and you knew that in the 5-pound bag of peanuts there were about 10 peanuts that were deadly poisonous, would you feed them to your kids? The answer is no.”

For many liberals at least, it’s tempting to embrace the former as “American values” and dismiss the latter as all-too-typical pandering to our fears and public opinion. When 52 percent of Americans believe Syrian refugees will make the country less safe, it’s easy to demagogue against their entry. But this is self-deception, albeit a well-meaning one. If our history shows anything, it’s this: The United States is a nation that fears immigrants and refugees as much as it’s a nation of immigrants and refugees.

In 1848, Europe saw turmoil. On the continent, democratic and nationalist uprisings swept through France, Germany, and its neighbors, as reformists joined with middle- and working-class agitators to overturn monarchy and despotism. They won a few victories, but the reactionaries weren’t weak—in short order, forces led by Prussia and the Habsburgs in Vienna would crush the revolts and scatter these liberal movements to the winds. Meanwhile, in Ireland, a blight destroyed the potato crop and threatened millions with starvation, as British officials refused to help or intervene.

Both events sparked mass migrations to the United States, as hundreds of thousands of Germans and Irish left their homes to escape political persecution, conflict, and famine. They followed a decade of similar but more modest immgiration, stretching back to the 1830s, when the first major waves of German and Irish immigrants reached American shores.

The Americans who met them were conflicted. On one hand, they believed in the Christian universalism, democratic equality, and its attendent faith in assimilation—the conviction, writes late historian John Higham in Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, “that this new land would bring unity out of diversity as a matter of course.” On the other, however, these migrants were alien, possessed of a religion—Catholicism—that seemed incompatible, if not hostile, to republican government.

The question of the refugees isn’t if we’ll honor our values; it’s which ones we’ll choose.

More than 3 million people came to American shores in the decade after 1845—the greatest increase in our history, relative to the overall population—and they exerted an immediate impact on American life and institutions, transforming cities across the Northeast and bringing a new wave of aggressive nativism, culminating in the anti-immigrant “Know-Nothing” movement, which spawned a political party. Its platform? “Repeal of all naturalization laws … War to the hilt, on political Romanism … Hostility to all Papal influences, when brought to bear against the Republic … The sending back of all foreign paupers.”

The Know-Nothings burned hot—affiliated candidates swept several state legislatures in the 1854 elections—and quickly died out. By the end of the decade, sectional conflict over slavery had overcome immigration as the central issue of American politics. In the South, the Know-Nothing “American Party” dissolved in the face of Democratic dominance, and in the North, anti-slavery Know-Nothings were pulled into the nascent Republican Party.

Despite the end of the Know-Nothings, nativism persisted in national life, as part of the deep ambivalence and fear Americans have felt towards migrants, immigrants, and refugees of various stripes. You saw it in violent form, for example, during the waves of Chinese immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Chinese immigrants faced exclusion, discrimination, and outright pogroms from mobs of angry, resentful European Americans (some, no doubt, descended from Irish and German immigrants).

You saw it in the late 1930s, when Americans faced Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and had to choose: Would we take the victims of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, or reject them? On the question of refugee children, at least, Americans said no: 67 percent opposed taking in 10,000 refugee children from Germany, according to a 1939 poll from Gallup.

They were similarly unmoved by earlier groups of Jewish refugees, and their fears evoked the anxieties of their predecessors in 1848 and beyond. Americans, and their counterparts in Western Europe, feared foreign influence and dangerous ideologies like communism and anarchism. (Just a few decades earlier, in the living memory of many adults at the time, an anarchist killed an American president.)

Again and again, when faced with the question of refugees and immigrants, Americans are ambivalent and sometimes hostile. In 1975, for example, 62 percent said they feared Vietnamese refugees would take their jobs. Four years later, just as many said they didn’t want to admit “boat people” from Vietnam, who were fleeing the country’s repressive communist government. Americans said the same for Cuban refugees in the 1980s, Haitians in the 1990s, and most recently, the wave of refugee children from South America, which brought protests and fears of disease and infection.

You can even apply this dynamic to the Great Migration, the huge movement of black Americans from the South to cities and towns across the country. These Americans were internal refugees, fleeing lawlessness and racist terrorism. When they reached their destinations—cities like Detroit and Chicago—they faced deep hostility from existing residents, who blamed them for crime and economic disadvantage.

The broad point—the reason to focus on the these patterns of hostility—is to emphasize the extent to which they are part of the American tradition. In calling for acceptance of Syrian refugees, President Obama, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, and others are voicing one set of American values—the ones we want to hold ourselves to. But the same goes for Sen. Ted Cruz, Gov. Greg Abbott, and the other Republican governors and presidential candidates who want to reject them—those too are American values.

The question of the refugees isn’t if we’ll honor our values; it’s which ones we’ll choose. Will we embrace our heritage of inclusion or reject it for nativism? Will we be a country of actual open arms or one where our rhetoric is in recurring contrast to our actions?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/11/america_s_long_tradition_of_fearing_refugees_the_united_states_has_always.html

Common Sense · 1/29/2017 2:43 am

Legal immigrants are welcomed with open arms to the United States and are required to meet certain legal requirements.

Illegal immigrants and terrorists are not! A country must have borders!

Immigration Surging; 1.5 Million Arriving Annually

Total immigrant pop. hit record high in 2015 — 43.3 million

http://cis.org/immigration-Surging-1.5-Million-Arriving-Annually-

The just-released public-use data from the American Community Survey shows 1.5 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) arrived in 2014, and another 914,000 arrived in just the first six months of 2015.

Between three-fourths and two-thirds of the 1.5 million new immigrants settling in the country are legal immigrants, including permanent residents as well as long-term visitors (e.g. guest workers and foreign students). The remainder are new illegal immigrants.

Data released thus far for the first six months of the year indicate that new arrivals may have reached 1.6 million in 2015.2

The number who arrived in 2014 represent a 17 percent increase over the number who came in 2013, and a 38 percent increase over the number who came in 2011.

The overall immigrant population grew about twice as fast in the last two years as it did in the prior four years.3 The 1.9 million increase in the immigrant population in just the last two years almost equals the two million growth in the four-year period from 2009 to 2013.

It is important to note that arrivals are offset by those immigrants who leave the country each year and by normal mortality of about 300,000 annually among the existing immigrant population.4 Therefore, growth in the overall immigrant population is less than new arrivals.

As a share of the U.S. population, 13.5 percent are now immigrants — the highest percentage in 105 years. As recently as 1970, less than 5 percent of the population were immigrants.

Based on current trends and Census Bureau projections, the immigrant share of the population will surpass the highest level in American history seven years from now.

Last edited by Common Sense (1/29/2017 2:47 am)

Goose · 1/29/2017 6:36 am

That's not on topic.
Stop making a fool out of yourself, and leave us alone.

Last edited by Goose (1/29/2017 9:21 am)

Goose · 1/29/2017 6:41 am

America’s Long History of Immigrant Scaremongering

Conservatives claim that the young immigrants crossing the border are diseased and pose a dangerous public health risk. It’s a sad American tradition.

Since last October, the United States has caught tens of thousands of children crossing the border with Mexico, most fleeing violence in Central America. Thousands continue to come into the country, and President Obama has called the influx an “urgent humanitarian situation,” asking Congress for $3.7 billion in funding to deal with the children and families that have arrived.

Complicating the problem are growing protests against the immigrants. “I’m protesting the invasion of the United States by people of foreign countries,” said one person at a recent demonstration in Oracle, Arizona. “This is about the sovereignty of our nation.” And at a similar one in Murietta, California, demonstrators held signs saying “illegals out!” and called for the U.S. government to “stop illegal immigration.”

But for as much as this anger is organic, growing from fear and anxiety, it’s also true that conservative media figures have stoked tensions with wild and dishonest rhetoric on the supposed threat of new arrivals. “Dengue fever, 50 to 100 million new cases a year of dengue fever worldwide. In Mexico, it is endemic. It’s a terrible disease, for anyone that’s had it,” said Fox News host Marc Siegel, who continued with a warning. “There’s no effective treatment of it. It’s now emerging in Texas because of the immigration crisis.” Likewise, on her radio show, Laura Ingraham declared, “The government spreads the illegal immigrants across the country, and the disease is spread across the country.”

Republican politicians have joined in as well. “Reports of illegal immigrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus, and tuberculosis are particularly concerning,” wrote Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey in a recent letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His colleague, Texas Rep. Randy Weber, sounded a similar note in an interview with conservative pundit Frank Gaffney: “I heard on the radio this morning that there have been two confirmed cases of TB—tuberculosis—and either one or two confirmed cases of swine flu, H1N1. … We’re thinking these are diseases that we have eradicated in our country and our population isn’t ready for this, so for this to break out to be a pandemic would be unbelievable.” And Rep. Louie Gohmert—no stranger to the offensive outburst—told conservative publication Newsmax that “we don’t know what diseases they’re bringing in.”

“Asians were portrayed as feeble and infested with hookworm, Mexicans as lousy, and eastern European Jews as vulnerable to trachoma ...”
Scholars Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern

But we do, and the reality is nowhere close to dire: While a handful of reports suggest there are incoming children with illnesses like measles and tuberculosis, the vast majority of these minors are healthy and vaccinated. Moreover, according to the Department of Homeland Security, border agents are required to screen “all incoming detainees to screen for any symptoms of contagious diseases of possible public health concern.” In short, the odds that migrant children would cause a general infection of anything are slim to none, right-wing claims notwithstanding.

These facts are easy to find, but it’s not a surprise that immigration opponents would claim otherwise. For as long as there have been immigrants to the United States, there has been scaremongering about their alleged disease and uncleanliness. What we’re hearing now, put simply, is an update on an old script.

“On the morning of 19 May 1900,” writes American University professor Alan M. Kraut in an essay titled “Foreign Bodies: The Perennial Negotiation over Health and Culture in a Nation of Immigrants,” “the Chinese community of San Francisco found itself under siege in the name of state and municipal security. It was not fear of bombs or terrorist attack that inspired officials to commit a wholesale violation of civil liberties that morning; it was fear of disease, specifically bubonic plague.”

That wasn’t the first quarantine of San Francisco’s Chinatown, and it wouldn’t be the last. Nor was it a surprise—local authorities long regarded Chinese immigrants as a threat to public health, a manifestation of long-standing nativist fears. To wit, notes Kraut, “The Irish were charged with bringing cholera to the United States in 1832. Later the Italians were stigmatized for polio. Tuberculosis was called the ‘Jewish disease.’ ” The entire discourse of 19th- and early 20th-century politics was saturated with attacks on immigrants as diseased intruders to the body politic. Indeed, this dialogue culminated, in 1891, to Congress, with revision of the 1882 Immigration Act to exclude “persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease” from entry into the United States.

Asians were portrayed as feeble and infested with hookworm, Mexicans as lousy, and eastern European Jews as vulnerable to trachoma, tuberculosis, and—a favorite ‘wastebasket’ diagnosis of nativists in the early 1900s—‘poor physique,’ ” write scholars Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern in a 2002 paper on “the persistent association of immigrants and disease in American society.”

Vivid examples of this association aren’t hard to find. “[E]very ship from China brings hundreds of these syphilitic and leprous heathens,” writes one editor in an issue of Medico-Literary Journal. Likewise, wrote one columnist in an Oct. 3, 1907 edition of the Princeton Union, “[German immigrants] produce large and swarming hives of children who grow up dirty, ignorant, depraved, and utterly unfit for American citizenship.” And in a Dec. 1, 1906 edition of the Deseret Evening News, one writer complained of “runners” in southern and eastern Europe who “tell fairy tales about the prosperity of the many immigrants now in America and the opportunities we offer to aliens. It is by such means that paupers and diseased persons are induced to make the journey, only to find that they are shipped back upon landing.”

Mass participation in World War II changed American perspectives of European immigrants, and later, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ended national quotas and opened the doors to a huge numbers of immigrants from around the world. Still, the link between immigration and disease has persisted through the 20th century and into the 21st.

In the 1980s, for example, the influx of Haitian refugees merged with the AIDS crisis to produce a new wave of anti-immigrant discrimination. “When AIDS appeared suddenly in the 1980s,” writes Markel and Stern, “it was quickly conflated with deviant sexuality and several minority groups, ranging from gays and intravenous drug abusers to Haitians and Africans.” In 1983, the appearance of HIV among several Haitian detainees led the CDC to add the group to its list of “recognized vectors” for the virus, and in 1990—acting on potent AIDS stereotypes—it banned all Haitians from donating blood in the United States. What’s more, that same year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service began to detain and quarantine HIV-positive immigrants at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

And in 1993, echoing earlier language against “paupers and diseased person,” Oklahoma Sen. Don Nickles introduced a bill prohibiting the entry of all HIV-positive immigrants on economic grounds, arguing that—if we didn’t—“it will almost be like an invitation for many people who carry this dreadful, deadly disease, to come into the country because we do have quality health care in this country … and jeopardize the lives of countless Americans and will cost U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars.”

Beyond the present situation, the most recent attacks on immigrants as carriers of disease came during the Bush administration. In 2005, an episode of Lou Dobbs Tonight falsely asserted, “We have some enormous problems with horrendous diseases that are being brought into America by illegal aliens,” including 7,000 cases of leprosy in the past three years. On his radio show, Bill O’Reilly agreed that immigrants were crossing the border with “tuberculosis, syphillis, and leprosy,” and in 2006, Pat Buchanan claimed “illegal aliens” were responsible for bedbug infestations in “26 states.” In reality, health officials attribute the growth in bedbugs to “widespread use of baits instead of insecticide sprays” for pest control.

Today, anti-immigrant protesters hold signs asking Washington to “Save our children from diseases,” while right-wing lawmakers fret about disease screening and spread fears of infection and contamination. In doing so, both draw from a long history of ugly nativism and prejudice dressed as concern for public health. And you don’t have to be a liberal, or support immigration reform, to see that it’s a disgrace.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/07/immigrant_scaremongering_and_hate_conservatives_stoke_fears_of_diseased.html

Goose · 1/29/2017 1:24 pm

My grandparents.
Immigrants from a poor, war torn land.
At the time they came, the good folk of America were told that the Italians would bring crime and disease.
Fear and ignorance are as old as Man.

tennyson · 1/29/2017 1:59 pm

Fear has been the Number One selling point in getting Trump elected.

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