Peter Rachleff: Don’t Give Us Your Tired, Poor
[Peter Rachleff is a history professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.]
The “nativism” manifested in SB1070, Arizona’s new law ordering police to challenge residents for proof of citizenship or immigration papers, is nothing new. Such hostility to newcomers — displayed in rallies and demonstrations, expressed in politics and codified in laws — has been an all-too-frequent presence throughout U.S. history.
As Americans prepare to debate not only the Arizona law (and its clones proposed in eleven other states, including Minnesota) and comprehensive immigration reform, we would do well to study our nation’s history. Such an examination reveals that these incidents, movements, debates, and laws have never been about immigrants alone, but have had other, underlying, causes. Furthermore, their impact on our body politic and culture have reverberated far beyond immigration legislation and “legalizing” immigrants.
In the 1840s and 1850s, as abolitionists sought to make slavery the top political issue of the day, Southerners and Northerners who wanted to protect the inter-regional economic links it had nurtured (the cotton textile industry, the transatlantic shipping industry, banking, and insurance), sought a strategy to depoliticize the slavery issue.
The influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany, amidst the economic challenges posed by the rising industrial revolution, on the one hand, and sporadic panics and depressions, on the other hand, fed white working-class fear in the North and insecurity among small white farmers in the South. Political opportunists, newspaper publishers, and clergy, in numerous cities and states, focused these fears on Catholic immigrants, charging that they might not only take “American” jobs but might vote as the pope would order them.
Thus was born the “American Party,” which contested, with some success, for gubernatorial and mayoral offices. Activists in this movement proudly referred to themselves as “Know Nothings,” which meant, to some, that they were sworn to secrecy, and, to others, that they needed know nothing but where you were born.
While the “Know Nothings” failed to keep the debate over slavery out of American political life, anti-Catholicism would remain a powerful force in American politics and culture, re-emerging not only in the early 20th century but even in the election of 1960, when Richard Nixon suggested that John F. Kennedy, when confronted by a crisis, would make his first call to the pope.
The U.S. economy slid into a deep depression in the mid-1870s, as layoffs, high unemployment and wage cuts swept the country. The national government lost the focus, the political support and the resources to continue to push the reconstruction of the South, abandoning the newly freed slaves to share-cropping, Jim Crow segregation, and ultimate disenfranchisement. Unions, many of them newly organized in the postwar years, crumbled, and workers’ strikes were defeated. In the summer of 1877, a railroad strike spread from Maryland to Missouri and Illinois, but it was crushed by federal troops who had just been withdrawn from the South.
Once again, political and economic turmoil turned into an outcry over immigration. In California, disgruntled workers, led by Irish immigrants, organized themselves into the Workingmen’s Party. They made the exclusion of Chinese immigrants their rallying cry, won key elections, and called on the U.S. Congress to take action against the Chinese.
The California Workingmen’s Party contended that Chinese immigrants were “coolies” who undercut “free” labor because of their low living standards and their inherent inability to stand up for themselves. Politicians, supported by newspaper publishers, stepped forward to lead this hue and cry, to direct workers’ anger about their economic difficulties onto these non-white immigrants, to secure their own elections to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and to call for national legislative action banning Chinese immigrants. In the spring of 1882, with a broad base of support, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was the first law to prohibit the immigration of a racially-defined people.
The Chinese Exclusion Act, which would remain on the books until 1943, was also the first law to render some immigrants “illegal.” New Chinese immigrants continued to enter the country, some with false documents, some by crossing the Canadian or Mexican borders, some by claiming kinship with Chinese immigrants already here legally.
American popular culture — via cartoons, newspaper editorials, songs and plays, jokes and apocryphal stories — added “sneaky” and “illegal” to the existing repertoire of stereotypes (dirty and diseased, opium-smoking, gambling, feminized males) of the Chinese which had blossomed in the late 19th century. These stereotypes plagued all Chinese and Chinese-Americans, even if they had entered the country legally or been born here, and they were applied to other Asians who would seek admittance to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act itself would serve as a template for the racial profiling of immigrants from other parts of the world.
At times, nativists combined racism with anti-Catholicism. In 1904, an orphan train, originating in New York City, arrived in the eastern Arizona copper mining communities of Clifton and Morenci. The priests and nuns in charge were eager to place their last forty Irish and Irish-American children with Catholic families. Here, these families were Mexican-American, descendants of those Mexicans who awoke one morning in 1848 to discover that the border had moved and they now lived in the United States. (“We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”) Some of them had inter-married with Apaches who lived in this part of Arizona where Geronimo had been born. They became the primary workforce in the copper mines which opened in the 1870s. And now they were ready to become the parents of these children.
But their white neighbors would have none of it. A mob of angry men and women went door to door in the Mexican-American neighborhood. Some were armed with guns, some carried buckets of tar and feathers, and some carried rope and gasoline. They demanded that the families give the white children to them, which they did. When some of the Mexican-American families turned to the courts, a local judge and the regional appellate court upheld the mob’s actions, and, eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Although many of the Mexican-Americans had lived in eastern Arizona longer than their white antagonists, their rights were not recognized.
This inter-weaving of religious intolerance with racism swept the United States over the first two decades of the 20th century. Immigrants from Italy, the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires were considered not-white. They were depicted as other “races,” their place in the U.S. society, economy, and culture compounded by their Catholic, Jewish, or Orthodox religious practices. When they sought employment or housing, when they married or wanted to start a church or synagogue, they often faced discrimination and hostility. And when the economy experienced difficulties, they made convenient scapegoats and targets.
Today’s heated discussions about “comprehensive immigration reform” and racial profiling would be on firmer ground with a review of the impact of nativism in our history. If we understood not only its depth but also its connection to many other issues, we might build a path to a more humane approach not only to receiving strangers but also to understanding ourselves and our place in the world.
We might reflect on the influences of religious intolerance and racism in our past treatment of immigrants, and more readily acknowledge the widespread anxieties that underlie their contemporary manifestations: unemployment, the mortgage system collapse, the instability of health insurance, the volatility of global markets, climate change and environmental disasters, even the fear of a black president. An historical analysis of nativism’s current resurgence could clarify these segregationist urges for what they are, and redirect our collective attention to what really ails us.