From President Donald Trump’s build the wall rhetoric to the month-long government shutdown, our nation can too often be seen these days as off its moorings in the way we treat the newly arrived. In a state of the union speech described by some as less bombastic that his usual twitter rants, the president still railed against the “flood of drugs and gangs” he says are ruining the country.
Unfortunately, anti-immigrant attitudes hearken to the founding of the nation. “Remember, remember, always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a 1938 speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Roosevelt was trying to tamp down that era’s anti-immigrant virulence. But even the leader of the New Deal wasn’t immune to xenophobia and political expediency. Under his administrations, Japanese-Americans were shuttled into internment camps and Jewish exiles fleeing Nazism were turned away at American shores.
Historians say that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Unless you are a Native American, every citizen of this nation –and especially New England – is related to someone who came from somewhere else.
In the warmth of nostalgia and family legend, all immigrants came here legally. They stepped off a boat into nuclear families speaking English and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
The reality, of course, was much different than the tales told at family gatherings that fuel some of today’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric.
The Irish were the first Roman Catholic immigrants who arrived to our shores in large numbers.
Between 1810 and 1845, about 5,000 Irish settlers landed in Rhode Island. They worked as ditch-diggers, and coal miners, building railroads in Providence and digging the Blackstone Canal. Then in the mid-1840s, the potato blight hit Ireland, bringing thousands of starving Irish to the ports of Providence and Boston.
What they faced when they arrived was hostility from the Protestant majority. Newspapers in both Providence and Boston sprouted No Irish Need Apply ads on the jobs pages. Later, Catholic convents in Boston were burned. The Ku Klux Klan campaigned against Catholics.
Foreign born workers were valued mainly as cheap labor; they weren’t allowed to vote in Rhode Island until late in the 19th century. Even then, naturalized citizens in Rhode Island faced property qualifications before they were allowed to vote.
And so it went for the immigrant groups who came after the Irish. French Canadians escaped hardscrabble farms for jobs in the textile mills of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Mill life was tough; twelve hour days were the norms. Children quit school to work in factories and lost limbs in machinery.
Sometimes, it’s hard to believe much has changed. Longtime NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw said recently that Latino immigrants ought to learn English and better assimilate into American society. He quickly apologized, but he voiced an opinion heard often these days.
The same was said of French-Canadians in the 1920s If the debates over bilingual education seem divisive nowadays, consider Woonsocket. In 1922, a Yankee-controlled state government approved an English-only law that required all children –even those in religious schools—to be taught solely in English. The French rebelled; the dispute wasn’t resolved until the Vatican ordered French Catholics to obey the law.
One element that’s different today is that we live in a hyper-connected global village where speed often overrides perspective. This instant social media world has created the disease of impatience and reckless conclusion jumping, from the president on down to local talk radio screeds.
Most immigrants come here still seeking a better life and a way to earn a living. Some are fleeing murderous regimes, others want to raise children in a free society.
It’s way past time for our politicians to cease the contentious rhetoric. Let’s find a path of citizenship for the law-abiding, figure out a way to secure borders, keep the government open and get on with the business of setting an example for our broken world.
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday morning at 6:45 and 8:45 and at 5:44 in the afternoon.