Republican presidential wannabes were hoping to keep the “immigration issue” on a backburner, at least during the primaries. However, the meteoric and dumbfounding rise of Donald Trump right along with — or perhaps because of — his ugly and demeaning rhetoric about a certain “class” of immigrants and even about their U.S. born children and grandchildren, has made “immigration” the number one rallying cry for a certain base of the Republican Party.
A recent article right here at The Moderate Voice (TMV) in the form of a ten-question quiz designed to “find out which Americans are enablers [allowing those who are here illegally to remain in the U.S. illegally] and which aren’t” fits that mold, in my opinion.
In a powerful commentary, TMV’s Managing Editor, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, posed 10 questions of her own. They ask who — in fact and historically — have been the real “illegal immigrants” on our continent; who in fact have abused, raped and slaughtered the “legal residents” of this continent; who the “h” were their “enablers.”
And, talking about “papers” — about “undocumented immigrants” — Estés, says:
No progress will ever be made until one starts with the fact that those screeching about ‘papers’ now are often the descendants of many who came without papers of agreement of any kind from those Native peoples already here. Trace back to the 1600 in the now USA?
While Dr. Estés, focuses on how the original undocumented immigrants treated the legal residents, over at the Washington Post, opinion columnist Catherine Rampell claims, “America has always been hostile to immigrants” and asks,“At what point, in this great nation of immigrants, did calling someone an ‘immigrant’ become such an insult?”
She writes:
Recent weeks — on the campaign trail and elsewhere — have been filled with ugly rhetoric about immigration status or other ethnic impurities, even when the target of such attacks has entered the country legally, is a naturalized American or is even an American by birth but descended from the wrong kind of parents. Witness Donald Trump’s proposal to deport first-generation Americans whose citizenship is conferred upon them, constitutionally, by birth. Witness legions of white nationalists lining up behind him, and the coded “dog-whistle politics” that other candidates are invoking to attract their own anti-immigrant coalitions.
Rampell notes “[e]ven presidential contenders who are themselves the children of immigrants and lucky legatees of the great American melting pot are denouncing the uncontrollable invasion of foreigners.”
She continues:
Their appeals to nativism are often cloaked in the procedural legalese of having the right “papers,” but at heart the message isn’t really about legal status: To this crowd, anyone who doesn’t look sufficiently white or sound sufficiently Anglophonic is presumed illegal until proven otherwise.
Those “papers” again!
Rampell then claims that while “it’s tempting to blame Trump for igniting the fires of xenophobia, betraying the great tradition of embracing immigrant strivers…the embarrassing truth is that the United States has always been hostile to immigrants. Or at least, a strong and vocal faction has been. This nativist streak dates back even to the earliest days of the republic.”
Rampell provides several examples of such a “nativist streak,” including quotes describing Ellis Island as really being “the monument to border control,” and “’the first wall,’ often used to repel undesirables.”
Even “Lady Liberty” does not escape Rampell’s critique:
You know Lady Liberty’s entreaty to give her “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? Emma Lazarus penned that sonnet when the United States began implementing strict laws to keep the huddled masses out. A year earlier, in 1882, Congress had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first major immigration law to restrict entry of a specific ethnic group, after complaints that the Chinese were polluting American culture and appropriating American jobs.
When I flew into New York as a young immigrant almost 60 years ago, Lady Liberty was the first unforgettable sight of my new homeland. She has kept her promise to me personally and I have never looked back.
Whether Lady Liberty has kept her promise to the millions of other immigrants who preceded and followed me, is something for each one of them to decide.
I read the rest of Rampell’s essay from my perspective and trust everyone else will do the same.
However, one thing I know for sure, as an immigrant myself: I will never say “After me, no more, please,” something that according to Rampell is, “unfortunately, a persistent refrain in American history.”
Above all, I will never condone the deportation of millions of law-abiding, undocumented immigrants who have been living and working in and contributing to our country for many years nor will I tolerate the denial of citizenship to their sons and daughters who were born in our country.
Read the full column here.
Lead image: www.shutterstock.com
Follow Dorian de Wind on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ddewind99
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.