Satire: The Immigration Apocalypse?

By Laurie Baron

With the expiration of Title 42, right-wing politicians and pundits fear the nation will be inundated by illegal aliens with dark pigmentation who will bring crime, drugs, and terrorism and replace white Americans as the majority. Here are some of their dire warnings:

“Vast multitudes of foreign-born citizens eventually will be naturalized and go to the polls, ignorant of American interests, without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American affairs.” My mistake— this was said by Henry Winter Davis, a “No Nothing” Congressman from Maryland in 1856, in opposition to Irish immigration.

“Doesn’t a country have the right to say, what kind of people shall be allowed to come here? … Should not a superior race protect itself from contact with inferior ones? Are not the white people the owners of this continent?” Wait a minute! This is how Frederick Douglass not Tucker Carlson’s replacement summarized the arguments for ending Chinese immigration in the 19th Century. He continued, “Though they come as the waves come, we shall be stronger if we receive them as friends and give them a reason for loving our country and our institutions. They will find here a deeply rooted, indigenous, growing civilization, augmented by an ever-increasing stream of immigration from around the world.”

“Statistics show that people from Latin America commit several times more crimes than people the English speakers of North America. Gangs and drug cartels are institutions of great influence among the Hispanics who take the law into their own hands.” I changed some proper nouns. It should read Southern Italy instead of Latin America and Northern Italians instead of English speakers of North America.” This was a finding in the Congressional Dillingham Commission Immigration Report of 1911 which called for strict quotas on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

“Let’s keep America for our boys and girls. Let’s give American jobs to American citizens. Let’s empty our prisons of alien criminals and send them back to their native lands. Let’s deport those alien agitators who are eternally advocating a change in our form of government. Let’s do our best to save our country from destruction by alien-enemy forces which are boring from within. Let’s save America for Americans.” You probably assume Donald Trump proclaimed this, but it comes from a speech by Senator Robert Reynolds in 1939 objecting to a bill to let 20,000 predominantly Jewish German children enter the United States to escape Nazi persecution.

If we want to be consistent with American history, we should not only close our borders to those currently fleeing Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, but also expel the masses who immigrated here from Ireland, China, Italy, and Germany in the past and let indigenous Americans, the first “owners of this continent,” decide whether the Anglo-Saxon Europeans who settled the United States before the undesirables arrived should be permitted to stay.

Baron is professor emeritus at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via [email protected]. This article has been republished from San Diego Jewish World which, along with The Moderate Voice, is a member of the San Diego Online News Association.