Thread: America's greatest paranoia

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America's greatest paranoia
Fear of immigration is misguided belief
- Cynthia E. Bass
Sunday, April 23, 2006


If America is a nation of immigrants, why is it that immigration remains so hotly debated?

It's just a new version of a very old debate. Immigration has been controversial in this country ever since its inception. At the heart of the controversy is fear. The real problem with immigrants is -- and always has been -- fear that these outsiders will overwhelm and undermine the unique way of life that makes America great.

But why, if America is so great, should we see ourselves as so vulnerable? For if history is any guide, this perception of cultural vulnerability is, in the long run, always wrong.

Always? Yes. America has long been awash with immigrants, all bringing in remarkably un-American ways of life and thought -- and, often, language -- yet we never have drowned in this flood. All these outsiders have ultimately become Americans, despite over two centuries' worth of nativist predictions of imminent doom.

One of our earliest, and most outspoken, doomsayers was Ben Franklin. He was very concerned about a certain nonwhite population he saw overrunning his beloved Pennsylvania: The Germans! Disliking what he labeled their "tawny" complexions, their refusal to learn English (sound familiar?), and their "Germanizing" ways, he wrote: "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens?"

Franklin's worries, of course, were groundless; not only did his "tawny Aliens" rapidly turn into integrated -- and English-speaking -- Americans, but many of them soon became anti-immigrant themselves.

The first (of many) nationwide anti-immigrant protests came early in the 19th century, in response to the first (of many) waves of Irish immigrants, all fleeing the first (of many) potato famines. These protests, by and large, were religiously based: immigrants from Protestant Europe were tolerated, if not always welcomed, but the Irish were Roman Catholic, which America emphatically was not.

These protests coalesced with the founding of the American Party -- also known, and deservedly so, as the Know-Nothings -- in the turbulent years before the Civil War. The Know-Nothings were originally the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, a name derived from their ritualistic reply when asked what they stood for: "I know nothing." Actually, they stood for something quite specific: anti-Catholic immigration. They saw the "hordes of Papists" (and hungry Papists at that) as a dangerous threat to the "nature" of Protestant America, and thus to America itself.

Furthermore, they asked, where would these immigrants' loyalties lie over time: the United States, or in Rome, with the Pope?

The Know-Nothings ran for office, with some local success. San Francisco had a Know-Nothing mayor, Stephen Palfrey Webb, for eight months in the mid-1850s. (Perhaps Mayor Gavin Newsom hopes to absolve the city of this embarrassment through his thoroughly pro-immigration position.) However, they never succeeded in pushing through any anti-immigrant legislation.

Irish Catholics continued to pour into the country. And just like the "tawny" Germans, they too became thoroughly Americanized while strengthening, not weakening, the American "nature."

After the Civil War, fear of immigrants took a nasty pseudo-scientific turn, influenced by faux-Darwinist thought claiming "survival of the fittest" meant the superiority of Western Europeans (and, of course, us). Anti-immigrant sentiment now became more concerned with race than religion. Attention shifted toward the Southern and Eastern Europeans flooding our shores. Italians, Poles, Russians, Greeks: all were proclaimed to be of a different race from Americans, incapable of (and uninterested in) assimilation, and clearly about to swamp the "real" America with their babble and babies. A popular poem of the time captures all this: "O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well / To leave the gates unguarded?"

And on top of all this, moaned the nativists, were the Chinese, who were so foreign -- their speech, their clothes, their religion, even their food -- that they were perhaps not merely another race, but another species. From the 1880s on, anti-Chinese laws, particularly in California, became increasingly stringent, creating a "slammed door" policy that remained firmly in place for decades.

Southern and Eastern European immigration was allowed to continue until the 1920s. (It was argued that if we didn't let "them" in, who would do the jobs "real Americans" never would do -- work in the slaughterhouse, roll the cigars, stitch gloves in an attic for pennies a week?)

Between 1860 and 1921, over 30 million immigrants found a new home in America, and so did their children and grandchildren.

For an example of precisely how many immigrants arrived every day, see last Sunday's Chronicle with its reprint of its April 16, 1906, front page, two days before the Great Earthquake. In just one day, the paper reported, 11,839 immigrants entered the country.

Then, in 1921, the ax fell. A series of immigration restriction laws, complete with quotas, tightly restricted almost all access to America, from Angel Island to Ellis Island. The nativists sighed with relief; at long last their ancient nightmare -- that immigration was about to dilute the essence of America -- had been expunged.

The nativists were right that these new laws would greatly restrict immigration (at least legal immigration); they did then and they still do today.

But they were -- and remain -- very wrong in their fear that immigration dilutes some sort of quintessential American identity.

Like the Germans of the 18th century and the Irish Catholics of the mid-19th century, the children of those "inferior" Eastern and Southern Europeans and Asians all eventually became thoroughly Americanized.

As we confront today's immigration issues, we should banish the fear that America will somehow be transformed in an inimical way by today's newcomers. By all means improve border security; and by all means address illegality. But let's do both with a confidence that today's immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- will, if given the chance that the rest of us have had, become Americans.

Cynthia E. Bass is an East Bay author and historian who writes frequently for Insight. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

America should be sending this message to any who want a "chance" in this country: Come to America LEGALLY. Law breakers need not apply.

By all means improve border security; and by all means address illegality. But let's do both with a confidence that today's immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- will, if given the chance that the rest of us have had, become Americans.

The standard mealy-mouthed, meaningless weasel words we've come to expect from so many "enlightened" writers.