An American disease for centuries

Xenophobia, an intense or irrational fear of things foreign, especially people, has been an American disease since some natives of this continent took an instant dislike for the white people in funny clothes landing on their shores 400 years ago.

Once those white people proved the natives’ suspicions were warranted by kicking them off their lands, the first white, Anglo Saxon Protestants had things pretty much to themselves for centuries.  

Then, other white people in not only funny clothes, but with strange languages and different religions, began to notice this new nation across the Atlantic and the opportunities it might offer.

The rest, as they say, is history and pretty ugly history at that. By the middle of the 19th century, the Irish potato famine and an economic depression in Germany sent millions of unwelcome aliens, unwelcome mostly because of their Catholic religion, to the United States.  

Those who got here first felt threatened and the result was the rise of the anti-immigrant American Party, also known as the Know Nothings, dedicated to banning Catholics from public office, a 21-year wait for citizenship, the deportation of foreign-born beggars and other criminals and mandatory Bible reading in the schools. At its peak, the party had “more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors and controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California,” according to the Smithsonian magazine.

The Know Nothing Party collapsed when its members couldn’t agree on the virtues of slavery, but their efforts to keep America their version of racially and religiously pure never quite died.

Yet the masses yearning to breathe free continued to come, even now.  In fact, just this month, the foreign-born population of the United States reached its highest share of the population, 13.7 percent, since 1910. It is expected to be only temporary.

Despite a prevailing view that immigrants are mostly semi-literate welfare candidates, rapists and murderers from Mexico, the new arrivals are more likely to be solid citizens from Asia. For years, the largest chunk of newcomers came from Latin America, but an analysis by the Brookings Institution indicates that 41 percent of those who’ve been here since 2010 are from Asia, with 39 percent from Latin America.

And about 45 percent of them are college educated, up from 30 percent in the first decade of the century. Only a third of American citizens over 25 have college degrees.

Up to the Civil War, the voting nation was hardly mixed at all — 60 percent British and 35 percent German, according to a forthcoming book by Geoffrey Wawro, “Sons of Freedom:  The Forgotten American Soldiers Who Defeated Germany in World War I.”  

But the wave of immigration early in the 20th century transformed the United States into “a turbulent melting pot,” with a third of America composed of either the foreign born or the children of foreign born parents. The British majority was reduced to 11 percent, overwhelmed by the Irish, Germans, Italians, Slavs and Hispanics and, of course, the descendants of those involuntary “immigrants” from Africa.

The people from new places weren’t universally welcomed and politicians were often eager to take up the crowd pleasing, anti-immigrant cause. Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful senator from Massachusetts, proposed a modest amendment to the immigration law that would have expanded the class of “excluded immigrants” from  “paupers, convicts and diseased persons” by adding “all Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks and Asiatics.” 

Lodge probably would have included Irish if he didn’t already have too many of them voting in Massachusetts, where one of them, John Kennedy, would later defeat Lodge’s grandson and namesake for the same Senate seat and become the first Catholic president. 

When America entered the war in Europe in 1917, Lodge’s friend, Teddy Roosevelt, correctly predicted that the draft, “the military tent,” would “rank next to the public school among the great agents of democratization” and it did. But three years after the war, Congress passed the National Origins Act, which effectively barred most immigrants who weren’t from western and northern Europe until Lyndon Johnson had it repealed in 1965.

So, as we observe the 100th anniversary of what we used to call Armistice Day, the end of the first World War, on Nov. 11, 1918, we might remember the immigrants who made up nearly a quarter of American draftees in 1917-18, the doughboys who spoke 49 languages in the trenches. 

All this is especially important when we have another immigration hard liner in the White House. On Oct. 1, just a month before we remember those hundreds of thousands of “half Americans,” as the German military derisively called them, the Trump administration plans to cap the number of refugees allowed here at 30,000 a year.

That number represents an all-time low — in any way you want to interpret the term.

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at rahles1@outlook.com.