IMO America’s greatness is based on its founding principles, the Boston Tea Party to oppose King George and taxation, the War of Independence, George Washington and the Constitution written by/for eleven “states” of the Republic.
Indeed America was a beacon of freedom for peoples facing religious persecution or utter economic disaster as the Irish and failure in agriculture (potatoes). America was a nation for immigrants during the 19th century, white Europeans seeking the opportunities of America’s expansion westward into the vast wasteland, empty except for roaming bisons and red-faced indigenous peoples. Indeed, these “savages” were wasted and the West was won by the law of the gun.
America lost it’s innocence and the French token of the Statue of Liberty marked the END of exceptionalism, not a NEW beginning for immigrants seeking economic opportunity.
Europe has become the main attraction for asylum seekers, refugees from colonial wars and devastated communities sending their sons on a perilous journey via Marocco, Libya or Turkey and the Balkan route into a land of “milk and honey”. Both the UK and the US have failed to accept refugees from their wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya/Syria.
Just as the British empire ended before the 1950s, so will the US empire end during the 21th century. Theresa May (according to the White House Teresa May) can coddle up to Donald Trump, it’s a poor man’s choice as the British voted to get out of the EU. UK (65m) and US (323m) are forever bound together as the rest of the world (6,9bn) are trying to make the best of it without both of them.
VIDEO MAY AND TRUMP HOLDING HANDS …
Donald Trump and Theresa May awkwardly hold hands at White House | The Guardian |
As in real life and in sports, it’s easier to get to the top than to stay on top.
Early 20th Century Immigration Restrictions
As was the case with late 19th century restrictions such as the Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act , early 20th century restrictions continued to increase in scope of immigrants targeted. The Immigration Act of 1917 was one such act that radically limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the U.S by banning any hopeful immigrant from all Asian countries within the Asiatic Barred Zone as well as those with undesirable characteristics. Undesirables as outline by the immigration Act of 1917 consisted of:
“…All idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons; persons who have had one or more attacks of insanity at any time previously; persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority; persons with chronic alcoholism; paupers; professional beggars; vagrants; persons afflicted with tuberculosis in any form or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease; persons not comprehended within any of the foregoing excluded classes who are found to be and are certified by the examining surgeon as being mentally or physically defective, such physical defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living; persons who have been convicted of or admit having committed a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude; polygamists, or persons who practice polygamy or believe in or advocate the practice of polygamy ; anarchists…” (Sec. 3).
The Immigration Act of 1917 is twenty-five pages long. In comparison, the Chinese Exclusion Act is only two pages. Within those twenty-five pages are explicit and detailed descriptions of those allowed to enter the country and just as explicit instructions on how the determine suitable immigrants. One such method for determining suitable immigrants was the literacy test. The controversial literacy test consisted of 30-40 words incoming immigrants would have to read to demonstrate that they were literate and thus capable of living in the U.S. Although appearing to agree with other discriminatory aspects of the Act, the literacy test was the basis for President Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 veto of the Act. In Veto Message H. R 10384 President Wilson states,
“In most of the provisions of the bill I should be very glad to concur, but I can not rid myself of the conviction that the literacy test constitutes a radical change in the policy of the Nation which is not justified in principle. It is not a test of character, of quality, or of personal fitness, but would operate in most cases merely as a penalty for lack of opportunity in the country from which the alien seeking admission came.”
‘Anglo-Saxon Heritage’ Abandoned In 1965
Wait ’till Romney and escort arrive in Jerusalem, since 1967 we are a nation based on our Judeo-Christian roots.
Public Policies and Racial Hierarchy: Immigration Act of 1965
Proponents designed the Immigration Act of 1965 primarily as a symbolic gesture, aimed at various audiences. For American citizens, they expected passage of this act, along with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, to signal an end to government-sanctioned Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the United States. For people both in and outside the United States, they wanted an act to reflect the country’s growing “role of critical leadership in a troubled and constantly changing world,” as the Secretary of State put it (Rusk, House, July 2, 1964). Given the Cold War and civil rights activity, the United States needed to be seen as a fair and meritocratic society, not one that judged people and nations through a lens of “bias and prejudice” (Rusk, House, July 2, 1964).
And the defenders of the national origins system — those who understood its complexities — seemed intellectually on the defensive. Few seemed able to match the blunt counterattack made a decade earlier by former State Department Visa Office head Robert C. Alexander in an article in the American Legion Magazine in 1956:
“What do the opponents of the national origins quota system want when they glibly advocate action which would result in a change in the ethnological composition of our people . . . perhaps they should tell us, what is wrong with our national origins?”
Still, a major problem for defenders of the existing system was flaws they were forced to acknowledge. Up to 2/3 of the immigration flows after World War II had come outside the quotas, as entrants from the western hemisphere and refugees. The system had become a swiss cheese of loopholes, with the result that annual numbers had been rising and the cultural background of immigrants was not what the system was designed to produce. Complex manoeuvring produced a House version of the administration’s legislation that ended national origins quotas and shifted to a system of preferences based on family reunification and skills.
Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina was the only member of the Subcommittee on Immigration defending the national origins system during hearings. Ervin met every administration witness with the argument that you could not draft any immigration law in which you did not “discriminate,” in that you favor some over others. Why not then discriminate, as the McCarran-Walter Act did, in favor of national groups who historically had the greatest influence in building the nation?
“The McCarran-Walter Act is . . . based on conditions existing in the U.S., like a mirror reflecting the United States.”
To put all the earth’s peoples on the same basis as prospective immigrants to the U.S., Ervin argued, was to discriminate against the “people from England . . . France . . . Germany . . . Holland” who had first settled and shaped the country. [11]
On the Senate floor, Senator Robert Byrd (among others) supported Ervin: “Every other country that is attractive to immigrants practices selectivity (in favor of their founding nationalities) and without apology,” including Australia, Japan, and Israel, Byrd said. Our system is “just and wise,” since “additional population” from western European countries is “more easily and readily assimilated into the American population. . . . Why should the U.S. be the only advanced nation in the world today to develop a guilt complex concerning its immigration policies?” [12]
Nativism and Anglo-Saxon Protestant virtues
A second form of nativism, manifest in the dread of alien radicalism, emerged during the 1790s when the wars of the French Revolution embroiled the United States and threatened the republican experiment.
A third manifestation of nativism, sometimes overlapping with anti-Catholicism and antiradicalism, developed during the 1840s as citizens celebrated their “manifest destiny” to bring the benefits of democracy and republican government to the Pacific. Girded by “scientific” analyses that touted Anglo-Saxon superiority against other peoples, racial nativism became crucial in the debate over imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century.
Trudeau says Canada will take refugees banned by U.S. | PBS |
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a message for refugees rejected by
U.S. President Donald Trump: Canada will take you.Trudeau also posted a picture of him greeting a Syrian child at Toronto’s airport in late 2015.
Trudeau oversaw the arrival of more than 39,000 Syrian refugees soon after he was elected.
Not our moral values – diary …
○ Really … ‘Authoritarianism’? Just Name the Beast Fascism by Oui @BooMan on March 3, 2016
○ Donald Trump and the Resurgence of the Know Nothings by Oui @BooMan on Sept. 20, 2016
Early signs of xenophobia in a “modern” America, advocating hatred in the red states …
○ Huckabee’s New Strategy – Embrace Hatred by Duke 1676 @BooMan on Dec. 11, 2007
○ Roy Warden Given Green Light To Keep Hating by Man Eegee @BooMan on Nov. 2, 2006
○ The Hispanic Paradox by XicanoPwr @BooMan on March 6, 2006