Basic privacy concerns have always prevented me from writing about certain things, particularly some of the important people in my life. I did mention for the first time the other day that my next door neighbors growing up were an Irish-American family from Manhattan. Because of that, I learned some stuff I would have otherwise picked up only in books, if at all. I got to see firsthand how legitimizing it was for them to have an Irish-American president elected in 1960, and how painful it was to have him assassinated.
I also learned that in the 1960’s, a Holy Cross and Harvard-educated lawyer couldn’t join any of the prestigious non-Catholic law firms in Manhattan because of religious bigotry. By the 1970’s the firms began the practice of making just one Catholic partner so they could serve Catholic clients. As a result, Italian- and Irish-Americans banded together to create their own prestigious law firms which by the 1980’s were established enough to compete for customers like BMW. It probably didn’t hurt that BMW is a southern German corporation rather than a northern one.
Because of these direct early experiences with anti-Catholic discrimination and segregation, I’ve always thought of Irish-Americans as outsiders who have had to fight and scrap to become the “real Americans” Sarah Palin liked to talk about. And my neighbors’ contemporary experiences also informed how I thought about my Italian-American grandfather’s life growing up in Hoboken and then getting shipped off to live with Protestants in Virginia before embarking on a journey to Ann Arbor to become a doctor.
Jeff Greenfield is correct to point out that the hostility we’re seeing to immigration on the right in this country at the moment is nothing new.
The millions of Eastern and Southern Europeans who came to America in the early 20th century led to a smorgasbord of fears: they were bringing disease or alien ideologies or would undermine core American values. Senator David Reed argued that restrictions would need to “maintain the racial preponderance of the basic strain on our people and thereby to stabilize the ethnic composition of the population.” Successive laws in 1921 and 1924 established quotas that sharply limited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe; quotas that were extended by the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. In successfully arguing for Congress to override President Harry Truman’s veto, Senator Pat McCarran said: “We have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain.”
As difficult as it has been for the Irish and Italians to achieve equality of opportunity in this country, it’s been harder for Jews (as I pointed out to David Brooks) and simply impossible for people of color, particularly African-Americans.
I think the advantage of looking clearly at this history is that it enables us to assess how many of the nativists’ fears actually came true. It’s obvious that we didn’t get devastated by disease, for example. And I don’t think the American way of life was diminished, at least not in a strictly cultural kind of way.
On the other hand, the Congregationalist pilgrims of Massachusetts were completely supplanted politically by Irish-Americans. And we saw versions of that happen in many of our big cities in the Northeast and throughout the Upper Midwest. And this did provide a few oases of political support in the north for the Democratic Party which was then able to take power in the 1930’s and launch us on the path that led us to where we are today.
So, the big changes were about political power, and that did eventually change our culture by leading us away from Apartheid and Jim Crow and opening up a way forward for progressive reforms in the economy. It’s probably not a coincidence that the nation was finally ready to deal with Civil Rights around the same time it was ready for an Irish-American president, and it could be a similar type of evolution that gave us our first black president around the same time as we got our first national health care law and a major leap forward in gay rights.
If you did not and do not like these kinds of progressive changes, then you probably can blame (at least partially) our immigration patterns and policies for enabling them.
But we should be clear that we’re talking not about crime and disease. We’re talking about power. I don’t see too many Congregationalists leaving this country because it’s too unhealthy or dangerous. And I don’t think many of them believe that the country has left them behind culturally. They adapted to having less power and many of them had or adopted progressive values that fit in nicely with the priorities of the people who supplanted them in Boston.
Conservatives understand that the country is moving ahead and leaving their values behind, and they’re understandably anxious about it. But we’ve seen this movie several times now and the one thing we know for sure is that it doesn’t turn out the way they say it will turn out. It’s true that they’ll lose political power and see changes that make them uncomfortable, but the country will remain recognizable and chart a familiar course.
Think Progress
Completely correct, Booman. However, this does not directly relate to immigrants flouting immigration laws or the particularly egregious case of the woman in Chicago who was forging Social Security cards then holed up in a church to avoid arrest. Or the Chicago alderman whose father was forging driver’s licenses using real Illinois blanks (I wonder how he got them) and was arrested by federal agents with over 5,000 in his possession. Nor doe it justify reasonable limits on the rate of immigration to an accommodable pace being demonized as racism. We may, of course, argue about what is reasonable. Nor does it justify mass immigration designed to lower wages and bust unions.
Back in the ’70s the IEEE had a reasonable legislative suggestion that was never implemented. It called for flat out visa rejection if the wages offered were in the lowest quartile and automatic acceptance if the wages were in the upper quartile, with intermediate cases on a case by case basis. Corporations didn’t want this because they only want workers in the lowest quartile, indeed decile.
Dude, it’s the racism that’s demonized as racism. Of course not everyone who’s concerned about immigration is racist, but I keep seeing people act like there’s no racism or bigotry at all in the anti-immigrant movement, which is nonsense.
Absolutely!
Yes, the tenets of American “conservatism” have no predictive power or ability because they are not based on facts, science or sensible social/historical analysis, but are always merely ad hoc rationalizations for the preservation of the existing power structure(s). Any absurd argument that supports the current status quo is vomited out for consumption.
Thus everywhere in the world requires a “protective” American military presence (so that we may more easily have wars thrust upon us and preserve the MIC). And the bronze-age babblings of the Bible came from God (and thus the male power structure is divine). And capitalism must be always be largely unregulated (since that best suits the economic interests of plutocrat families of the moment). And cutting income taxes raises revenue and creates jobs (but mostly gives buckets of cash to the existing wealthy)
So if you’re going to judge “conservatism” by its predictive abilities, it failed generations ago. Not that this matters to the adherents of the religion, nor that there can be any doubt it operates as a religion.
An excellent analysis, which is much different from a Southern view. Ethnic minorities, even Irish Catholics, were in small enough numbers through the history of Southern states to be something of exotics. Most wound up in specialized trades in the towns and cities of the South. So there is a continuity of Irish Catholic, Jewish, and to as lesser degree Eastern European Catholic communities in various places in the South. And they were always included under the “white” classification.
My experience living in Baltimore and Chicago tell me that the 19th and 20th century experience of urban ethnics was much different and my experience in Green Bay tells me that there might have been something like rural ethnic segregation by religion and nation-of-origin in the Great Lakes area. There were definite Polish Catholic towns, Belgian Catholic towns, German Lutheran towns (even some regional separation) because of who originally settled. And then there were mixed-up American towns of the same size.
I don’t think the thinking is rational except that there are a lot of Anglo construction workers who have been underbid by first- or second-generation Hispanic construction workers who arrived in their area, were exploited by the local large construction companies, and learned enough to start their own small construction companies that now compete for subcontracts. So job competition on what are perceived to be unfair terms has created anger in a time of intentionally depressed economic policy. Republicans demagogue that anger and inflame it. That’s what’s driving the immigration issue even as immigration is declining because of the reduction of jobs.
The political power that most rank-and-file Republicans have lost is power over their jobs and their standard of living. For a lot of them, there is also the anxiety that they will have insufficient influence over their children to forestall their children’s making bad sexual or marriage choices or that their children will stigmatize them in the eyes of their neighbors. And for men, there is the fear bordering on panic of women’s economic power when their women become the breadwinners because their jobs have disappeared to some foreign country or have been replaced by an employer who uses immigrant labor.
It is the folks my age who thought that by staying where they were in their home town, finding a steady job, and just keeping their head down and paying their bills, they could live and undisturbed life who have the biggest adjustments. Which probably began with the first Mexican restaurant in their small city or town and now includes the first mosque. And as more youth desert sterile religion, the preachers get more fiery about their competition and the coming days of judgement and the destruction of America.
And then there are the shock jocks and Fox. This is not a rational environment for political discourse and consideration. The people making conservative descisions are not necessarily undertanding what they are reacting to. Even those middle-class people with good educations and responsible management jobs.
In Boston, the undocumented Irish, the come-overs, who underbid the American Irish, sons of earlier waves of legislation.
What made it more interesting was when am Irish general contractor or developer hired undocumented Irish… lots of bad blood.
Twenty years, twenty-five years ago, Linda Mae’s bakery on Morrissey Boulevard worked more or less like the parking lot of a home center does now, just with undocumenteds from Ireland instead of Central America. Sheetrock, painters, electricians, all skilled — you could hire anything.
This:
The construction issue is real, I’m sure, but only for a limited number of people; that old-white-dude sense of powerlessness in his own family, and soothing it by looking for some less powerful person to dump on, is the emotional key.
Ah, so as long as someone else losses his job, you are perfectly comfortable with a bunch of illegal job thieves?
This is exactly why the working class who is white and sometimes also black are increasingly telling Democrats to “fuck off”.
The illegals who are stealing jobs from white working-class skilled trades workers were originally brought here by Bob Perry. You know, Bob Perry, the guy who funded the “swift boat Veterans” group which destroyed Kerry.
The supporters of illegals in this industry are in the same boat as the exploiters of illegals. They are in the same place as Grover Norquist, who views the importation of illegals by the 100s of thousands as the way to destroy unions. Norquist is correct – unions only work when they control the labor access. Cesar Chavez knew this in CA in the 1970s. He called the illegals “wetbacks”, he beat the crap out of them, and he was totally opposed to illegals and their destruction of the labor movement.
How fucking stupid can “progressives” be when just a generation ago they knew clearly that oversupply of labor led to the destruction of the labor movement?
In addition, the illegals have led to the huge increases in rent. You bring in 11,000,000 illegals, and this increases competition for rental housing, and thus prices go up.
Not only did the Congregationalists not leave, but the lineal descendant of their denomination, the UCC, is among the strongest voices for immigration justice that we have!
LBJ famously said he had “lost the South for a generation” when he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Of course, it turned out to be a more or less permanent (to this point) realignment in American politics.
But he also signed an immigration reform bill in 1965 that created – on a time delay – the Obama Coalition.
I read once – and would love to see it vetted – that if America had the demographics of today in 1972, McGovern would’ve won.
No disease?! Jenny MCCARTHY gave us measles!
good one 🙂
There is opposition to immigration and there is opposition to illegal immigration. I oppose illegal immigration.
I will certainly agree with you that in years past, that the opposition was to immigration. However, that was before the current era of legal immigration for roughly 1,000,000 per year. I certainly support legal immigration. I certainly oppose illegal immigration.
As recently as 1995, Barbara Jordan chaired the Jordan Commission on Immigration Reform, which called for 1) reduction in legal immigration 2) deportation of illegals. Cesar Chavez opposed illegals – he called them “wetbacks” and he broke their legs.
Chavez lost support with the position he took on importing farm labor. A question he couldn’t answer was who would work in the fields as the children of farm laborers acquired more formal education. Not many would be like him and return to it after obtaining physically easier work and higher income.
While flawed, Cesar Chavez is a worthwhile movie. Michael Peña as Chavez is very good in it.
Yes, I am agree with you that Cesar Chavez is a full of entertainment movie and i would like to watch it again. Michael Pena has done a wonderful acting and justified with this role in the movie.
Thanks and Regards.
DazzleMeds.com.