Immigrant Fridays

I've decided to have some regular features, things related to a single theme.  Fridays will be related to things immigrant and some days to food (mostly grandma's recipes but not only).  

Immigrant Fridays are my way of A/ keeping up with immigrant news; B/ digging into the past via books written between 1880 and 1924, years when immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was at its height.   I'm interested in the latter as at this time anti-immigrant feelings ran high, reminding me of what's going on today.  The target's changed but the game remains the same.  Whenever something's not right politically or economically, we run over the most disenfranchised members of society, blaming them for whatever ails us.  It's like we'd rather blame "illegals" now for the state of the economy than Wall Street.  WTF, right?

Problems in American Democracy by Thames Ross Williamson was published in 1925 and lists "Immigration and Assimilation" as one  of its chapters in the section of the book called "American Social Problems."  Some of the other chapters in this section include "Crime and Corrections," "The Negro," and "Industrial Relations."  Enough said. 

Even before the Act of 1924 which restricted all immigration to a mere Northern and Western European trickle, Act of 1917 excluded anarchists, criminals ("except those who have committed political offenses not recognized by the United States"), "insane persons, idiots, epileptics, beggars, and other persons likely to become public charges."  Oh yes, and also no "contract laborers" and no persons over 16 years of age who "cannot read English or some other language."  Just imagine the testing going on at Ellis Island to determine, for example, whether someone was a beggar or an idiot.  We all know what administrative bureaucracy does, even today with all of the technological know-how, so I can only imagine what it did then.

Copyright 1997 State Historical Society of Wisconsin

Williamson explains why Japanese and Chinese immigrants were not welcome by pointing to their supposed racial and cultural differences: "The most important social reason for the exclusion of these two races is that the differences of race and religion existing between Asiatics and native Americans render assimilation of the Chinese and Japanese extremely difficult if not impossible."  This 150 year old stereotype of the inassimilable ethnic persists even today and Asian Americans get complemented on their English.

1886 advertisement for detergent

Williamson (and he was not alone in this) maintains that the "new immigration," which began around 1880 and came primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe was very much unlike the "old immigration" hailing from "Great Britain and Ireland, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries" (this reminds me of current immigration debates which mistakenly posit Mexican immigrants as unlike those who came before them).  Why?  For one, the "the old immigration was largely made up of individuals who were similar to the original American colonists in political ideals, social training, and economic background."  However,

Those who make up the new immigration have assimilated less rapidly: they are relatively unlike the native stock in language, race, and customs; the volume of immigration is very great; and rather than being uniformly distributed, the new immigrants tend to concentrate in cities, where they are often little subject to contact with natives.

This also erroneously implies that there was no protest against the earlier, "old" immigrants and that they were indeed welcomed with open arms.  Not the case as we know from the Irish immigrant experience and the Chinese and Irish immigrants of the mid-19th Century were represented as equally dangerous.  

Aside from the immigrant/ethnic groups accused of not assimilating, how is this different than today's outrageous debates around "illegal" immigration?  Just as a century earlier, today's anti-immigrant sentiments have little in common with facts.