New York Times (Op-Ed)
By Timothy Egan
July 10, 2015
They
were criminals — thugs and thieves — a single ethnic group that filled
the jails of big cities. “Scum unloaded on American wharves,” one
speaker in Philadelphia said
of them. Dirty, filthy, foreign. As for their children, they were
“utterly ignorant of a place such as school,” The New York Herald
reported.
Mexicans?
No, the Irish of the 1850s, then pouring into Anglo-Saxon America at
such a rate that it gave rise to a political party founded in opposition
to immigration
— the Know-Nothings. At one point, it was second largest party in the
United States, complete with a paramilitary arm called the Wide Awakes.
Nearly
50 years later, as Italians and other southern Europeans left their
barren lands for hope in America, a prominent educator and writer,
Francis A. Walker, expressed
a widely held view of these new arrivals: “They are beaten men from
beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for
existence.”
Donald
Trump — we’ve found your century. The xenophobes have always been with
us, sometimes in power, usually not. It’s the mother of all ironies that
a nation where all
but about 2 percent (the Native Americans) of the population can trace
its lineage to some distant land is now going through another of its
anti-immigrant moments.
But
good news: The 2015 version is a weak strain of the earlier tea. It
will flush out those camped in the Republican Party who have long used
code words and fabrications
to hide their loathing of people who “are not you,” in Trump’s phrase.
“I
salute Donald Trump,” said Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, one of the first
to be flushed, and also one of the jillion candidates for the Republican
presidential nomination.
Cruz wants some of the immigrant-hatred vote, at least 10 percent of
the primary audience, that has catapulted Trump to the top tier in
polls. The other candidates are afraid of Trump. And Democrats, even the
atheists, have become devout believers in a benevolent
God, as Trump keeps delivering on their prayers.
It
will only get better as Republican primaries move into all-white,
anti-immigrant strongholds. Here, you can expect to see clusters of
red-faced older men clutching
copies of “¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a
Third World Hellhole,” by the polemicist Ann Coulter. Here’s a sample
line: “Today’s immigrants aren’t coming here to breathe free, they are
coming to live for free.”
Her
book has influenced Trump, even as his hotel construction projects
benefit from those same immigrants. No matter. If intellectual
consistency were threads on Trump’s
head, he would be as bald as a snow globe. If this keeps up, the 27
percent share of the Latino vote that Republicans got in 2012 will look
like a high-water mark.
History
is a guide here. The Chinese of the late 19th century were subject to
exclusion laws and outright pogroms on the West Coast, and cast as
inscrutable opium addicts.
The major railroads probably could not have been built without them.
The
Irish did make up a majority of people housed in New York’s jails — and
the city’s mental institution — at one point. But they also dug the
Erie Canal and provided
the shovel muscle to remake the city.
The
new Know-Nothings have certainly kept fact-checkers busy. Mexicans:
They’re pouring across a porous border, yes? And with them comes
something else — “tremendous infectious
disease,” said Trump.
The
pouring is actually going the other way. Since 2006, more Mexicans have
left the United States than have arrived, according to a Pew Research
Center study in 2012.
Since 2009, there’s been a 50 percent drop in those trying to sneak
across the border. A falling birthrate in Mexico, better economic
opportunity at home, and economic stagnation in the United States are
the contributing factors.
At
the same time, President Obama has deported more undocumented
immigrants than any of his predecessors. And doctors note that Mexico
has a higher vaccination rate against
disease than many United States communities.
As
for those who want to “live for free,” in Coulter’s sneer, they better
step up the mooching. Poor immigrants are less likely to take advantage
of free government help
than citizens, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Well,
then, if they aren’t leeches, Mexicans are still rapists and criminals,
as Trump claimed. What about the oft-deported illegal held for murder
in San Francisco? That
killing looks more like a result of bureaucratic negligence, in part
because of San Francisco’s inane sanctuary policy, than a reason to go
after job-seeking Latinos living in the shadows. Still, in conservative
media circles, one murder proves the narrative.
In
fact, first-generation immigrants have a much lower crime rate than the
overall population. As to the rapists claim, whites accounted for 71
percent of all sexual assaults
in 2013, even though they are only 63 percent of the population,
according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Latinos, though 17
percent of the population, committed 9 percent of sex crimes.
In
other words, whites are far more likely to meet Trump’s description
than Latinos. But don’t expect to hear that statistic, or any other that
sets the record straight,
during a presidential debate. Whites make up an overwhelming majority
of the Republican primary base. You can insult your audience’s
intelligence, but not to their face.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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