The Atlantic (Opinion)
By Cono Friedersdorf
August 18, 2015
Donald
Trump’s immigration paper asserts, as “core principles,” that “there
must be a wall across the southern border” because “a nation without
borders is not a nation.”
And it argues that “any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages, and
security for all Americans,” because “a nation that does not serve its
own citizens is not a nation.” Many have observed that America has never
had a wall across its southern border, and
that no immigration plan has ever improved wages and security for all
Americans. By Trump’s logic, America has never been a nation.
One wonders what he calls the country that allowed his ancestors to immigrate here.
He is of German stock on his father’s side.
Prior
to his grandfather’s arrival, plenty of immigration restrictionists
believed, not without reason, that German immigration had irrevocably
changed their communities.
As one example, consider what took place in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“In
the 1840s and 1850s, Cincinnati society became increasingly unstable as
German and Irish immigrants poured in,” The Cincinnati Inquirer
reported in a historical retrospective.
When an Italian emissary of the Pope visited in 1853, “German Catholics
took to the streets armed with guns, pistols, clubs, canes and sling
shots trying to run Cardinal Bedini out of town. The Germans, many of
whom fled to the U.S. after the failed European
revolutions of 1848, saw the priest as a symbol of repression.”
Two
years later, Germans clashed with a nativist mob alarmed by a rumor
about electoral shenanigans. “German-Americans barricaded streets into
Over-the-Rhine on the north
edge of the Miami-Erie Canal,” the story notes. “Members of the
Turners, a German physical fitness organization, aimed their cannon and
‘shot it over the head of the mob of nativists that came at them,’ says
Don Heinrich Tolzmann, University of Cincinnati
German-American studies director and curator of UC's German-American
Collection.” German immigrants, who started many German language
settlements in the U.S., “had become such a force at the ballot box that
they pushed for — and received — bilingual education
in city schools and Sunday beer sales.”
The
Know-Nothing Party ultimately failed at mid-century to stop the
immigration of both Irish and Germans. And because they failed,
Frederich Christ Trump could immigrate
to America in 1885. That decade, 5.2 million immigrants arrived in the
United States. 3.7 million immigrants arrived the next decade. The
unskilled German laborers competed with Americans. The skilled German
craftsmen competed with Americans. The German farmers
competed with Americans.
Some of the Americans lost jobs or income.
Today,
there are nearly 50 million Americans of German ancestry. Many have
hazy, romanticized notions of the time when their ancestors came to
America. And some, like
Trump, champion restrictionist views on immigration that would’ve
barred their own grandfathers from coming here had bygone Americans
applied them. This despite the fact that, compared to Hispanic
immigration today, the waves of 19th-century immigration imposed
far higher costs on those already here: Contagious diseases killed more
people; those at the bottom of the economic ladder vying with newcomers
for work had less of a safety net to fall back on if outcompeted;
radical political ideas from abroad led to violent
clashes; immigrant riots rocked numerous cities; and every cost was
born by a much, much poorer America.
This
nation of immigrants will defeat its nativist elements again, as it has
periodically throughout its history. It is nevertheless unfortunate
that a candidate pledging
to make America great again is running against something that made it
great in the first place. In the 19th century, as today, immigration
created more winners than losers. But no wave of immigrants ever
improved “jobs, wages, and security for all Americans.”
To mandate that threshold would fundamentally change America.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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