America's Anti-Immigrant Hatred Is Nothing New

     According to the U.S. Census Bureau, less than 2% of the population of the U.S. is Native American, meaning about 320 of the 330 million Americans are the descendent of immigrants. I could understand Native Americans taking umbrage with immigration, but the vast majority expressing such discontent are ignorant and racist white people. Immigration literally built this nation!

     However, we have not yet learned our lesson, for this anti-immigration sentiment is nothing new. In the mid 1800s, in the wake of the Great Patato (or "potatoe," as Dan Quayle would say) Famine, a wave of Irish immigrants came to the United States and became a source of cheap labor for corporations. Rather than blame the corporate mechanism, Americans blamed the immigrants, and a nativist party called the "Know-Nothings" famously ran former president Millard Fillmore in 1856, seeking to prevent Irish Catholics from holding public office. Once again, in the 1860s and 1870s, resentment among Americans, especially on the West Coast, grew after Chinese immigrants were hired, most notably on the Transcontinental Railroad. In 1882, the Chinese Exlusion Act banned Asians from immigrating to the U.S., and restrictions were also placed on the ethnic composition of immigrants. 

     Today, such restrictions are rightfully seen as discriminatory and wrong, yet some of the same people who see this as a dark chapter in America's history fail to remember George Santayana's famous words, "Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it." That is why we have what is happening now. Muslims have in essence been banned from entering the country in a misguided attempt to prevent terrorism that provides merely a placebo effect. Latinx people are dying in cages and being forced to choose between staying in countries torn by the war and crime left in the wake of U.S. intervention or risk their lives for the prospect of a better future, a choice that any reasonable parent would gladly make for their children.

     If we do not begin learning from our mistakes, then they are not mistakes, but the sign of a rot at our core that compromises our founding belief in "liberty and justice for all."