America's long, unbroken history of defining a "real" American

     "You were always on my mind.  You were always on my mind.  You were always on my mind."

                 Willie Nelson

Immigration: We have been here before.

Trump's tweets, the shooting in El Paso, chants of "Send her back," night protests in Charlottesville, and the congressional debate over immigration are part of an unbroken history in America.

White Europeans came to North America and their diseases killed most of the local inhabitants. Indians worked out poorly as laborers in the Caribbean and North America--they died or escaped--so white settlers imported black laborers as slaves.

There were White people, Natives, and Blacks. In 1787 the Constitution wrestled with the issue of who was in and who was out. The First Congress in 1790 established the first law on immigration, the Naturalization Act of 1790, which extended US citizenship to "free White persons of good character" who had been in the US for two years. It therefore excluded white indentured servant immigrants, and all Natives and Blacks.

Various amendments to the immigration law moved toward restrictions. People began needing to take an oath, the time was extended to five years, and "good character" was amended to "good moral character." In 1798 the time limit was extended to 14 years, and applicants for naturalization needed to give 5 years of notice.

That federal law stayed in place during the period of rapid Irish immigration in the 1840's, but native born citizen in Boston and New York, the primary points of entry, pushed back, creating a series of state laws intended to exclude and deport the Irish, citing "the lazy, ungrateful, lying, and thieving population of old Ireland" and their dangerous foreign Catholicism. Poverty--"pauperism"--was criminalized, and it became the criminal justification for deportation. People of Irish heritage still repeat the history with bitterness about signs they encountered. "No Irish need apply," and "Irish and dogs prohibited."

A political party arose in America, the Know Nothing Party, with a principal aim of stopping immigration by the Irish and other Catholics.

The Civil War was a move toward inclusion.  The war, Lincoln said in Gettysburg, was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The13th, 14th, and 15th post Civil War Amendments of the 1860's gave citizenship to Blacks, banning slavery, offering voting, and granting the "equal protection of the law."  

Blacks began holding office in the south, and the pushback grew to be unstoppable. Civil War Amendment inclusions rapidly eroded with the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, intimidation, and State laws known as the Black Codes, Black Americans were nearly totally excluded from citizenship.These codes were a model for Hitler in creating non-citizenship rules for Jews in Germany in the 1930's, and were cited in Mein Kampf.

CLICK: Amazon

Federal law began changing to restrict immigration in the 1870's, in response to Asian immigration, people who came to America to work gold mines and railroads in the western states. White Californians rebelled. Asians could live in America, but were largely banned from immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 essentially ended Chinese immigration to the US, The Japanese were excluded by a "Gentleman's Agreement" with Japan, in which Japan itself limited emigration at US request. Popular opinion considered Asians unable to assimilate into America. 

In 1917, the US established an outright ban on immigration from South and East Asia. 

The early 20th Century was a period of heightened attention to race and ethnicity generally and world wide among predominately white countries. Anti-semitism was common. Colonialism was common. The ideology and justification was that the White races were doing the savages a favor.

President Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to be elected president since the Civil War, ended Black employment in the civil service. Race and ethnic groups were considered to have deep genetic differences and abilities. Germany under Nazi ideology brought this notion of "scientific racism" to its highest level, with an effort to protect the authentic German volk from Jewish and Slavic influence and amelioration, but a weaker version existed in the US.

In 1924, following the early 20th century decades of rapid immigration from southern and eastern Europe, primarily Jews, Italians and Greeks, the Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited immigration on the basis of national origin. The intended purpose was to preserve the prior, northern European weight of ethnic composition of the US by allowing immigration based on ethnic composition of the country in 1910.

Yesterday's blog post gave an example of the ethnic consciousness of a Los Angeles boy during early and mid century. Ethnic rivalries dominated Boston politics in the 1970's, exacerbated by the effort to integrate schools, but it wasn't just whites against blacks. The Irish had their neighborhoods, the Italians, theirs, Jews and Blacks their own. 

CLICK: Reagan on immigration.





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Then the political center moved. Leadership matters. 

The 1986 Simpson-Mazolli Act, signed by Ronald Reagan, reversed the 1924 law. It gave amnesty to some three million people here illegally and it allowed immigration from places previously highly limited. It opened immigration to new immigrants  from Latin America and Asia. Reagan thought immigration was a very good, all-American thing. So we got more of it again. 

Both Bush presidencies defended it. The younger George Bush defined the 9-11 attacks as the act of criminals. He specifically de-nationalized it. Islam, he said, is a religion of peace. 

It was Jeb Bush's turn to run for president. Jeb Bush's wife was born in Mexico. Jeb got wiped out early in 2016. 

We have been here before: nativist push back against the wrong outsiders. 

We have had openly proudly racist presidents, who heightened public opposition to immigration: certainly Woodrow Wilson. Trump says he is the "least racist" person in the country, but he has profited politically by talk of criminal and rapist Mexicans and banning Muslims, and by choosing black opponents to criticize. Trump located a politically viable mood in America, one perviously dormant in the GOP, but now the predominant impulse in the GOP. 

Reagan is gone. It is Trump's GOP. 

If there is a Reagan out there among the GOP officeholders, he or she is in hiding.