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New York Times Filled With Immigration Stories This Weekend

Posted August 8, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.
Categories: Hate Watch

The New York Times has been filled with stories on immigration this weekend, and I wanted to look at a few.

On Friday, the Times had an excellent editorial on the move by conservatives to repeal the 14th Amendment. Here is some of what it said:

Leading Republicans have gotten chilly toward the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to people born in the United States. Senators Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Sessions and Jon Kyl have been suggesting that the country should take a look at it, re-examine it, think it over, hold hearings. They seem worried that maybe we got something wrong nearly 150 years ago, after fighting the Civil War, freeing enslaved Africans and declaring that they and their descendants were not property or partial persons, but free and full Americans.

As statements of core values go, the 14th Amendment is a keeper. It decreed, belatedly, that citizenship is not a question of race, color, beliefs, wealth, political status or bloodline. It cannot fall prey to political whims or debates over who is worthy to be an American. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” it says, “are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

People like Mr. Sessions, who pride themselves on getting the Constitution just right (on, say, guns), are finding this language too confusing. “I’m not sure exactly what the drafters of the amendment had in mind,” said Mr. Sessions, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, “but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen.”

It’s true that air travel was not a big focus in 1868, but this is not about a horde of pregnant jet-setting Brazilians, if, indeed, such a thing even exists. The targets are Mexicans, and the other mostly Spanish-speaking people who are the subjects of a spurious campaign against “anchor babies” — children of illegal immigrants supposedly brought forth to invade and occupy.

Thankfully, the Constitution is sturdy. The birthright-deniers will not easily rewrite it or legislate around it. More than a century of jurisprudence stands against their claim that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (an exception for diplomats’ children and members of sovereign Indian tribes) also alienates undocumented children.

The proponents of changing the 14th Amendment also would have to acknowledge the big-government colossus that new rules would require, burdening all parents to prove their children’s status. New battalions of attorneys would gain full employment to fight over thousands of newborns rendered stateless each year, an instant, permanent underclass. Then there’s the obsolescence of all those civics texts, old movies, patriotic picture books and red-white-and-blue songs.

The United States has never had a neat, painless way to add newcomers. But our most shameful moments have involved the exclusion of groups, often those that do our hardest labor: Indians, African-Americans, Chinese, Irish, Italians, Catholics, Jews, Poles, Japanese-Americans, Hispanics. America has stood proudest when it dared to stretch the definition of who “we” are.

As a result, this is still the most welcoming country for immigrants. A few politicians chumming for votes in an off-year election cannot be allowed to destroy that.

An article in today’s paper puts the so-called “World Trade Center Mosque” controversy in perspective. I’m getting tired of people telling me that they are not bigots, they just think the mosque is too close to the WTC. The fact is that in communities around the country, some thousands of miles away from the Financial District, 9-11 is being invoked to halt the building of Muslim houses of worship.

The paper adds further context with a Week in Review article looking at the questioning of the Americaness of Latinos born in the U.S. and Muslims. Matt Bai writes beautifully in the article I’m American, And You? about the mosque and the Latino US citizens:

It’s hard to make a thoughtful case for anything in 140 characters or in a 30-second cable TV clip, and the way that some Republicans happily pounced on these debates could reasonably be characterized as political opportunism. (Rick Lazio, the Republican running for governor of New York, darkly suggested that radical entities might be behind the building of the mosque, as if the most publicly scrutinized building on the East Coast might strike someone as a good place to locate a sleeper cell.)

Conservative politicians were playing to the moment; in a recent CNN poll, 62 percent of respondents said the policies that made America a “melting pot” in the early 20th century were a good thing, while only 31 percent said the same policies were making the country stronger now.

Giving that resentment an outlet at the polls, some politicians seem to think, will propel them past the Democrats in November—and maybe even right into 2012.

On some level, the reactions to both issues that surfaced last week, or at least the more reductive versions of them that ricocheted online, were about the basic question of who gets to share in the American experience — whether that means the experience of citizenship or, in the case of the mosque, the experience of grieving for Americans lost.

A nativist impulse underlies this type of political appeal, and it is not new. It springs, perhaps, more from human nature than from any defect in the American character; when our way of life feels imperiled, we tend to cast a wary eye toward those who embody otherness. At moments throughout our history, when there loomed the perception of a threat to the established order of things, we have sought clarity on the issue of who fully belongs in the society and who doesn’t.

Sometimes the threat is economic or cultural. The 1850s, for instance, saw the rise of the American Party — more commonly called the Know Nothings, because that was their response to any inquiries about their secret activities. Like us, they found themselves stranded in a fast-changing society, its economy transformed by emerging railroads and this gizmo called the telegraph.

“If your status was slipping, and if your grandfather had been a general in the Revolution but now you had no access to the new money, you could feel like your country was going away,” explains Ted Widmer, a Brown University historian who wrote a book on the period. The Know Nothings responded by lashing out at Catholic immigrants from Germany and Ireland. Some members supposedly stole a stone meant for the Washington Monument, because it was a gift from the pope, and threw it into the Potomac River.

At other times, the societal peril has been physical and imminent. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, for instance, Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers oversaw the forced relocation of more than 100,000 immigrants of Japanese descent. Most were citizens, made suspect by their customs and their language.

Nothing quite so drastic has occurred amid the anxiety of the current moment, one that reflects, perhaps, a collision of forces both economic and existential. First, we have endured the decades-long sputtering of the industrial engine that once powered America’s towns and cities, the shuttering of factories and downtown storefronts. This has created the sense among some voters — not always illusory, by any means — that their jobs and neighborhoods are endangered by interlopers, a fear that has empowered a long line of populist politicians and commentators.

And then came the cataclysm of 2001, when a new era’s foreign enemies made themselves known on American soil, leaving in their wake a lingering sense of vulnerability, reminiscent of the cold war.

These trends have opened the door, once again, to nativist appeals — some more subtle than others. And because of the political realignment that began in 1980 (when the term “Reagan Democrats” — meaning ethnic whites — entered the lexicon) and reached its apex in 1994, when the South tipped into the Republican column, the voters who are most susceptible to such appeals reside, at this juncture in our politics, primarily in the Republican base.

When Mr. Bush, a Texan fluent both in Spanish and in immigration policy, advanced a plan to reform the system in 2006, he was going directly into the teeth of that sentiment within his own party. His failure virtually guaranteed that his party — already beset by an unpopular war and mounting distrust from black Americans — would not become the broader coalition he had hoped to build.

This could be a problem for Republicans in the years ahead, as the American electorate rapidly grows more diverse. “You can win elections temporarily by accumulating large percentages of the white vote,” says Matthew Dowd, who was a top strategist in Mr. Bush’s two elections, “but over time, it’s unsustainable.”

It’s also true that however much the forces of American exclusivity may bob their way to the surface from time to time, the current of our history seems to carry us toward a more inclusive ideal. As Mr. Widmer points out, when the Know Nothings petered out rather quickly (it was hard to hate immigrants when they were dying on Civil War battlefields), some sizable number of them meandered over to Abraham Lincoln and his new Republican Party.

It turned out that what the Know Nothings really detested, even more than immigrants, were two entrenched parties — Democrats and Whigs — who offered no persuasive solutions to the agony of displacement. Leadership, of a more genuine sort, carried the day.

Finally, I’d like to point you to a review of a book about the cuisine of German, Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants on the Lower East Side. The book uses the conceit of looking at what the people who lived at what is now the Tenement Museum would have eaten.

Interesting to note that at turn of the last century,, nativists saw Jewish and Italian cooking as a threat to life and culture. The Italians had an unhealthy tendency to use olive oil instead of butter and corn oil. The Jews, well, who knew what that stuff they were cooking was? WASPs trooped down to the immigrant neighborhood to teach the ignorant newcomers the “virtues of American food at its blandest.” According to the book, “The cooking classes were only a modest success. The reason was simple: the Jewish homemaker already knew how to cook.”

Tags : 14th amendment, anchor babies, italian immigrants, jewish immigrants, mosque

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