Tuesday, May 01, 2007

America: Land of Immigrants and Immigrant Bashing

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Illegal Immigrants do NOT have my Support....... Legal Immigrants do.

 

I do recognize that Laws are often not Fair or Equitable. For instance, Exclusion Laws, or Discriminatory Quota Laws.

 

Yet, does Not a Country have the Right to preserve it's "character", by not being inundated by peoples of completely different cultures, mores, traditions, who are not interested in assimilating but maintaining their "styles", and creating constant conflict??? 

 

Italian Americans came and assimilated, and took pride in being MORE American than the Americans. Yet they were reviled!

 

 

Immigrant Bashing: An American Tradition

 

Beyond Chron

SF Alternative Daily
By Tommi Avicolli Mecca

May. 01[1] 2007

Everybody knows that America is a land of immigrants. And that the Statue of Liberty stands in New York harbor holding a torch to light the way for the tired, the poor and the huddled masses yearning to be free.

Lady Liberty aside, America has never welcomed immigrants. Not any group of huddled masses. Not even other Europeans.

 

Certainly not the French and Irish who came after the ink was barely dry on the Declaration of Independence. The Congressional response to their arrival: The Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, which mandated a 14-year residency requirement for citizenship. It was later repealed.

When masses of starving Irish immigrants fled here in the 1840s after the islands potato crop was destroyed by a blight, anti-Irish groups called for quotas on immigration and longer residency requirements. When the non-English speakers (Italians, Germans, It , Scandinavians Eastern Europeans, and Chinese) flooded into Ellis Island and elsewhere, the country responded with discrimination and anti-immigrant legislation. No Irish Need Apply signs in shop windows became No Italian Need Apply. In 1882, Chinese workers became the first ethnic group to be officially excluded by law.

Other ethnicities were regarded as undesirables. F or years it was feared that Southern Italians would topple Anglo-Saxon culture with our wild Latin ways. We werent considered the inheritors of Roman civilization, Northern Italians were.

 

Leta Hollingworth, well-known author and professor at Teachers College at Columbia, characterized Italian children as having a low level of intelligence. The American Eugenics Movement proposed to sterilize Italians and others (including Jews and Slavs) to keep them from reproducing. Neither the Italians nor the Irish were seen as white, but as separate races from Northern Europeans.

Ethnic profiling was alive and well back then: In 1891, eleven Italians were hung by an angry mob of 20,000 in New Orleans after the police chief was killed by someone who allegedly looked Italian.

Kangaroo courts were popular, too: In 1921, two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were tried for the murder of two South Braintree, Massachusetts men. During the trial, Judge Thayer called the two southern Italians dagos. Though many believed that they were innocent, Sacco and Vanzetti were nonetheless executed for the crime.

 

The same year that their trial began, Congress passed the first immigration restriction act, limiting to 357,000 the number of people who could enter the country. The figure was less than half the 800,000 who had arrived on our shores the year before.

In 1924, Congress cut immigrant quotas even more. Southern European and Eastern European as well as Chinese and Japanese immigration were the hardest hit. To no ones surprise, Southern European quotas were chopped by 87%, as opposed to 29% for Northern Europeans. Those quotas werent eliminated until 1965.

America: A country of immigrants that hates immigrants.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical, southern Italian, working-class, performer and writer whose work can be seen at www.avicollimecca.com.

 

 

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