Tuesday,
May 01, 2007
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
May.
01[1] 2007
Everybody knows that
Lady Liberty aside,
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 It was later repealed.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
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
Ethnic profiling was alive and well back then: In 1891, eleven Italians were hung by an angry mob of 20,000
in
Kangaroo courts were popular, too: In
1921, two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti, were tried for the murder of two
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.
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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