“They are criminals”, “they invade our country”, “they bring a disease”, “they eat dogs”, “they change the culture”. When you read these words, you immediately know who are “they”: immigrants.
You have been bombed with this rhetoric. Insults and degrading remarks against immigrants have apparently reached a summit in recent years and are essential.
As a person who writes regularly on immigration, I often hear readers about the way they find the current speech of immigration. These are people who, honoring the American spirit, welcome the new peaceful arrivals and know that these attacks are inserted and harmful, because they know that most immigrants are peaceful and productive people who come here to build a life in freedom.
Although the way in which political leaders and their supporters speak of immigrants today can be worse than 20 years ago, this phenomenon is not new. America has a long history of hateful rhetoric against immigrants, and this way of thinking and speaking is partially responsible for the horrible policies adopted in American history to prevent new arrivals.
One of the many examples is the treatment of Chinese in the 19thth century, when they started arriving in America in large numbers.
The new Chinese arrivals were different from the Americans in their appearance and their traditions, and many Americans said the Chinese were a threat. American declared that the Chinese “took our job” and reduced working conditions. They declared That the Chinese were “unchanged, impure, dirty beyond the conception” and that they were sexually depraved. They judged the Chinese a “invasion. “”
This representation of Chinese immigrants has become dominant, to the point where advertisements for household appliances and other merchants husband Openly racist sentences and lines like “the Chinese must go” to sell products.
The dissemination of Chinese immigrants has led to one of the most shameful laws in American history: the Law on Chinese exclusion. This law, among others, has interrupted immigration to most Chinese nationals and excluded them from naturalization. Partly because the government detained that the Chinese have endangered certain localities, it has become easy to rationalize brutal violence against them. (The law was so racist and had such a negative impact that Congress pass A rare resolution in 2011 expressing its regrets for legislation.)
This legislation made its way at the time at the congress in part because there was a societal acceptance of the false belief that the Chinese were immutably immoral and threatening. The rhetoric that politicians and other influential actors had pushed against them facilitated the limit of their immigration, despite some opposition to this treatment of Chinese.
In the 1920s, the denigration of immigrants had developed far beyond the Chinese to other Asians and the Eastern Europeans, who were deemed “inferior” and a threat to the “racial purity” of America. The false rhetoric around the presumed presumed incapacity of these immigrants to assimilate, and affirms that they brought non -American ideologies which irreparably harm culture, were omnipresent. For example, an editorial of the New York Times of 1921 supported that these immigrants irreparably brought “ignorance and Bolshevism diseases” to America.
Many academics have approved these ideas and praised eugenics, which has become fashionable in learned circles and the American public. A popular book from 1916 from Eugenicist Madison Grant entitled “The death of the big race ” supported These “inferior” immigrants were exaggerated white Americans and blamed them for the decrease in quality of life, reducing birth rates, among other problems – all the false accusations that have spread in American culture. Adolf Hitler refer to Grant’s book as his “Bible”.
These ideas paved the way to the 1924 national origins Act, an immigration law which resumed racist accusations against immigrants to justify extremely draconian restrictions on immigration. This law has reduced immigration to Eastern and South Europe, as well as Asia. He too closed the door To researchers of freedom from around the world, including Jewish refugees who escape the Nazis. The demonization of immigrants by Madison Grant was directly cited During the debates of the Congress on the law of 1924. (It remains a little known fact that the book that Hitler judged his “Bible” was the same which inspired the American immigration system in 1924.)
The law was not entirely repealed before 1965, the date on which it was recognized to what extent this legislation was unfair and discriminatory, although elements remain in our current system.
The denigration of immigrants in public discourse over time has contributed to creating a fertile ground where these non -American restrictions could prosper. The inability to thwart the rhetoric of dissemination has led to its policy. Like Ayn Rand once put: “The undisputed absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They become accepted by degrees, by a precedent, by involvement, by erosion, by default, by constant pressure on one side and a constant retirement to the other – until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the official ideology of the country.”
When rhetoric reduces immigrants to invaders, criminals or cultural threats, it opens the way to policies that deploy them from their fundamental rights and their humanity and eroded freedom for everyone in America. The tribal defamation Japanese during the Second World War facilitated the support of the internment of 120,000 Japanese and American citizens in concentration camps, marking one of the most shameful eras in the history of America.
Some of the arguments which were once used to justify unless Chinese immigrants, restrict Europeans and divert Jewish refugees are now used to justify severe repression, indefinite detentions and mass deportations.
But history has also shown us that these policies are getting badly. Most Americans now consider them a shameful spot on the history of the nation. Will the Americans continue to repeat the same errors whose future generations will be ashamed?
If Americans must avoid past mistakes, they must resist the fall in tribal speeches. The rhetoric and the ideas that we accept and do not dispute today shape the policies of tomorrow. And, with history as a warning, we must be wary of the place where this road leads.
Agustina Vergara Cid is a young voice contributor. You can follow it on X at @Agustinavcid
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
