The ‘Ve is a nation of immigruntz’ cliches simply do not stand up to scrutiny.

Excerpt: ‘When the Irish Catholics came off the boat in New York, escaping from famine and certain death, high minded Americans beat the crap out of them because the freakin’ Catholic papist evil bastards were going to ruin the country.’

Citation? As a matter of fact, Irish Catholics were here pretty much from the time that Nieuw Amsterdam became New York. Its namesake, the Duke of York (later James II) was Catholic; so was his colonial governor, Lord Thomas Dongan. Anti-Catholicism when it erupted, and it did, was a reflection of political interests back home. This of course was in the 1680s, not the potato-famine 1840s of song and story and Martin Scorsese fantasia.

By the way, the ‘Know-Nothing’ hysteria of 1840s—typical of Philadelphia rather than New York—was fomented not by old-stock American Protestants but by first-generation Jews, e.g. one Lewis Levin, the founder of the ‘Know Nothing’ party and sometime congressman. (You could look it up!)

Moving right along: ‘When the Italians and the Jews got off the boat in New York, there were those who met them at the docks and met them with baseball bats…’ Again, citation? Which Italians and which Jews? I gather you are referring to the immigrant waves circa 1900. Who exactly was it who met them with baseball bats? The Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers? Solomon Guggenheim? Mother Cabrini? And the new Ellis Island arrivals were met with such cruelty, why did they stick around? They weren’t indentured servants, after all.

You, SCA, are not wielding facts, but vague impressions born of political sloganeering. There simply is no commonality between the colonists and immigrants of the past, and the illegal aliens of today.