19 Aug 2015

Trump’s Immigration Policies Would’ve Barred His Own Grandfather

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I don’t often agree with Conor Friedersdorf, but this time he nails it. I’m myself the grandson of turn-of-the-last-century Lithuanian immigrants. My ancestors arrived legally, because immigration was all but unregulated before 1905 and had no limits on anyone except East Asians before 1921.

I know a lot of people I went to school with in my hometown, of precisely the same background as myself, who have convinced themselves somehow that their ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, and who are now horrified to see the American landscape polluted by a new wave of exotic greenhorn immigrants speaking imperfect English.

Donald Trump’s immigration paper asserts, as “core principles,” that “there must be a wall across the southern border” because “a nation without borders is not a nation.” And it argues that “any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages, and security for all Americans,” because “a nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation.” Many have observed that America has never had a wall across its southern border, and that no immigration plan has ever improved wages and security for all Americans. By Trump’s logic, America has never been a nation.

One wonders what he calls the country that allowed his ancestors to immigrate here.

He is of German stock on his father’s side.

Prior to his grandfather’s arrival, plenty of immigration restrictionists believed, not without reason, that German immigration had irrevocably changed their communities.

As one example, consider what took place in Cincinnati, Ohio.

“In the 1840s and 1850s, Cincinnati society became increasingly unstable as German and Irish immigrants poured in,” The Cincinnati Inquirer reported in a historical retrospective. When an Italian emissary of the Pope visited in 1853, “German Catholics took to the streets armed with guns, pistols, clubs, canes and sling shots trying to run Cardinal Bedini out of town. The Germans, many of whom fled to the U.S. after the failed European revolutions of 1848, saw the priest as a symbol of repression.”

Two years later, Germans clashed with a nativist mob alarmed by a rumor about electoral shenanigans. “German-Americans barricaded streets into Over-the-Rhine on the north edge of the Miami-Erie Canal,” the story notes. “Members of the Turners, a German physical fitness organization, aimed their cannon and ‘shot it over the head of the mob of nativists that came at them,’ says Don Heinrich Tolzmann, University of Cincinnati German-American studies director and curator of UC’s German-American Collection.” German immigrants, who started many German language settlements in the U.S., “had become such a force at the ballot box that they pushed for—and received—bilingual education in city schools and Sunday beer sales.”

The Know-Nothing Party ultimately failed at mid-century to stop the immigration of both Irish and Germans. And because they failed, Frederich Christ Trump could immigrate to America in 1885.

Read the whole thing.

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Building a wall across the entire Southern US border would be preposterously expensive as well as constituting a disgraceful expression of totalitarian statism. Hispanic immigrants are not perfect. They are typically socially and educationally inferior to Americans. Some of them are criminals and undesirable. But that’s the way it always was. You get a certain number of crooks and radicals along with a great mass of perfectly assimilable salt-of-the-earth hard working people. America has always needed affordable labor, and America has always needed a new influx of people willing to take the low-paying, unpleasant jobs which native-born Americans, who have typically moved up and out of the laboring class, cannot be found to do.

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5 Feedbacks on "Trump’s Immigration Policies Would’ve Barred His Own Grandfather"

Dan Kurt

My ancestors were German and, as yours, were not wanted by the Natives already in the USA. However, they were White and had the potential to blend in with the whites already here because of a similar genetic heritage with similar IQ mean and temperament as defined by the genes. Hell, you made it to Yale and I to another Ivy, both of us fit in fine without affirmative action.

Not so now with the importing of Blacks and Browns and their 15 to 20 point lower Mean IQ and definitely different genetic derived temperaments.

Now it is not just a mixing of different whites but significantly different races into a what was once a white country. This is not a recipe for good admixture.

Dan Kurt



gonewiththewind

Both the legal immigration AND the illegalimmigration is overwhelming our ability to assimilate them. We are becoming a third world country. But the real problem is the future. Today we probaby bring in about 5-7 million immigrants legal and illegal a year. Far more than we should. But because of the immigration pressures and the inability or disinterest in enforcing our immigration laws this is about to skyrocket. Soon you will understand. Today you do not and like to call anyone who isn’t interested in committing cultural and societal suicide a racist or worse. Once this ball really gets rolling it cannot and will not be stopped. If you are middle aged or younger you will see the day when immigrant “Americans” outnumber Americans born here and they will demand and get repressive and exclusive laws and interpretations of laws. There are only two possible results to this suicidal choice: A. civil war in the streets and alleys where the two sides kill each other, OR B. total dominance and repression of the minority (i.e. native born Americans). In the mean time taxes must increase and you productive native born Americans must pay to support these “new immigrants” and you will pay until you are broke and broken.



JDZ

See that post of mine from yesterday about the “Head” of Pierson College at Yale? I am far from eager to have anybody assimilated to the culture of the American urban-based community of fashion. Maybe some liberals will assimilate to the superior culture of Mexican vaqueros.



Roy Lofquist

Three of my grandparents were born in Sweden, one in England. They came to the US ca. 1900.

At that time immigrants were making a practically irrevocable commitment to an utterly new life. The journey was far more expensive than today and often somewhat dangerous. They were severing all relations with family and friends as correspondence took months. There was essentially no public assistance awaiting them – it was sink or swim.

It’s like eggs and bacon – the chicken participates, the pig commits.



Phil McKann

Maybe, but doubtfully, true if all things were equal.

But the number coming in is overwhelming, and by design. 70,000 in the 1920s, half a million (not including illegal) in 2010.

My opinion is that the elitists at best are indifferent to overwhelming our culture so long as they are securing money and power, and at worst are doing it intentionally to replace us with a culture that “knows their place” and is tolerant of tyranny and corruption.

And they’re being encouraged not to assimilate.

This is NOT your grandfather’s immigration.

Libertarians have a blind spot on this that is wholly disconnected.

And get a new cartoon if you’re going to keep rattling this cage. You keep throwing up the same one.



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