“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” — America’s promise in Emma Lazurus’ New Colossus
Every nation has its creation myth — which, in the retelling, has become a polished monolith blending truth and wishful thinking. In time the tale becomes a simplistic and feel-good narrative with a tenuous connection to the facts of the matter.
Americans revere the Thanksgiving feast celebrating the generosity the indigenous population showed to an ill-equipt, generally inept group of English religious dissidents whose poor planning had almost doomed them. In November 1620, the Mayflower's motley complement had arrived at the rocky shores of what would become Massachusetts, without enough food to survive the winter.
A local tribe, the Wampanoags, gave them sufficient sustenance to keep them going until the spring. And in gratitude, after surviving to see 1621, the new immigrants shared a Thanksgiving feast with their benefactors. Note: the Wampanoags were driven not just by altruism but also because they hoped these new arrivals would help them in their fight against the Narraganset.
Although this account is now the totemic version of the Thanksgiving story, the first Thanksgiving celebrated by English immigrants was in 1619 by the thirty-eight adventurers who arrived on the good ship Margaret, at Berkeley Hundred, in what would become Virginia. But often the first is forgotten (who members Lycos, the first internet search engine with proximity search)
Regardless of the truth of the tale, at its root, Thanksgiving celebrates immigration. Specifically, the immigration of oppressed people who fled their native lands to a new world of hope and opportunity — regardless of what the native populations thought of the proposition.
Four hundred years later, many of the descendants of these people yearning for a better life — along with the millions of other descendants from more recent waves of immigrants seeking the same thing — bitch and moan about the latest generation of immigrants whose motivation is to flee oppression and seek opportunity in new places. The hypocrisy is overwhelming.
America is a paradox. It is a nation of immigrants, where 98% of the population traces their family tree back to another continent. And Americans are obsessed with discovering their non-American roots. Many have created the exact non-American makeup of their history. “I’m half Italian, a quarter German, and through my grandmother, I have Scottish and Irish blood.” Many add a strain of native American DNA because why not?
Yet these proud citizens of foreign antecedents are some of the most virulent anti-immigrants on the planet. One talking head on the leading conservative, anti-immigrant propaganda media machine warns of the Great Replacement — in which new (darker) immigrants replace existing (whiter) immigrants. And the base, living in an ecstasy of fear and mindlessness, laps it up without one shadow of irony darkening their horizon.
The Great Replacement theory is nothing new. Xenophobia is rooted in the American soul. The collapse of the Whig Party in the early 1850s created a political vacuum — who would become the Democratic Party’s opposition? For a short time, before the Republican Party formed, it was the Native American Party, later the American Party, known colloquially as the Know Nothing party.
This anti-immigrant party’s bugbear was the mid-century waves of new immigrants whose allegiance was not to American values and the right God but to an anti-American papacy and the wrong God. The existential threat to America was Catholics.
The Irish Potato Famine (aka the Great Hunger) had egested Irish Catholics by the boatload onto American soil. And they joined the millions of the wrong sort of Europeans, in the form of Papist Germans, Italians, and Poles, in bringing potential ruination and damnation on the great nation's fair Protestant population. Yet the country survived. And not just barely.
It survived so well it became the world’s largest-ever economy, which today accounts for one in every four dollars of global GDP. And yet the anti-immigrant forces in the US would strangle the goose laying the golden eggs. Why? Racism — pure and simple hate and fear.
The narrow-minded nativists say dirty, ill-educated brown people with a limited grasp of English will be an intolerable and insupportable burden on the country. The bigots claim these strivers will laze around as unproductive and idle parasites and say they are nothing but gangsters, thugs, and deviant ne’er-do-wells. If that sounds familiar, it is because that is what Americans, back in the day, said of the Irish. How did that social analysis work out?
Contemporary small-minded, small-economy nativists argue that previous immigrants obeyed the law — but today's are “illegal”. Here is a simple fix. Change the law to reflect the common good. Change it so America can reach its economic potential. Change it so that the agriculture, construction, hospitality, and home service industries are fully staffed.
Common sense should not be a heavy lift. Think about marijuana and gay marriage. They were once against the law. Then people realized those were dumb laws. Now America has gay marriage. And pot is increasingly legal. And still, the country survives.
The pilgrims and the other English settlers could have procreated like jackrabbits, and America would never have had the population needed to produce the economic juggernaut it became. Who would have populated the middle? It would be jaw-droppingly instructive to see an economic model of what America would look like if the law had banned all immigration after 1840. The US would be a shadow of what it became.
So this Thanksgiving, give thanks to all the immigrants who made America. And also give thanks to those who still want to come here to help build our future.
NOTE: The use of “America” in this diary refers to the nation, the “United States of America”, and not to the landmass that came to be named by Europeans as “America”.