Immigrants kept coming, but they were not assimilating. unlike our Immigrant ancestors came to America and never looked back, but they remained connected to their home countries, waving foreign flags, reading the news in another language, and bringing cousins and friends from home with them. I’m talking, of course, about the Basque shepherds who settled the Rocky Mountains in the 19th century and continue to welcome newcomers into their ethnic club more than 100 years later.
Almost everyone in this country has ancestors from somewhere else. So nativists now think immigrants are now just different Immigrants from their ancestors. Micah Meadowcroft, research director of the National Conservative Center for American Studies, wrote: “The point I often make about this, of Peter Thiel’s, is that in the 19th century it became American settlers are—for all intents and purposes—dead to the old world. “Today, thanks to communications and transportation technology, migrant workers never have to leave their homeland psychologically. “
This is simply not true. Since ancient times, immigrants have maintained connections with the land they left behind. (The Psalm reads: “By the rivers of Babylon we sit there, yea, we weep when we think of Zion.” “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” ) The United States in the 19th century was no exception. They organized newspapers, social clubs, political organizations and informal networks that allowed them to establish themselves in the ancient country, sometimes for generations.
While technology has made it easier for people to stay informed and return home more often, the same innovations have also made it harder for people to avoid assimilating into broader American society. Even famously insular religious groups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews are now on social media. To some extent, newcomers are now “pre-assimilated”: people from around the world, especially those who want to immigrate, have a familiarity with American pop culture and the English language that fans out from shiploads of Europeans time is impossible.
For decades, for example, northern Wisconsin was like a little Finland, with entire towns built by immigrants who did business, socialized, and prayed almost exclusively in Finnish. They maintained this connection for generations. The Oulu Evangelical Lutheran Church continued to offer services in Finnish into the 1950s. Finnish language newspaper based in Wisconsin Työväen cooperative newspaper It was closed until 1965. About half of Finns within Finland Speak English now.
The Chicago Foreign Language News Survey collected 116,553 pages of foreign language newspapers published in the United States from 1855 to 1938. 1897 Lithuanian American Weekly Lithuania Said that national schools are “the only institutions that can improve the intelligence of our brothers and inspire our children with the Lithuanian spirit”. 1910, Czechoslovakia – American Weekly daily herald Complaints about the U.S. Census not recognizing Slavic identities, like the recent movement to add “Middle Eastern” as a census category.
Some old-time European immigrants engaged in identity politics so blatantly that they would make modern woke academics blush. One week before the 1922 U.S. election, daily herald “Czechoslovak voters, both men and women, should always remember that four of our compatriots are Democratic candidates and none are Republican candidates, and act accordingly next Tuesday,” the statement said. Six years later, Bolletino The Italian-American National Alliance reminds readers that “different Italians are candidates for different offices. Regardless of our party affiliation, we have a responsibility to vote for them.”
When President Theodore Roosevelt complained that “hyphenated Americans are not Americans at all,” he listed German, Irish, British, French, Scandinavian, and Italian Americans as a threat to the nation. The people who Meadowcroft viewed as models of good assimilation had been viewed as unassimilated subversives a century earlier. Italian-Americans in particular were vilified as carriers of religious extremism, political violence and organized crime; the largest lynchings in American history targeted the so-called “sneaky, cowardly Sicilians, descendants of bandits and assassins” in New Orleans.
Some modern nativists have advanced a more sophisticated argument, acknowledging that early immigrants changed America but wanting to freeze that change. chronicle Podcast host Jay Engel recently wrote that his definition of American identity “includes the types of people who came here during the Ellis Island generation, even if that was a major sociopolitical mistake. We are also the ones we made as a country.” The product of error. Engel’s preferred cutoff point for American identity was World War II, the last time he saw America as “centered on Anglo-Protestant experiences and norms.”
Why not cut off earlier? forward Did the massive wave of southern and eastern European immigrants through Ellis Island dilute Anglo-Protestant culture? (The fact that Engel himself had Italian grandparents shows why this would not be politically feasible in the United States.) Or, if we agree that those Ellis Islanders are irreversibly part of the American fabric, then why no Including subsequent waves of immigrants?
Engel believes this is because “certain ethnic groups pose less of a threat to Anglo-Protestant society than others.” “The Irish, Italians, or Catholics may not have fit into the original core,” he writes, “but as Europeans they were closer in scope.” Thus, they might have been assimilated, whereas recent non-European arrivals “If they are unable to integrate, they should be sent home immediately.”
Like Meadowcroft’s account of the settlers, Engel’s classification of “American heritage” is historically illiterate. Not all immigrants in the 19th century were European; some were born far away from Europe.
After all, the first major law restricting immigration to the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Pacific coast. Also forgotten are the Indian Conspiracy Trials during World War I, a California-centered scare over Indian-American support for the resistance to the British Empire. These examples of nativist backlash reveal just how much Asian Americans contributed to solving problems along the western frontier.
Paterson, New Jersey, a city famous for renaming its main street “Palestine Way,” has had an Arab-American community since the 19th century, when Syrian silk weavers helped establish the local garment industry. Michigan has a similar ancient Arab diaspora, which has also hosted many generations of Armenian Americans. Both communities continue to welcome newcomers while retaining memories of the old country. There are no strict racial lines between “traditional Americans” and new immigrants.
Basque shepherds first came to the U.S. frontier with the 1849 gold rush and dominated California’s sheep industry in the 1970s. They were often the first and only settlers in remote areas of the Rockies. Basque-American men often returned to Spain and France to find wives or recruit new workers. Although European, these Basques did not adopt the “cultural and behavioral ways, habits and standards” of the “American heritage,” as Engel puts it. Instead, they created a Basque bubble in the United States, some of which still exists.
“After church, Basques lined up outside the Pyrenees bakery to buy thick-crusted sourdough ‘shepherd’s bread’ for Sunday dinner. Others gathered at the Basque Club to play a game. ball (Basque handball) or card game Moose,” this Los Angeles Times 1989 Description of the Basque Country in Bakersfield, California. “By late afternoon, the bar at the Noriega Hotel was packed with shepherds and their descendants drinking picon punch, a cocktail of brandy, grenadine, soda water and amir picon. An intoxicating aperitif blend.
Just as some of America’s oldest communities retain ties to the old world, some newcomers are eager to close their doors. A few months ago, Fox News reporters encountered a group of Turkish immigrants sneaking into California from Mexico without documents. Shortly after the crossing, one of the people told reporters that Americans should be concerned that the border is “not safe.” “Who comes to this country? They don’t know,” the man said. “Okay, I’m fine. But what if they’re not?”
This is the U.S. immigration debate in a nutshell: People who arrived ten minutes ago try to keep out people who arrived five minutes ago. Although “American tradition” may be decades removed from the immigrant experience, this is only a difference of degree. The basic information remains the same. Well, my ancestors were kind. But are those people doing the same thing? they are not.
