Immigration and Racism in Britain and USA

What about its title? :wink:


Nah, I'll stick to covering the British part of the thread, I'll leave the US part to you Americans this time ;-)

http://www.asian-nation.org/first.shtml

You must leave also the Latin countries to Latins instead of showing racism towards them!

Meet the New Racism: Same As the Old Racism
From Michael Phillips

Anti-Immigration Hysteria in American History
Finding himself caught between two irreconcilable expectations held by the Republican Party faithful, President Bush's immigration policy veers towards the irrational. In the 19th century, Jews, Italians and the Irish were viewed by many ruling Anglo-Americans as non-white. These groups, however, became "white" in part by accepting elite ideas of race and by supporting an economic system that provides a great deal for the few and the barely adequate for the many. The social status and the incomes of these groups rose accordingly. If Mexicans are an outside group now, they too might enter the white man's club if they accept predatory capitalism and adopt the language of anti-black racism. As Richard Pryor once said, the first word an immigrant learns in English is "nigger"


Article Continues: Irish Immigrants and the 'Know-Nothing' Era

Irish Immigrants and the 'Know-Nothing' Era
Early 19th century anti-immigrant racism found its fullest expression in the platform of the American or Know-Nothing Party, which rose and fell almost entirely within a two-year span, from 1854 to 1856. The Know-Nothings formed in response to the continued immigration of Germans and the sudden rise of Irish immigration after the potato famine in the late 1840s. About 2.3 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1830 and 1850, the largest group coming from Ireland. The Know-Nothings promised to stop what they called as a cultural and racial invasion by the Catholic Irish, who, because of their religion, supposedly owed first allegiance to the Pope. In addition to seeing them as disloyal citizens, Know-Nothings saw the Irish as promiscuous drunks, a potent charge at a time when the Prohibition movement emerged as a political force.

Know-Nothings accused the Irish of lowering wages for "American" workers and accepting filthy living conditions. The Know-Nothing and the broader anti-immigrant movements in the 1840s and 1850s sought to end legal immigration, ban Catholics from holding elective office, diminish the voting strength of new Americans by extending the period of naturalization from five to 21 years, and supported the use of the Protestant King James Bible in the public schools.

The Know-Nothing Party fell apart because its Northern and Southern wings couldn't agree on slavery. Mid-19th century nativism lost salience as an issue because of the nation's rush towards the Civil War, the decline of Irish immigration in the late 1950s, and the rising assimilation of Irish Americans into the American political system through what was then a white supremacist Democratic Party. The Irish North of the Mason-Dixon line, locked in competition with African Americans for low-wage jobs, spectacularly displayed the negrophobia required for higher status in this country's caste system, violently resisting the draft in an1863 New York City riot. Insisting they would never fight a war to free black men, Irish rioters burned a black orphanage and shot and beat to death African Americans men and women, young and old, in the city streets. Once racial outsiders, by the late 19th century the Irish rose to leadership positions in politics and the labor movement. Irish union leaders banned black members, called strikes if black employees were hired, and insisted on higher "white men's wages" for themselves as they forced African Americans to remain on the outside of the factory gate.

Article Continues: Jews, Italians and the Eugenics Era


Jews, Italians and the Eugenics Era
The next wave of anti-immigrant paranoia started in late 19th century. More than 14 million Europeans immigrated to the United States between 1870-1900. Before 1880, the Germans, the Irish, the English and Scandinavians made up 85 percent of immigrants arriving in the United States. After 1880, immigration from Europe dramatically shifted, with Italians, Hungarians, eastern European Jews, Turks, Armenians, Poles, Russians and other Slavic people accounting for 85 percent of all immigrants by 1896.

Such numbers lead Theodore Roosevelt in warn in an 1906 address to Congress that the fast reproduction of these new immigrants, and the low birth rate among Anglo women, raised the specter of "race suicide." that Jews and other Southern and Eastern Europeans lacked whiteness, and thus lacked the work ethic, thrift, energy, intelligence and morals to make it in this country. Popular magazines disseminated this message, encouraging the rebirth of the long-dormant Ku Klux Klan, which became a dominant force in not just Southern but national political life by the early 1920s.

Hoping to preserve the nation's "racial stock," nativists passed a series of immigration restrictions between the 1880s and the 1920s. The Congress banned Chinese immigration n the 1880s and excluded laborers from most Asian countries in a 1917 immigration law. The Immigration Restriction League successfully lobbied for the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which set immigration quotas at 2 percent of nationals from a particular country present in the United States in 1890, a move drastically reducing the immigration quotas permitted Southern and Eastern Europeans. The Italian quota, for instance, fell from 42,000 to about 4,000 and the Polish quota from 31,000 to 6.000. This act barred the door to America for Jews who attempted to flee the Holocaust. America's 1924 immigration restriction law doomed many Jews to Hitler's gas chambers, though the total number who might otherwise have found safety in the United States remains a mystery.

Article Continues: Mexicans, Central Americans and the Immigration Hysteria

Mexicans, Central Americans and the Immigration Hysteria
Mexicans, Central Americans and the Immigration Hysteria Today
We should keep this tragic backdrop in mind as we consider today's immigration fracas. Whether or not we build a hideous Berlin Wall along our southern border, immigrants will continue pouring over our borders until nations like Mexico are no longer treated like open markets for modern slave labor. The NAFTA treaty destroyed the Mexican economy, with some of the chief victims small campesinos who are no longer able to compete with American agribusiness. These struggling growers, many of them indigenous people, become landless peasants and now head north to save their families from starvation.

The lies told about earlier immigrant groups are told now about the Mexicans and Central Americans who cross our borders every day. Immigrants have become this year's gay married couples, a convenient scapegoat targeted by the political right. They are a threat shown on the nightly news scuttling across the border in grainy, nightscope vision footage bringing to mind a 1950s horror movie. The immigration "crisis" is so dire, according to Fox News' John Gibson, that he recently called for a crude program of neo-eugenics. On the May 11 edition of The Big Story, Gibson took a break from ranting about the so-called war on Christmas to ask his viewers to "do your duty. Make more babies."

Gibson cited a Census Bureau Report that said that half of all children ages 5 and under belong to minorities. "By far, the greatest number [of children under five] are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, Hispanics are having more kids than others. Notably, the ones Hispanics call "gabachos" -- white people -- are having fewer." Gibson's comments exposes as deceit the claim that the anti-immigrationistas are only concerned about preserving the national culture and aren't racists. Gibson obviously believes that being American means have a white skin.

The lies of the anti-immigrant movement presented uncritically on the media are easy to refute. Nightly on his news broadcast, CNN's Lou Dobbs proclaims that modern immigrants don't want to learn English and reject assimilation. It might interest Mr. Dobbs that, according to demographers, 19th century immigrants and their families took on average three generations of residence in the United States to completely master the language, while today's immigrants are fluent in English in two generations.

Rather than using more in government services than they contribute in taxes, immigrants fork over $80,000 more in taxes than they receive in local, state and federal assistance combined, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Low wages and unemployment are more due to technology than to immigration, according to several economic studies. The Cato Institute studied the relationship of unemployment and immigration between 1900 and 1989 and could document "no statistically reliable correlation" between the two. Mr. Dobbs blames immigrants for bringing back diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis, when drug-resistant versions of these diseases began a comeback among our native homeless and poor as a result of the era of Social Darwinism launched by Ronald Reagan. Research by The Cato Institute also found that rather than bringing disease, that new immigrants are healthier than the native-born population in almost every measure.

Violent words precede violent actions. If the public is constantly fed propaganda that a group of people threaten their homes, their standards of living, their health and their safety, backlash inevitably sets in. This is already happening with the anti-immigration movement of today. While researching this paper, I came across a website where one young, white supremacist man noted that an on-line video game awards points to players as they shoot immigrants trying to illegally cross the border. Now, the man gleefully announced, the National Guard can do it for real. Sadly, this lone hacker is not alone as anti-immigrant attitudes have easily morphed into anti-Hispanic thuggery.

Article Continues: Vigilante Groups, Anti-immigration Activists & Immigration as an Economic Issue

Vigilante Groups, Anti-immigration Activists & Immigration as an Economic Issue
Vigilante groups like the Minutemen and lone actors have taken it upon themselves to fix what Dobbs obsessively calls our "broken border." On April 22 of this year, a 17-year-old Texas Hispanic high school football suffered serious injuries after an assault by two white men, one an active neo-Nazi skinhead, according to Harris County authorities. 

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 17-year-old Keith Robert Turner, and 18-year-old David Henry Tuck, 18, targeted their victim when the young Hispanic man tried to kiss a young Hispanic girl Turner and Tuck believed to be Caucasian. The pair burned their victim's neck with cigarettes, gashed his chest with a knife and stomped his head with steel-toed boots, while shouting anti-Hispanic slurs. They then stripped him naked and sodomized him with a patio umbrella pole. 

 Tuck, the skinhead, kicked the pole "so far in that [it] caused major organ damage." The unnamed victim remains in serious condition.

So-called mainstream anti -immigration activists are already forging ties with hate groups and encouraging violence to pursue their cause. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that on April 3. Border Guardians founder Laine Lawless, who once started a press conference by burning a Mexican flag before the Mexican Consulates in Tucson, Arizona, fired off an e-mail to Mark Martin, head of the Western Ohio unit of the National Socialist Movement. Titled "How to GET RID OF THEM," the e-suggested offered suggestions for terrorizing illegals. "Steal the money from any illegal walking into a bank or check cashing place," she suggests. " . . . I hear the rednecks in the South are beating up illegals as the textile mills have closed. Use your imagination," she wrote later. "Discourage Spanish-speaking children from going to school. Be creative," she concludes. Meanwhile, cowards in the media like Dobbs have repeatedly refused to acknowledge the involvement of Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, former militia activists and other fanatics in the anti-immigrant movement or to report on anti-immigrant violence.

Immigration, properly considered, should be an economic issue and not a racial or cultural one. The same free trade policies that drive Mexican campesinos off the land and move Indians to flee Central America depress wages in the United States, and de-industrialize our cities, all for the benefit of economic elites and at expense to the global working class. Anglo workers and Mexican immigrant workers share more than their common humanity: they are robbed by the same forces of greed and exploited by the same robber barons. Rather than closing the border, the Anglo public, the media and our politicians need to open their eyes to the human toll of globalization and of not free, but unfair, trade. The great battle to be fought in America today is not between Mexicans and Anglos, but between rich and poor.

Ha ha! Oh, I'm not going to leave either Americans or Latins alone in general, dontcha get yer hopes up ... just not interested in writing about America in this thread.

I see, you are only interested, for personnal reasons, in bashing the Latin countries!

Give up man, dont be too mean!

Oh god man, I thought you were joking. Now I read your post in the FIFA thread, and your one here now too, and it seems you're serious.

Now thats well weird. Me showing racism to Latin countries? Because I was disgusted by the way Portugal played? How ridiculous. I love how the French and Brazilians play, and they're Latin peoples too.

I also, lessee, hate Berlusconi, but love Zapatero, dont like most French movies but loved Amelie, never read Sartre but loved Modiano. And there's a Portuguese girl out there somewhere whom I still miss with yearning in my heart..

Take a chill pill, my man.

No, Nimh, I will not take pills as I dont take medications like many of your kind do!

You displayed some racism before and I'll quote it some day.

Btw, I dont need that you like France or French things, I need you ponderate your silly comments before posting such crap!

nimh and Francis, Hey, guys, I like both of you, and hate to see what's happening here. I wish both of you could take a "time out" before this escalates into something that can't be "recovered."

Thank you, CI, for your ponderate post. But sometimes I have to call crap, crap!

And such crap will not be "recovered" anyway...

"like many of my kind do"?

What's "my kind" supposed to be now?

Yes, I take an anti-depressant pill every day. It came with therapy, after I'd gone through some very rough years.

You want to bash that, now? (I'm sure Bernard will..)


Please do so. I dont like to be railed and ranted against without actually seeing what it is I'm even accused of, exactly.


You'd better show me what "silly comments" and "crap" I posted, cause I have no idea what you're going on about.

All I have to go on for now is that you didnt like how I ranted against the evil Portuguese football players, and that you thought that I was "bashing" them -- though you say yourself that you know nothing about football, so you wouldnt even know what it was that made football watchers like me angry about Portugal's game, in the first place.

And yes, if you're going to accuse me of "racism" - no less - against Latin people, then it is very relevant that there's at least as much, if not far more, that I love about Latin people and culture than that I dislike.

Right?

I think you are overstating the case a good deal here. I certainly agree that cultural differences of any kind can cause discord among mixed populations anywhere -- the U.S.A., Japan, China, the UK, France, ... anywhere.

Nations vary in the degree to which they are welcoming of others. Ususlly these differences are traceable to historical, economic, or cultural factors that may cause them. The U.S. has been particularly welcoming, mostly because we had lots of space for new development and usually needed the new sources of labor. However, even here, we have exhibited the usual forms of intolerance to each of the new waves of immigrants - Scotch-Irish, Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and now Central Americans. Was it all racism??? I don't think so, unless you use that word to describe any and all observable differences between groups of people.

France, the UK, and the Netherlands are all dealing with high (for them) levels of immigration, and the difficulties they are encounttering are generally very like those we have seen here. Each of these nations has done these things in its own way - more central control in the UK; a serious attempt to create a unifying 'French' culture embracing everyone there in France. They, like us have achieved both success and failure in the process. In every case the passage of time is likely to erase the problems. There are intolerant, narrow-minded people everywhere and I suppose you could call some of them racist. However I don't think the word means very much.

The Japanese are particularly intolerant of alien cultural imports - at least until they have created their own versions of them. They certainly dion't welcome immigrants, and even required the adoption of Japanese names by Koreans who came there. Are the Japanese racist? Is this a lasting quality in the makeup of all Japanese, evebn those who have left for other countries? Or, alternatively, is this just the cultural manifestation of Japanese history?

It is so satisfying to see the Europreans here turning on each other!

Nimh - Like you did in other threads before, you are using poor rhetorics in order to advance your arguments.

Yes, I want to bash you about the pills as you advise others to take them as you do, without knowing what their life is or what are their positions towards medications. That's poor rhetorics.

Bashing a country and it's inhabitants because of the way their team play a game is far too mean and racist.

And, again, you are a whinner!

I remember that happened equally or even more among the US-Americans here.

I've never been satisfied by such.

george, There is a truism to your thesis as there is to mine and many others that write on this topic. Some with a more liberal view will accept most immigrants irregardless of racial or ethnic background, but there are also those that play the race card to promote their anti-immigrant rhetoric.

All I'm trying to show is that racial issues still permeates immigration policy for many Americans and our government. To say the current issue on illegal immigration is without racial overtones is just ignorance of history and what's happening today.

I'd appreciate it if you could quote me so I knew what it was you were talking about.

I've mentioned in threads where people had questions that it helped me. I've never told people that they must use them.


I've never bashed Portugal as a country or the Portuguese people - I think rather kindly of them, for various reasons. I bashed their football team.

Their football team, for chrissakes. Hating a country's football team doesnt make anyone a "racist".


And you have transgressed the ToC several times here already. I have bashed a football team, but you are hurling insults personally at a fellow A2K member.

Again, as you didn't read my post, I'll quote you some day.

I don't know if whinner is an insult but, imo, it's no worse than obtuse..

Besides, I hardly can consider such screg of humankind as a "fellow"!

If my epithets to you are transgressing the TOCs, I'll gladly be punished for such and leave your racist and crapy company!

I somewhat agree with you here. However, was it racism on the part of the Episcopalean English settlers of Virginia who drove the Scotch-Irish religious dissenters into the Appalachians from the rich agricultural lands of the coast? Was it racism that drove the German settlers a century later to the then new lands of the Midwest? Was it racism that caused the friction between the native populations of our big cities with the Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants who came later? No, in each case it was cultural, religious, and language diffwerences that excited the reaction.

I do agree there is an element of racism in the reactions of some to what is happening at our southern border, but I also recognize that the other differences alone are enough to excite what wwe all observe. How can we honestly make the distinction? Finally, I believe that many citizens are a bit fed up with our government's long neglect of enforcement of our residency laws. They want the system to work more than they want to restrict immigration.

That's because you are so damn perfect Walter ! I, on the other hand take my pleasures where I find them.

Actually I don't know or understand the source of the pique between Francis and Nimh. I checked the last few pages and don't see the origins, but also recognize that there may well be something else involved.

Both are very good guys (for Europeans, anyway), and I hope they can get by it.