It's All About the 'Others'

[Passages]

Can Trump convince voters who are immigrants and immigrants’ children that today’s immigrants are to blame for all our ills?

by Harold Meyerson October 14, 2024

I’m not an uncritical fan of the 1619 Project, but I will note that our country’s foundational DNA came complete with savage racial hierarchies, as the foundational DNA of most nations did not. It’s only now, with non-Europeans coming in considerable number to the nations of the EU, that those nations are seeing the rise of the kind of explicitly racist and xenophobic tendencies that, alas and alack, are as American as apple pie.

Historically, of course, in the absence of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean immigrants, Europe had to make do with antisemitism, which I suppose goes to show that the need for a scapegoatable “other” can be common to a wide range of peoples and nations.

As a nation of immigrants, America is also periodically a nation of xenophobes. Benjamin Franklin’s railing against the mid-18th-century German immigrants in otherwise Anglo Pennsylvania is as good a starting point as any. Came the Irish, came the Yankee Protestant backlash; came the Italians and the Jews and that backlash took the form of the second iteration of the Klan and, in 1924, the 40-year banning of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Our disparate groups of immigrants haven’t always banded together, either. Having amassed majorities or near-majorities in most American big cities by the end of the 19th century, the Irish used the existing patronage systems to dominate big-city politics and big-city hiring. In New York, Tammany didn’t exactly hang out a sign reading “No non-Irish need apply,” but there weren’t a lot of points of entry for Gotham’s Italians and Jews. It took Fiorello La Guardia, with Italian and Jewish parentage, fluent in both Italian and Yiddish, and who’d previously been elected to Congress on both the Republican and Socialist ballot lines, to unite the city’s Italians and Jews, as they’d not been united before. They came together with the anti-Irish Protestant Brahmins to elect La Guardia as mayor in 1933, defeating Tammany’s Irish candidate. At the national level, the Irish, Italians, and Jews all supported Franklin Roosevelt, whose political skills were such that they all believed they had a stake in his electoral success (which, in fact, they did)b

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-14-all-about-the-others-trump-immigrants/

Hoping for the same outcome.