Aug 23^rd

The recent rants against immigrants have a long and dishonorable history in this country. It certainly isn’t a recent development and it isn’t confined to rabble rousers. My ancestors were Pennsylvania Dutch. They emigrated from Germany in the 1780s. The “Dutch” was a corruption of Deutsch, or German. Mostly farmers, they arrived here speaking little or no English and they stayed largely to themselves. They settled in Pennsylvania, primarily in Lancaster County and counties nearby. In spite of the fact that Pennsylvania was sparsely settled and farms only existed after the farmer had spent weeks with an ax and a team felling trees and pulling stumps, my ancestors were not universally welcomed in this new land.

One of our founding fathers expressed considerable hostility toward these emigrants. Here are some quotes from Ben Franklin about these immigrants:

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the   English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as   to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our   Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation…and as few of the English understand the German Language, and so cannot address them either from the Press or Pulpit, ’tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertain…, and even our Government will become precarious.

Note, particularly, that Franklin complains of these settlers’ stupidity and of their “complexion.” In fact, in other complaints, he focuses heavily on complexion; he assures us that only the English and some Nordic people are sufficiently light skinned to be desirable immigrants.



That was about 1780 so let’s move ahead 100+ years and look at an article in the Atlantic magazine about immigrants published about 1890:

The question to-day is not of preventing the wards of our almshouses, our insane asylums, and our jails from being stuffed to repletion by new arrivals from Europe; but of protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe.

That’s a small portion of the article but it’s enough to give you the flavor of the times. Just substitute Latin America for Europe and you have exactly the pitch of today’s conservative’s views on immigration. Curiously, Franklin’s obsession with skin color is echoed and amplified today by Ann Coulter. Ms. Coulter has written at least ten best sellers all of which excoriate liberals. Her latest book, “Adios America,” takes the position that the country is becoming Latinized. She laments the arrival of “swarthy skinned males.” Swarthy skinned is the identical phrase used by Franklin 240 years ago to describe my ancestors. Coulter has lost favor with the right perhaps because she is simply too vicious. The last meeting of CPAC (Conservative Political Action Congress) did not give her an invitation to speak; it was her first rejection in many years.