Sunday, August 04, 2019

Immigrants? We wuz them

I am on the internet (right wing sites this time) busy defending the Catholic position to help immigrants in need (both legal and illegal) in the USA.

Sorry, fellahs, most of them just want to work and support their families.

I agree there is a need for regulation. I suggest they do as the Middle East and richer Asian countries do here: let job recruiters or sponsors into these countries for people to apply, so people won't just arrive and be dropped on an overwhelmed asylum system. Similarly, churches could sponsor families similar to how the Vietnamese families were housed and helped by churches after the fall of Saigon.

But alas, although Trumpieboy is right in the need to regulate the immigration system and put a fence up to keep out drugs and criminals, but politics trumps sanity I guess: So instead the Democrats play the racism card and it is the height of insanity when the mod squad congresswomen condemn the overcrowded asylum camps as "concentration camps" while voting against their own party's bill for emergency funding to improve conditions. WTF?

A pox on both their houses.

Trump usually uses hyperbole as a negotiating tactic, but one of the "side effects" is to encourage bigotry against all foreigners and immigrants (who take the jobs of Americans who resent being unemployed, but also by some of whom don't want to work that hard and resent the hard working newcomers, ..).

 It' s not so much "racism" as seeing immigrants as "the other", someone dangerous. And many blame the immigrants for their inability to find a job (whereas the real reason was predicted 40 years ago: a globalization run by the elites who put profit over the common good, and decided to export their jobs to China etc. rather than upgrade American workers with education etc.).

 The press with their anti Trumpieboy hatred only makes things worse, since ironically these "deplorables" only want the same thing as the immigrants: to be left free to work and support their families...

Racism accusations just make things worse, of course. You see, the elites making the accusations tend to live in an upper class bubble, whereas the "deplorables" live in the same neighborhoods as immigrants and minorities. Yes, they fought each ether over jobs, but as the immigrants assimilated, within a generation, everyone is intermarried...

None of this is new, of course.

Some of my ancestors arrived half starved and sick, fleeing the Irish Potato famine. My great grandfather was orphaned and raised by Catholic sisters in an orphanage; presumably his parents died on one of the "coffin ships".

There is some criticism of the Catholics not being "woke"back then, since they were not pushing anti slavery in those days before the civil war, but this ignores that the major "civil rights" problem  that Catholics faced was the prejudice against the immigrants.
From Wikipedia:
The term Know-Nothing Riot has been used to refer to a number of political uprisings of the Nativist American Know Nothing Party in the United States of America during the mid-19th century. These anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic protests culminated into riots in Philadelphia in 1844, St. Louis in 1854, Cincinnati and Louisville in 1855, Baltimore in 1856, Washington, D.C. and New York in 1857, and New Orleans in 1858.

Ironically the only major film that showed this was "Gangs of New York": which ironically was directed by an Italian American, and starred non Irish Italians as the Irish fighting the New York City establishment.

and yes, the Catholic bishops worked with the immigrants and fought for their rights.

In one of the ironies of history, Bishop Healy of Boston and Portland Maine, the first African-American Catholic bishop, was one who defended the rights of the Irish immigrants in those days.

Healy's siblings also were prominent: His brother was dean of Georgetown for example, but it was his Brother, "Hell roaring Mike", who is best known in history as a Captain of what would now be considered a Coast guard vessel that patrolled the Alaskan coast,  a job that included defending the rights of the Native Americans  and doing law enforcement in that vast area.

You know, America has always been a "melting pot", and one would think that it would be better if politicians remembered it and promoted what people have in common instead of encouraging hate speech and insisting people should stay in their own group.

 A good quote to remember (from wikpedia article on the Gangs of New York)

The country was up for grabs, and New York was a powder keg. This was the America not the West with its wide open spaces, but of claustrophobia, where everyone was crushed together. On one hand, you had the first great wave of immigration, the Irish, who were Catholic, spoke Gaelic, and owed allegiance to the Vatican. On the other hand, there were the Nativists, who felt that they were the ones who had fought and bled, and died for the nation. They looked at the Irish coming off the boats and said, "What are you doing here?" It was chaos, tribal chaos. Gradually, there was a street by street, block by block, working out of democracy as people learned somehow to live together. If democracy didn't happen in New York, it wasn't going to happen anywhere. — Martin Scorsese on how he saw the history of New York City as the battleground of the modern American democracy.

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