"The Immigrant" is a 1975 single written by Neil Sedaka and Phil Cody and performed by Sedaka. The single was the second release from his album, Sedaka's Back. "The Immigrant" was dedicated to John Lennon and the immigration problems that he faced.[According to Philip Cody, the song's lyric writer, it was originally written as a tribute to his father, Anthony Feliciotto, who came to America from Sicily in 1930. Sedaka's parents had also emigrated, from Russia/Poland.
I have always been pro-immigrant. in part it had to to do with out Franco-American (French Canadian0 heritage. We are actually fourth generation. My great-grandparents (both sides) emigrated from Quebec province during the diaspora of the latter nineteenth century. (For more on us Franco-Americans, like maybe 1 in 4 New Englanders, see here) it would not be an easy life. As the source points out, a lot of immigrants settled in the Fall River area, then with booming textile mills. In fact my maternal grandmother had been a master weaver (I believe), but my old-fashioned grandfather wanted her to be a housewife. Another relative of my dad had a New England farm where he spent his teen summers. I do think Mémère cooked cretons for his grocery. Cretons is a spiced cooked/cooled pork spread, literally my single favorite food, that and Tourtière, a pork pie. In fact, mom made me the latter on my last visit to her house. I do think my Uncle Pitou (spouse of my paternal Aunt Bea) was an immigrant; he used to amuse us kids by taking out his dentures. He passed away before I turned 18, he reportedly died of a heart attack while working as a car mechanic on the side at his house. All the generations before mine were brought up bilingual, mostly spoke French at home. French in fact was my preferred primary language at home. the base kindergarten was concerned and threatened to hold me back, so the folks went all English around the house with my 6 younger siblings, who blame me over not being bilingual, I didn't get to practice my French and gradually lost my fluency, but I did well in a French literature course at OLL. In fact, one of my favorite YouTube channels is Y a que la vérité qui compte. My parents' generation almost went out of the way to distance themselves from our Franco roots. My Mom remembered in early school being mocked for her French accent. you would never know. My maternal uncle, a priest, did not want to be stereotyped and sent by the bishop to a dying French parish because he spoke French. He had Mom's family genealogy back to Normandy in a strongbox which eventually got stolen from his rectory. LMAO if they ever cracked upon the box to find nothing more than old family records.. My brothers and I all grew up in the Roots era (in fact I had to attend an Alex Haley lecture at OLL) and have traced back my Dad's family tree. On the other hand, I was intrigued by the Québécois separatist campaign, and my uncle had zero patience for the discussion. "If you think it's so great, move there."
Our ethnic culture is best summarized in the following: "The hardships suffered by a difficult upbringing also ingrained certain values in the Franco-American community - particularly faith, family and a strong work ethic.". My dad was the youngest of six, and I'm the oldest of 7. Our Catholic heritage was key. There's an unusual family myth that my maternal grandmother had the power to stop bleeding (from wounds) with a special prayer (I'm a skeptic here about the power and how it's propagated but mention it as a context for the following incident). My grandfather's house was at the start of a steep downhill descent to the end of the cul-de-sac. My uncle (my mom's only, older sibling) had a sled, which he used to sled downhill. Apparently one day the sled flipped upside and a blade deeply cut his leg. Apparently, Mémère had been watching her son immediately ran to his side, prayed over him and the bleeding stopped; the story also goes that Mémère promised God if He saved her son, she would give him to Him to serve as His priest (meaning an end to the family name since priests are celibate.) I once asked my uncle about the sled bleeding incident; my uncle was direct and unflinching; he would not argue. He had no time for astrology or ols wives' tales. He simply said he was there and the bleeding stopped. (I didn't pursue the story about Grandmother's promise for his vocation to the priesthood.) but the lure of the religious life was strong. My paternal Aunt Grace also spent 20 years as a religious nun/sister who was a schoolteacher. She left the convent by the time I earned my first Master's. I remember I was in Officer Indoctrination School at Newport, RI and she drove there to pick me up for the weekend.
Familiar readers may know I thought I had my own vocation to the priesthood. In fact Mom made me vestments from old beach towels so I could play mass in primary school. I was an altar boy. from the age of 8 when masses were still said in Latin to leading the base altar boys in south Texas and serving the weekday 6am mass before high school. I had a vocation but not as a diocesan priest like my uncle but with an education order like the Jesuits or Oblates. I actually got interviewed by a Jesuit while at OLL . They never followed up, so I guess I didn't pass the audition. But there were 2 reasons why my vocation never panned out. First, I was 16 when I started college, no dating experience. And to my astonishment some very attractive coeds like smart gentlemen. And one of them actually asked me out on a first date. So I began to question taking a vow of celibacy. The second was I didn't like the liberal progressive drift in the Church, striving to be "relevant". I was mourning the loss of the centuries-old Latin mass and the beauty of old rituals and old cathedrals, sung masses, Gregorian chants to the overly familiar guitar masses and the like. For me, the "jump the shark" moment was going to mass at UT in Austin and the priest gave a homily on Olivia Newton John's pop hit "Have you never been mellow?"
Note: the essay continues after the following charts
False Myths about Immigration
The decades surrounding 1900 were not only the age of industrialization in the United States, but were also the age of urbanization and immigration. The 1880s were the first decade in American history, with the exception of the Civil War decade, when the urban population increased more than the rural population (in absolute numbers). From 1880 to 1920, population growth was concentrated in cities—the urban fraction expanded from a little more than one quarter of the national population to more than one half (Carter et al. 2006: 1–105).
The pace of rural to urban migration of the native born picked up during this era, but domestic urbanward migrants were dwarfed by the flood of immigrants coming to cities. From 1880 to 1920, the number of foreign born increased from almost 7 million to a little under 14 million (Gibson and Jung 2006: 26). These figures, however, underestimate the economic and demographic contribution of immigration (Kuznets 1971b). Immigrants inevitably lead to a second generation—the children of immigrants—whose social, cultural, and economic characteristics are heavily influenced by their origins. Counting the 23 million children of immigrants2, in addition to the 14 million immigrants, means that over one-third of the 105 million Americans in the 1920 population belonged to the “immigrant community,” defined as inclusive of the first and second generations.
Resumption of the essay
I loved "The New Colossus", the melting pot, our relatively open immigration policies (with certain unconscionable racist exceptions like the 1880;s Chinese Exclusion Act) contributed to the American industrial age and the world's biggest economy (around 1890). It really wasn't until WWI and the ensuing depression which stoked labor protectionism. Coolidge sadly signed a quota system into law, and to a certain extent the general parameters still exist today. There were nuances;
[B]efore 1965 there were no numerical limits at all on immigration from Latin America or the Caribbean, only qualitative restrictions. The 1965 amendments changed all that, imposing an annual cap of 120,000 on entries from the Western Hemisphere.
According to Gabriel “Jack” Chin:
Based on the Monroe Doctrine—and the desire for the free flow of labor, especially agricultural labor—there had been no cap [for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere] under the National Origins Quota System
There were phases in Latino migration (in addition to Texas, Mexico lost over half of its territory in the Mexican-American War "including the present-day states California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.") About 115000 native Mexicans remained after the American conquest, largely fought to expand its empire to the Pacific.
Let me expand on an example of historical discrimination against those of Mexican descent within the context of WWII:
In September 1945, Macario García returned to Sugar Land, Texas after serving as a sergeant in the US Army during World War II. The month before, President Harry Truman presented García with the Medal of Honor for his actions on November 27, 1944 near Grosshau, Germany. García singlehandedly attacked German machine-gun emplacements that were hindering his company’s advance. Although wounded during the attack, García crawled to the machine-gun nests, destroyed them, and captured four German soldiers. Only after his company advanced did García agree to medical treatment.
On the way to [the LULaC hometown celebration of his heroism] García entered the Oasis Café when, as the story goes, the waitress told García that they do not serve Mexicans. García commented that “if he was good enough to fight in the war he was good enough for a cup of coffee.” A fight broke out, and the owner and a patron beat García with a baseball bat. Police arrived and arrested García. His case was well publicized, and LULAC and the Comité Patriótico Mexicano (Mexican Patriotic Committee) raised funds for his legal defense. The case was repeatedly postponed, and the charges were finally dropped in 1946.
So, there were obviously family and economic ties to the south-western territory states with less formal regulation of migration, economic development in the region. labor demand, and better wagers lured immigrants from multiple sources (including China). Mexican civil war and violence, not to mention economic hardship in Mexico, contributed to an outflow of refugees. Depressions led to labor protectionism, scapegoating and deporting Mexicans (even Mexican-American citizens). The US relented due to manpower shortages with the American participation in WWII, but labor protectionism soon made an appearance with returning GI's from war. There were negotiated legal labor flows (e.g., the bracero program for temporary foreign labor) , but additional unauthorized workers worked outside these parameters. Hence, with special interests scapegoating migrants for allegedly low wages, Eisenhower launched Operation Wetback, which eventually ended under controversies of US citizens getting deported and farmers running into labor shortages. Essentially the illegal migration problem was resolved by issuing temporary work permits.
A couple of critical points in the 60's; JFK/LBJ ended the bracero program
In 1960, Pew notes, 84 percent of U.S. immigrants were born in Europe or Canada; 6 percent were from Mexico, 3.8 percent were from South and East Asia, 3.5 percent were from Latin America and 2.7 percent were from other parts of the world. In 2017, European and Canadian immigrants totaled 13.2 percent, while Mexicans totaled 25.3 percent, other Latin Americans totaled 25.1 percent, Asians totaled 27.4 percent and other populations totaled 9 percent.
Reagan then a generation later signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1886. which essentially legalized nearly 3M unauthorized aliens prior to 1984 but established sanctions gor employers knowingly hiring unauthorized aliens.
Unfortunately, the Reagan reform did not address the labor demand underlying the unauthorized entries. The law and order populist media "conservatives" opposed amnesty for unauthorized immigration, which it saw as setting a bad precedent. When George W. Bush tried to revisit immigration in his second term, a temporary worker program was part of a bipartisan compromise bur it ran into labor union labor protectionism opposition, including Barack Obama, broke the compromise:
[E]ven though he was part of the coalition, Obama offered an amendment that the larger group opposed, one that would have sunsetted the merit-based evaluation system for immigrants after five years. That amendment failed 42-55.
But Obama also supported four other amendments that the coalition opposed. Two from Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-ND, to sunset both the temporary guest worker visa program and the Y-1 non-immigrant temporary worker visa program after five years; and two amendments from Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, that would have removed the requirement that ‘Y’ non-immigrant visa holders leave the United States before they are able to renew their visa, and would have lowered the annual visa quota for guest workers from 400,000 to 200,000 per year. Obama voted for all five
Dorgan’s amendment to sunset the temporary guest worker visa program was of particular issue, since it passed, 49-48, despite calls from the coalition that it constituted a “deal-breaker.” Future votes to bring the legislation up for a vote on final passage failed.
Note that the nativist right wingers joined with left winger union opposition to kill the bill, and even if it passed the Senate, it faced an uphill battle in the House.
Obama failed to get legislation protecting Dreamers [i.e., unauthorized migrant foreign-born children] in the lame duck session following his midterm losses. Obama then implemented a related executive action, DACA, which Republicans correctly saw as executive branch overreach.
Trump used the unauthorized alien issue as a cornerstone of his Presidential campaigns. The xenophobic lies of migrants being criminals and mentally ill are despicable lies. Cato Institute and others have debunked the lie that unauthorized aliens are more criminal than native-born Americans. They also note Trump actually cut legal immigration more than "illegal" immigration. In fact, Obama was more of a Deporter-in-Chief than Trump.
Trump, the alleged Art of the Dealer, repeatedly failed to get the funding for the border wall and in fact unconstitutionally transferred DoD funding. He then used the pandemic as a pretext to restrict any immigration.
Biden clearly failed to anticipate the effect of ending Title 42 and mismanaged the crisis. but Trump scuttled the first Senate bipartisan immigration deal in years to save the issue for last fall's campaign
I totally oppose Trump's immigration policies this year and will likely expand on these in a follow-up post, But a couple of final notes,
First, there's Trump's unconstitutional action against birthright citizenship. I've written probably more than a dozen tweets about this and the Fourteenth Amendment. The fact is, this concept started in English common law. "In the 1844 New York case of Lynch v. Clarke, the court held that the common law rule applied in the United States and that a child born in United States of a temporary visitor to the country was a natural-born citizen of the United States under this rule." The case involved the child of two Irish visitors. this case was specifically cited in 14th Amendment hearings. Why the citizenship clause? Because common law had an exception for slaves.
Finally, a recent incident related to Trump's recent executive orders especially on ICE's crackdown on unauthorized aliens. A young American girl, Jocelynn Rojo Carranza, was bullied by some guy saying her parents would be deported, leaving her alone, and she committed suicide. This is heartbreaking, and in my opinion, her blood is on Trump's hands.
