History of Migration
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Columbus Day - Celebrating the First Illegal Alien
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Netroots Nation: Day 1
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Netroots Nation: Going to Pittsburgh
QOTD: Unruly Agitators
Published August 12, 2009 @ 04:00AM PT
[I]t is infinitely more safe to admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to work, than to admit one of those unruly agitators and enemies of governmental control, who can not only read and write, but delights in arousing by inflammatory speech the illiterate and peacefully inclined to discontent and tumult.
- Grover Cleveland
Remember the Voyage of the St. Louis
Published June 22, 2009 @ 09:36PM PT
The Washington Post ran a political cartoon by Art Spiegelman over the weekend commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the voyage of the St. Louis on the eve of World War II. It’s a great piece, but too large to post here. His reproduction of contemporary political cartoons is especially poignant given the tragic outcome of the attempted escape from Nazi persecution.
On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba. On the voyage were 937 passengers. Almost all were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich. The German annexation of Austria in March 1938, the increase in personal assaults on Jews during the spring and summer, the nationwide Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) pogrom in November, and the subsequent seizure of Jewish-owned property had caused a flood of visa applications. The plight of German-Jewish refugees, persecuted at home and unwanted abroad, is illustrated by the voyage of the St. Louis.
After Cuba and then the United States denied these refugees entry, the St. Louis was forced to return to Europe on June 6, 1939. Following difficult negotiations initiated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the ship was able to dock in Antwerp, Belgium; and the governments of Belgium, Holland, France, and the United Kingdom agareed to accept the refugees. By 1940, all of the passengers, except those who escaped to England, found themselves once again under Nazi rule.
Nearly a third of the St. Louis's passengers died in the Holocaust.
After Cuba refused entry to the refugees, all hope among the passengers rested on the United States. Just 15 years after the restrictive Immigration and Nationality Act was passed in reaction to widescale Jewish and Italian immigration through Ellis Island and other ports of entry, that hope was misplaced.
Sailing so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami, some passengers on the St. Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded. The State Department and the White House had decided not to take extraordinary measures to permit the refugees to enter the United States. A State Department telegram sent to a passenger stated that the passengers must "await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States." U.S. diplomats in Havana intervened once more with the Cuban government to admit the passengers on a "humanitarian" basis, but without success.
Racial History: "The Order of Myths"
Published June 21, 2009 @ 08:52PM PT
Watching the 2008 documentary The Order of Myths tonight, I was reminded of how migration and race have been closely connected throughout the history of the continent, and how difficult it has been for many Americans to come to terms with this history and its consequences. Filmmaker Margaret Brown, herself from a white family in Mobile, followed the segregated Mardi Gras celebrations of 2007. Brown and her crew interviewed royalty and participants from both the black and the white Mardi Gras balls.
Seeing unabashed institutionalized segregation in the 21st century smacks you in the face—especially since it seems so ordinary to the residents of Mobile. The film doesn't flinch from its subject, but nonetheless manages to also be gracious and optimistic. Notably, Brown secured the participation of members of both the black and the white royalty at the film's premieres at Sundance, Edinburgh, and in Mobile.
But there’s also a migration story here. From PBS’s website:
[T]he narrative takes an unexpected twist when it is revealed that this year’s white Mardi Gras queen, debutante Helen Meaher, is the direct descendent of an outlaw who ran the last slave ship to enter the United States, more than 50 years after a federal ban abolished the slave trade. His ship, the Clothilde, contained unforeseen cargo—the ancestor of the film’s black Mobile Mardi Gras Queen of 2007, Stefannie Lucas. Her forebears fled into the woods outside of Mobile, known as Africatown, rather than be burned alive when the Clothilde ran aground.
“Outlaw” is one way to describe Timothy Meaher, but “wealthy Mobile shipyard owner and shipper” is another.
Sotomayor and Scalia: A Brief History of Whiteness
Published May 27, 2009 @ 11:00PM PT
I see several bloggers today pointing out the hypocrisy of conservative politicians and pundits accusing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor of promoting identity politics while themselves assuming "white male" to be the neutral baseline from which all other identity groups diverge.
In particular, several observers have compared the reaction to Sotomayor's Puerto Rican identity with the treatment of Scalia and Alito's Italian heritage. Atrios notes that
our white males on the teevee have never had any problem with the identity politics that they associate with American Whiteness - the identity politics of white ethnics - but get freaked when a member of a non-approved (nonwhite) group achieves some prominence.
But Italians were not always included on the list of "approved Whites." Alito's testimony from his confirmation hearings a few years ago is instructive:
when a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant -- and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases -- I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position.
. . .
when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, "You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country."
. . .
When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender.
Alito wasn't just blowing smoke. His family really did live that history. While it seems obvious to contemporary Americans that Italians are white,
this was not clear at the time of the last great immigration wave. Then, the white population was seen as divided into many sharply distinguishable races. Jews and Italians were thought of as racially distinct in physiognomy, mental abilities, and character. A common belief was that they belonged to inferior “mongrel” races that were polluting the country’s Anglo-Saxon or Nordic stock.
(at 143)
And it gets worse. Social scientist Edward A. Ross wrote that steerage passengers from Naples “show a distressing frequency of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins, poor features, skew faces, small or knobby crania, and backless heads. Such people lack the power to take rational care of themselves.” He noted the “dusk of Saracenic or Berber ancestors” appearing in the faces of Italian immigrant children, which could “in time quench what of the Celto-Teutonic flush lingers in the cheek of the native American.” (Ross of course referred here to the now-elusive European variety of “native American.”)
These opinions weren't limited to leading scientists. President Woodrow Wilson bought into the pseudo-scientific racism of the day, calling migrants from southern Italy the "sordid and hapless elements of their population" with "neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence" and completely lacking a work ethic.
Jewish or Italian ethnicity wasn't always regarded as synonymous with mainstream whiteness. This assimilation came over decades as those communities struggled to distinguish themselves from people of Asian, African, and indigenous descent to secure the status benefits of whiteness.
An observer from 1924, the year Congress shut the gates of immigration for four decades because of the number of Jews and Italians that had come to the U.S. through Ellis Island, would find it very strange that two Italian-American jurists are now identified so thoroughly with establishment Whiteness. Yet to read this week's commentary about Alito, Scalia, and Sotomayor, one would think that U.S. history before 1970 had simply been erased.
