Anti-immigrant slurs: an American history
Or a sketch of the history, anyhow, since there's far too much of it to cover in a mere blog post.
The idea of immigrants as "garbage" is in the news because of Donald Trump's assertion in a speech and an interview last week that "we're like a garbage can for the rest of the world", followed by Tony Hinchcliffe's offensive jokes at Trump's MSG rally about Puerto Ricans (who are American citizens, of course, but are often lumped in with Spanish speakers from Central and South America). And then there was Joe Biden's comment, and Trump's trash truck stunt in Wisconsin.
Let's go back 102 years, to a quotation from William Joseph Simmons, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in an address delivered on April 30, 1922, and published in the Klan's journal The Searchlight:
Right here within our own borders, the great and mighty city of Boston, which tries to lay claim that it is the cradle of America (tries is all it can do), and holds itself up as the paragon of American principles, has, if my information is correct, seventeen schools in which the English language is never spoken, and not an English thought or an American ideal. These schools are for the children of French-Canadians who have come across the border and each of these schools are under the domination of a foreign potentate who is in nowise sympathetic with American ideals and institutions. Right here in our own land twenty-one towns in the state of Connecticut are under the domination and control of the Italian-Dago influence. Then you hear folks talk about "we Americans” and of America as the melting-pot where the stamp and impress of all nations can come in and shape our destinies. It is no such thing. It is a garbage can! Not a melting-pot. . . . My friends, your government can be changed between the rising and the setting of one sun. This great nation, with all it provides, can be snatched away from you in the space of one day, and that day no more than ten hours. When the hordes of aliens walk to the ballot box and their votes outnumber yours, then that alien horde has got you by the throat. . . . Americans will awake from their slumber and rush out for battle and there will be such stir as the world has never seen the like. The soil of America will run with the blood of its people.
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