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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.

(At least, that's how the speech is quoted by Charles Sweeney in "The Great Bigotry Merger", The Nation 7/5/1922 — I haven't been able to find The Searchlight on line.)

The parallel with current anti-immigration rhetoric is striking, except that the "hordes" Simmons warns against are French Canadians and Italians.

And then we can go back another 67 years, to Abraham Lincoln's 1855 letter to Joshua Speed:

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

That's a place-holder for a denunciation of Irish and German Catholic immigrants as politically- and socially-threatening trash. Many such complaints can be found in the writings and speeches of those Know-Nothings, including this 1857 speech by Henry Winter Davis, who "told Congress the unamerican Irish Catholic immigrants were to blame for the election of  James Buchanan":

The recent election has developed in an aggravated form every evil against which the American party protested. Foreign allies have decided the government of the country — men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election. Again in the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence on the political arena. These influences have brought vast multitudes of foreign-born citizens to the polls, ignorant of American interests, without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American affairs; and those votes have, in point of fact, accomplished the present result.

And finally, let's go back another century to Benjamin Franklin's "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.", 1751:

[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? 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.

So no "garbage" — but things that "swarm" and "herd" are maybe halfway between trash and human beings.

You can read a bit more about Franklin's essay in "Palatine boors swarming into our settlements" (2/4/2017), which also notes that

Those "Palatine boors"were presumably farmers from the Palatinate, in what's now Germany. So there's a potential problem with the idea of citing Franklin in support of current White House views on strong immigration control — from Wikipedia:

Donald Trump's paternal ancestry is traceable to Kallstadt, a village in the Palatinate, Germany.

October 31, 2024 @ 4:42 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and politics

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