Читать книгу To Be An American - Bill Ong Hing - Страница 11

“We are a nation of immigrants.” How many times do we hear this phrase? Most of us encounter it in positive terms beginning in elementary school. Take my daughter’s Fifth Grade social studies textbook America Will Be.¹ Chapter 1 is entitled “A Nation of Many Peoples,” and the first paragraph contains this passage: “From the earliest time, America has been a land of many peoples. This rich mix of cultures has shaped every part of life in the United States today.” The authors continue, as a “pluralistic culture, life is exciting. People work, join together, struggle, learn, and grow.”

Today the phrase—“we are a nation of immigrants”—is invoked on both sides of the immigration debate. On one side we are told, “We are a nation of immigrants, immigrants are our strength, they invigorate our economy, they stimulate our culture, they add to our society.” On the other, “We are a nation of immigrants, but times have changed; they take away jobs, they are costly, the non-English speakers make life complicated, new immigrants don’t have our values.”

As early as 1751, Benjamin Franklin opposed the influx of German immigrants, warning that “Pennsylvania will in a few years become a German colony; instead of their learning our language, we must learn theirs, or live as in a foreign country.” A couple of years later, he expanded this thought:

[T]hose who came hither are generally the most stupid of their own nation, and as ignorance is often attended with great credulity, when knavery would mislead it, and with suspicion when honesty would set it right; and few of the English understand the German language, and so cannot address them either from the press or pulpit, it is almost impossible to remove any prejudices they may entertain. … Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make modest use of it.

Responding to dramatic increases in German and Irish immigration in the first half of the 1800s, the Kentucky Senator Garrett Davis spoke out against further immigration and proposed a twenty-one-year residency requirement for naturalization. In his view,

[M]ost of those European immigrants, having been born and having lived in the ignorance and degradation of despotisms, without mental or moral culture, with but a vague consciousness of human rights, and no knowledge whatever of the principles of popular constitutional government, their interference in the political administration of our affairs, even when honestly intended, would be about as successful as that of the Indian in the arts and business of civilized private life. … The system inevitably and in the end will fatally depreciate, degrade, and demoralize the power which governs and rules our destinies.²