Immigration

I've been thinking about immigration a lot lately. My family were immigrants, and so are the students that I teach in Kansas City, Kansas. I found it striking that Kansas City, Kansas, has had high numbers of immigrants for a hundred years, and that the house in which my grandfather grew up  now houses immigrants from Mexico.

207 S. 8th, Kansas City, Kansas (near Strawberry Hill)

Immigration is as American as apple pie, but it is one of the most hotly-contested issues in American politics. I do not know much about the state of our immigration policy, but I hear how difficult, time consuming, and expensive it is for people to come here. In 1899 European immigrants were at an all-time high, and by the 1920s the Dillingham Report caused the government to pass legislation (The Emergency Immigration Act) to restrict immigrants by numbers (3% of of the population already living in the United States), ability (must be able to read), and race (anyone easily assimilated into "American" ways). The legislation blocked people from Southern Europe, Russia, and a large section of Asia from immigrating legally because they were desperately poor and had religious views that contrasted with Protestant Americans. Who called for the report and subsequent legislation? Nativist groups, according to the best source available, Wikipedia, states, "Nativism typically means opposition to immigration and support of efforts to lower the political or legal status of specific ethnic or cultural groups because the groups are considered hostile or alien to the natural culture, and assumptions that they cannot be assimilated." Sounds racist to me...

Here's an interview on NPR about the long-lasting effects of the Dillingham Report: http://www.npr.org/2013/01/28/170494504/dillingham-commissions-ranking-of-immigrant-groups-affected-u-s-policy-for-decad

 It also sounds like current legislation in states like Arizona are attempting to pass. "Nativists" hold deficit views of other cultures, and because we had done a horrible job of teaching social studies in this country, the same racist legislation is being passed in 2013 that was passed in 1911, over a hundred years ago. 


^{History is repeating itself. What are we going to say to our children's children when they look back at our policies today?}