Unwelcoming

FOR A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS, the United States is notoriously, demonstrably immigrant unfriendly, just as, for a nation of cultural, racial, and ethnic, and religious diversity, the United States, the american people, are and have always been antagonistic to such diversity. The xenophobic attitude of Donald Trump, his followers, and conservatives generally, while alarming, is quite typical of American historical tendencies. never underestimate the European-American capacity for hypocrisy. African immigration was once so strongly desired that it was coerced. Their services no longer required, no longer allowed, they were promptly discarded; even slave owner Thomas Jefferson wanted to send them back, to Africa's land of liberty, "Liberia". In the 1790s, an epidemic of yellow fever was blamed on German immigrants, when the king of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin, so seriously despised the Deutsch that some of them started calling themselves "Pennsylvania Dutch", instead of "Pennsylvania Deutsch". In the late eighteen forties, when desperate began arriving in Boston fleeing the great Irish potato famine of 1845, they were immediately blamed for subsequent outbreaks of cholera, for which they of course had no more responsibility than anyone else. In America, it has traditionally paid to be white, Anglo Saxon, Protestant. In the eighteen sixties thousands of Chinese workers were brought to the west to work in the mines and on the railroads, but they became too numerous, and public opinion, never favorable towards them, turned against them vehemently. The Chinese exclusion Act 0f 1882 finally halted Chinese immigration, and was supposed to be temporary. it lasted sixty one years. In the nineteen thirties and again in the nineteen fifties millions of Mexicans, many of whom were legal citizens, were kicked out of the country, scapegoats for economic stagnation, for allegedly stealing American jobs. Those are the twin excuses for kicking people out and stopping immigration; they allegedly steal jobs and bring disease.Today we have turned our attentions back to the Chinese, the progenitors of the virus. All across freedom's fruited plain, hate crimes against people who even remotely look oriental are proliferating; to have almond eyes puts one at great risk. As consolation, for the time being, middle easterners and Muslims are off the hook, no longer the American scapegoat of the month. Now trump has stopped immigration altogher, supposedly temporarily; because immigrants steal American jobs and bring disease. Its anyone's guess who will be our next victim to suffer the wrath of white christian conservative america. One thing we can depend on: it will be somebody.