No Entry: What’s Old Is New
Notes on American Immigration, Nativism, and the Modern Conservative Movement in the Age of Trump
“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” — Exodus 22:20
1/ They refuse food. Seven of them. Locked up in immigrant detention in Bergen County. This is what is being reported. Why there are protests outside the facility. They want ICE to “free them so they can await the outcome of their deportation cases at home amid the current coronavirus surge,” reports Matt Katz. // In America, we warehouse immigrants. Place them in cages. Treat them as criminals. Worse. //
*
2/ American History Lesson: The Chinese Exclusion Act. American History Lesson: 1921 Emergency Quota Act. American History Lesson: Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. // Italians. Jews. Poles. Slavs. Greeks. None need apply. // “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood,” said Albert Johnson, the Republican congressman who sponsored the bill. // Limited the undesirables from the east, especially the Jews. “The usual ghetto type,” said a government report, “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.” //
*
3/ Germany has made itself a world power, the naturalist William T. Hornaday wrote in 1918, “partly by welding together and maintaining her Germanic stock.” No mixing with Slavs. With Hungarians. With Jews. // Germans “are a unit, working like one vast machine.” America, he said, has “pursued an exactly opposite course.” Alien races flow into American cities. Into the heartland. “America has become the dumping-ground for the ashes and the cinders of all nations” (217). //
*
4/ The rhetoric repeats. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” This was Trump in 2015. This is Trump now. A nativist. He calls refugees from the south an infestation. A disease. An invasion. As if this were war. // On cable, the right’s commentariat amplifies the libel. Tucker Carlson says immigrants crowd out Americans. They despoil and pollute. Lou Dobbs says the immigrant influx is “just going to consign tens of thousands perhaps millions of Americans to their deaths.” Sean Hannity. Dennis Prager. Ben Shapiro. Rational restrictionists. Not opposed to immigrants, but to illegal immigration. Their arguments have the veneer of logic. But like the wood coating on a cheap dresser, they disintegrate. // Peel it back. Note the words. Culture. Homogeneity. Look at Japan, Prager says. Diversity leads to crime. Japan is successful because it’s homogeneous. Immigrants must assimilate, he says, as if they don’t. As if they refuse to. As if the young activists I’ve met, undocumented but in all ways American, are a fifth column waiting for orders. // This is not about assimilation. It’s about culture. About race. About “massive demographic changes,” says Laura Ingraham. // It’s about fear. About who the refugees and immigrants are. About where they come from. //
*
5/ Still we came. The Jews. My grandparents and great uncles and aunts. // “From their long and too often unhappy history the Jews had learned the value of migration,” writes Lucy Dawidowicz. // A history of wandering. Of flight. The “fundamental Jewish strategy for survival, the escape valve of Jewish history,” she says (3). // Exiles in Egypt. Refugees escaping the Pharoah’s wrath. Spread through diaspora to the winds. To Europe and Russia. To the Pale of Settlement. To America. On Passover, we declare, “Next year in Jerusalem.” //
*
6/ Still we came. Without papers. With few restrictions. A small tax. A check for lice or disease. And then onward. // “This is the America my great-grandfather, Samuel Freedman, came to in 1911, when he walked off the deck of an English ship onto Ellis Island,” writes Aaron Freedman. No visa. No passport. Nothing to document his travel. “In other words, my great-grandfather was an undocumented immigrant.” // No need for papers. The borders were open. “Simply stating the name of the ship on which he had arrived was all that was required for a foreigner to come to America with the intention of staying,” writes Freedman. // That was the America my grandfather entered. Henry Kaletsky. No more than 15 or so. Left Poland. Fifth of six to arrive. Father and sister would stay in Poland. The Jewish Quarter in Suwalki, the Pale of Settlement. Or that’s what we believe. // Henry entered through Ellis Island. With few papers, if any. Like his sister, brothers. Like hundreds of thousands of Europeans. Like Samuel Freedman. Lived in Queens. Would join the Army as the First World War ended. Became a citizen. Married. Had a child, my father. //
*
7/ Did he attend shabbat services at Schul Gasse? Buy his radishes and kosher meats on Market and Wesola? Almost a year in Brooklyn, with a daughter. My father’s aunt Rose. Irving tells my dad this. Irving, my dad’s younger cousin. Isaac, their grandfather, made one visit to America. To see his children. Six of seven settling here, mostly in Brooklyn. Like so many Jews from Eastern Europe, fleeing persecution. Russian and Polish pogroms. The segregation of the Pale. Isaac, my great-grandfather. refuses to stay in America. People don’t say hello. Returns to Suwalki, Poland, early-1930s. Home to shtetl streets where men sold birds and fish from stalls. Talked. Yelled. Sang. In Yiddish. Polish. This is all speculation. I watch a 1937 film clip. “Jewish quarter in Suwalki; Market in Filipow.” Soon the Nazis would erase these images. Poland would be partitioned. Suwalki bombed. Isaac died shortly before the Nazis invaded. Just weeks. His daughter Feiga, my dad’s aunt, and her family fled to Slonim. Eastern Poland. Now Belarus. They were rounded up. Massacred in the woods outside town. Dumped in a mass grave. Or so we believe. Feiga’s siblings were in the United States. Norman, Feiga’s son was sent here, too. // Irving says Isaac convinced Feiga to send their oldest son to American in ‘36. Isaac thought the rest would follow. //
*
8/ They didn’t. They died. Murder in the cause of purity. In the cause of power. By law. // “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal,’” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. (134). // Feiga and her husband and her daughter. Irving’s maternal grandmother. His uncles, aunts. “They never made it to the camps,” he says. His Aunt Esther was 16. // Six million Jews killed by the Nazis across Europe. Jews scattered to the winds. Turned away. By Roosevelt. // “Most notoriously,” Daniel Gross wrote, the German ship St. Louis was turned away in June 1939. Nearly a thousand passengers, “almost all Jewish.” Denied entry in Miami. The Jews were sent back to Europe to die. //
*
9/ Separated at the Mexican border. Mother. Son. Two years apart as a penalty. A threat. A deterrent. As if they’ve committed the worst of crimes. Take away your kids. // In the Times, a story about reunification. Happiness tempered as bonds broken stay severed. As food grows scarce. As work barely materializes. // Leticia Peren fled north from Guatemala, the paper says, “rather than risk what might happen next.” The gangs. The violence. Her story is familiar. Carmela fled threats and domestic violence. Coming north, she told me, was her only option.. Still waits for a hearing, a friend tells me. // These families are refugees. Not criminals. Not vermin. Or insects or an infection. // Shut the borders. Build a wall. //
*
10/ I asked her why she left Guatemala. Why flee north? Why the United States? Carmela tells me her boyfriend raped her. He was protected by the gangs. The police did nothing. Her son was threatened. Bullied. Would be drafted into the gangs. // She would have stayed. Her family is there. Her father. But there is no safety. Trekking north. Relying on the coyotes. Crossing Mexico, through deserts and mountains. Crossing the Rio Grande. Into what has become hostile territory. There was no choice. // Carmela is in limbo. Carmela waits, but is lucky. She is in New Jersey. It is the waning hours of the Trump era. Refugees are huddled in Mexico. Hundreds. Thousands. Forced to wait there. A violation of American and international law. Refugees. Asylum seekers. Families separated at the Mexican border. // Mother. Son. Two years apart as a penalty. A threat. A deterrent. As if they’ve committed the worst of crimes. Take away your kids. // In the Times, a story about reunification. Happiness tempered as bonds broken stay severed. As food grows scarce. As work barely materializes. // Leticia Peren fled north from Guatemala, the paper says, “rather than risk what might happen next.” The gangs. The violence. Her story is familiar. Like Carmela’s. // Like my grandfathers’. Like so many across the decades.
*
__________
Works Cited
Atkinson, David. “Trump’s views on immigration aren’t as bad as those in the 1920s. They’re worse.” The Washington Post, 14 Janauary 18, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/01/14/trumps-views-on-immigration-arent-as-bad-as-those-in-the-1920s-theyre-worse/. Date accessed 8 December 2020
Dawidowicz, Lucy S. On Equal Terms: Jews in America 1881-1981, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1982.
Dickerson, Daitlin. “Three Years After Family Separation, Her Son Is Back. But Her Life Is Not.” The New York Times, 7 December 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/us/family-separation-complications.html?searchResultPosition=4. Date accessed 8 December 2020
Freedman, Aaron. “Open Borders Made America Great.” The New Republic, 9 August 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/154717/open-borders-made-america-great. Date accessed 9 October 2020
Gross, Daniel. “The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies.” Smithsonian Magazine, 18 November 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/. Date accessed 8 October 2020
Hornaday, William T. “Awake! America.” The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present, ed. David Brion Davis, Cornell University Press, 1979, pp. 216-218.
Ingraham, Laura, qtd. by Erin Durkin. “Laura Ingraham condemned after saying immigrants destroy ‘the America we love.’” The Guardian, 9 August 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/aug/09/laura-ingraham-fox-news-attacks-immigrants?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. Date accessed 8 October 2020
“Jewish quarter in Suwalki; Market in Filipow.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bland Family Collection, 1937, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1005051. Date accessed 8 December 2020
Johnson, Albert, qtd by Tom Diegnan. “Progressives Have an Immigration Problem.” Commonweal, 7 December 2020, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/progressives-have-immigration-problem. Date accessed 8 December 2020
Kalet, Hank. “Border Song: A Story of Violence and Flight.” The Medium, 17 June 2019, https://link.medium.com/PVEq24r63bb. Date accessed 8 December 2020
Katz, Matt. Matt Katz (https://gothamist.com/news/ice-detainees-go-hunger-strike-second-time-month-bergen-county-jail)
King Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Radical King, 2105, Beacon Press, pp. 127-145.
Prager, Dennis. https://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/dennis-prager-a-nation-of-immigrants-only-if-they-assimilate/
Trump, Donald, qtd. by Katie Reilly. “Here Are All the Times Donald Trump Insulted Mexico.” Time, 31 August 2016, https://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-mexico-meeting-insult/. Date accessed 8 October 2020