WE ARE AN IMMIGRANT nation unique in history, the only country that consciously invented itself rather than evolved from a mythic past. People came here not to conquer new lands for a mother country but to break from old bonds and start anew (African-Americans, forcibly brought here as slaves, being the obvious exception). Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock to found a community free from England’s oppression. This collective shedding of the past, combined with the extraordinary freedoms that didn’t exist in the rest of the world, enabled us to attract and assimilate peoples from everywhere more successfully than any other country in history. (Many scholars now believe that Native Americans would have done far better after they were violently displaced had they not, in effect, been ghettoized on reservations.)
For most of our history there was no such thing as an illegal alien because there were virtually no immigration rules: One just showed up. In the late 19th century immigrants were processed at Ellis Island and elsewhere, but that was primarily for health reasons. If you weren’t sick, you got in. (In an ugly outburst of prejudice during that period barriers were erected to keep out people from China and Japan.)
Indeed, America is immigration. Read the rest of Immigration Made Us Strong And Can Do So Again by Steve Forbes.
Related Reading:
Now, as Then, Immigrants are Individuals With Inalienable Rights
1 comment:
I don't agree with Forbes' history of immigration laws in the USA. In any event immigration did cause certain problems such as socialism brought in by Eastern Europeans.
In any event we did OK when immigration was European. We don't benefit by third world immigrants. Just look at what happens when Mexican s arrive in a town _ crime vandalism litter etc. I've seen it. Just look at the most wanted lists of major cities. They are almost all immigrants.
sj
Post a Comment