This Alabama newspaper column on immigration from 1893 will blow your mind

*If you can get past the clickbait headline, this is a very good read. It’s an opinion piece written in April of 1893 in the Troy Democrat, from Troy, Alabama. But it could well have been written yesterday in one of many right-wing rags. Some things never change. VL

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By Cliff Sims, Yellow Hammer

Immigration has been perhaps the most discussed public policy issue of the 2016 election cycle, with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton proposing to increase the flow of immigrants into the country and presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump proposing to slow it, or cut it off all together from certain regions.

In congress, immigration hardliners led by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) have repeatedly beat back attempts by large corporations and their congressional allies to increase access to foreign-born labor.

Sessions’ efforts to stem the flow of both legal and illegal immigration have often centered on the argument that the increased influx of immigrant labor suppresses the wages of working Americans.

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The Troy Democrat, a now defunct Wiregrass-area newspaper, published an opinion column by F.W. Hamilton that very well could have been written by Sessions himself, if it were not from 1893.

Excerpts from the must-read article can be found below.

THE TROY DEMOCRAT
April 1, 1893

IMMIGRATION LAWS
“What, if any, changes in the existing immigration laws are expedient?”

By F.W. Hamilton

This sense of danger has come from the change in character of the stream of immigration pouring into our eastern ports…

These people for the most part bring nothing but themselves, and in themselves are neither useful or desirable. The are of entirely different stocks from the original settlers and the earlier immigrants. They may indeed have longings for liberty, but they have no knowledge of what liberty is, how it may be secured, or how it should be used. They are mentally and morally degraded by century on century of oppression, of ignorance and misery. Unused to any sort of self-government, they are incapable of walking the paths of citizenship without leaning heavily on the arm of some kind of paternalism. They have just enough money to get them past the gates of Castle Garden and then are dumped down, a helpless and unassimilable mass, and expected to take care of themselves and to develop by some mysterious process into intelligent wielders of the American suffrage.

We are daily witnessing the results of such a policy. These poor people herd helplessly in the cities… They have no skill and no natural aptitude for productive labor . . . READ MORE

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[Photo courtesy of Yellow Hammer News]

Suggested reading

Originally published in 1928, and written by journalist Daniel Venegas, Don Chipote is an unknown classic of American literature, dealing with the phenomenon that has made this nation great: immigration. It is the bittersweet tale of a greenhorn who abandons his plot of land (and a shack full of children) in Mexico to come to the United States and sweep the gold up from the streets. Together with his faithful companions, a tramp named Pluticarpio and a dog called Suffering Hunger, Don Chipote (whose name means “bump on the head”) stumbles from one misadventure to another.

Along the way, we learn what the Southwest was like during the 1920s: how Mexican laborers were treated like beasts of burden, and how they became targets for every shyster and lowlife looking to make a quick buck. The author, himself a former immigrant laborer, spins his tale using the Chicano vernacular of that time. Full of folklore and local color, this is a must-read for scholars, students and those interested in the historical and economic roots—as well as with the humor—of the Southwestern Hispanic community. Ethriam Cash Brammer, a young poet and scholar, provides a faithful English translation, while Dr. Nicolás Kanellos offers an accessible, well-documented introduction to this important novel he discovered in 1984.

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