Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Another
Round of Fear: Refugees in America
In 2013, a young mother crosses the border
from Syria and becomes a refugee. (Photo: UNHCR / S. Rich)
In the wake of the massacre in Orlando
on June 12, 2016, the likely Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump,
again stated that the United States should ban Muslims from entering the
country, according to the New York Times.Although
the shooter was an American citizen, Trump reiterated (and praised) his
recommended prohibition from December 2015, a prohibition that was then
primarily directed at the 10,000 Syrian refugees the Obama administration
pledged to resettle in the U.S. Of course, these calls for banning Muslims
pander to Americans’ fear of refugees, a fear that is largely without
historical justification. Last year, after the terrorist attacks in Paris and
the ensuing concern that Middle Eastern immigrants could pose a threat to the
security of the United States, a number of articles and opinion pieces,
including Jamelle Bouie’s essay in Slate (November
17, 2015), pointed out that this is not the first time Americans have been
afraid of immigrants and refugees. The history of fearing refugees bears
repeating because it puts the current crisis in context.
The United States has a long and
complicated history regarding the acceptance of refugees, a history often
complicated by ethnicity and religion (as I have detailed in my book Bilingual Public Schooling in
the United States: A History of America’s “Polyglot Boardinghouse”).
The Irish Catholics escaping the potato famine in the 1840s, the Chinese
seeking asylum during the Opium Wars, the eastern European Jews evading pogroms
in the late nineteenth century, the Mexicans fleeing civil war in the 1910s,
and the German Jews absconding the Nazi regime (as well as, more recently, the
Cubans in the 1960s and Vietnamese in the 1970s) were all, in one way or
another, refugees.
All of those groups encountered a great
deal of discrimination as they settled in the United States, largely because of
their non-Protestant convictions and their “race,” which, in the nineteenth and
early-twentieth centuries, was equated with nationality (and non-Anglos were
considered inferior “racial stock”). The prejudice against the Chinese and,
then, the eastern and southern Europeans became so strong that the U.S. Congress
passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s and the Immigration Restriction
Act in the 1920s, which greatly curtailed the flow of non-western Europeans
into the nation. Despite the fears and discrimination of the native-born
Americans, these groups of refugees and their children became an invaluable
part of U.S. society.
Perhaps one of the most interesting
examples of a social concern about refugees in American history was the arrival
of the so-called German Forty-eighters. Rightfully fearing repercussions for
their part in the failed European revolutions for democracy in 1848, these
refugees fled to the United States en mass. Many of the German Forty-eighters
were quite radical for their day and, as “free thinkers,” criticized America’s
institutions, notably Christianity. As Germans, the Forty-eighters were
persecuted by the conservative Whig Party and its xenophobic offshoot the
American Party (the Know-Nothings), whose slogan was “America for the
Americans.”
Regardless of the alarm many felt about
these refugees—an alarm often fabricated by the Know-Nothings—the
Forty-eighters became an extremely engaged and civic-minded group of newcomers.
Often rising to leadership roles in local communities and, in the case of
Secretary of Interior Carl Schurz, in national politics, the Forty-eighters
advocated for better public schooling, the abolition of slavery, and other
progressive reforms.
Like many immigrant groups, the
Forty-eighters maintained some of their Old-World customs—especially their
language, preferring to be German-English bilinguals rather than English-only
monolinguals—and negotiated ways to meld their traditional cultural identities
with the mores of U.S. society. Nevertheless, assimilation to America’s
customs, especially as the second and third generations entered the nation’s
public schools, was inevitable, and many aging German-Americans lamented that
their children and grandchildren could no longer speak German fluently, a
common concern among many immigrant groups.
When the U.S. declared war on Germany in
1917, the children and grandchildren of the Forty-eighters, along with other
German immigrants, were considered “un-American” and deemed potential enemies
by the court of public opinion and, unofficially, by many leaders of the nation,
including Woodrow Wilson’s administration. The fear of German-Americans during
the war was hysterical; rumors circulated that they were plotting to poison
food and water and to bomb factories and bridges (of course, none of these
rumors were true). Yet, the historical record shows that German-Americans were
quite loyal to their adopted homeland, serving the Allied Powers during the
duration of the war.
The example of the Forty-eighters is
informative. The Forty-eighters were a group of refugees who were German-speaking,
non-Christian radicals critical of many U.S. institutions. Although
discriminated against and, during the war, demonized and feared, these refugees
posed no threat to the nation and, ultimately, helped build a better American
society.
From a historical
perspective, the fear of Syrian and other refugees is largely unwarranted.
Previous groups of immigrants, including those that were perceived as
threatening to America’s social fabric, proved to be vital members of the
citizenry. Additionally, the fear of Middle Eastern immigrants seems to ignore
the assimilating power of America’s culture and institutions, especially its
public schools (considering the loss of cultural roots, the assimilation of
immigrants is, in itself, problematic, although a historical reality). It is
therefore curious that many of the political leaders who express the greatest
concern about refugees are simultaneously failing to support a public education
system that has introduced children to democratic ideals and processes for
generations and, instead, are moving the nation toward a hodgepodge of
privately run, for-profit charter schools without a civic mission.
In the days and weeks following the
Orlando tragedy, the far Right likely will have little to say about the LGBT community,
but its fearmongering and political opportunism again will be on display by
calling for a halt to United States’ acceptance of Syrian refugees. The
manufactured fear (of Syrian families hoping to escape the civil war) that
Trump and other Republicans are selling Americans is a distraction from
something much more terrifying: once again letting xenophobes dictate the
Unites States’ response to a global humanitarian crisis.
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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