After reading Michael Gerson’s most recent Washington Post column and particularly this passage:
The hypocrisies of our history are startling. A nation dedicated to freedom was a prison for millions of slaves. In the founding era, many towns celebrated Pope’s Day, in which effigies of the Bishop of Rome were cheerfully burned. While Chinese laborers worked on the massive foundation of the Statue of Liberty, Congress tightened the Chinese Exclusion Act, which set immigration rules by race. Even now, some would have those rules set by religion.
But how do we even know these are hypocrisies? It is because they are revealed by the light of the Declaration of Independence. America’s founders set a principle in place that has judged and changed cultural practices for more than two centuries. It is primary to our national identity.
I have some questions. Is it hypocrisy to have immigration rules that bar people who reject the “American creed”? How about those who reject American “national identity”?
As throughout our history most of those who come here do so for economic reasons and are at best indifferent to our national creed or identity. But what if they’re actually opposed to them?
It’s hard to take someone seriously when they start with this:
“The hypocrisies of our history are startling. A nation dedicated to freedom was a prison for millions of slaves.”
Without noting that slavery has been a horrible practice in many cultures for ages. It’s a sleight of hand designed to disqualify the notion of national virtue, even if virtue is relative and only recently more fully realized. It replaces aspirations with absolutism. It’s myopic, and dare I say, a common Reynolds tactic. It’s commonplace with the liberals these days. It appears Gerson needed it to make a ham fisted case for letting everyone and anyone in. Don’t know Gerson, but I suspect he was intellectually dishonest from the start. He knows better.
Dave’s response is, I suspect, rhetorical. There is nothing wrong with expecting some sort of basic, common and unifying value system from a nations potential immigrant pool. “Diversity is our strength” is just feel good nonsense.
I’m catching up on posts and just left a response in a thread below to ellipses” comment about Polish immigrants. After my little joke about Leon Czolgosz, then reading your question here, I’m reminded of the requirement in the early twentieth century for immigrants to certify that they were not anarchists. Aside from the inefficacy of such questions (why would someone seeking to harm American interests be trusted to answer honestly?) there is certainly nothing wrong with the sentiment behind them.
‘It’s hard to take someone seriously when they start with this:
“The hypocrisies of our history are startling. A nation dedicated to freedom was a prison for millions of slaves.â€
Without noting that slavery has been a horrible practice in many cultures for ages.’
How many of those cultures’ founding document contains this:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
You really are stupid.
You, Sam, are a case in point.
“All honor to Jefferson–to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
— A. Lincoln (1859)
“We now begin to experience the danger of admitting so great an error to have a place in the Declaration of our Independence. For a long time it lay dormant; but in the process of time it began to germinate, and produce its poisonous fruits. It had strong hold on the mind of Mr. Jefferson, the author of that document, which caused him to take an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South, and to hold, in consequence, that the latter, though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled to both liberty and equality as the former, and that to deprive them of it was unjust and immoral. ”
— J. Calhoun (1848)
Just to clarify my views, I think that while no one is “unqualified”, to use Mr. Calhoun’s term, to possess the liberty that the U. S. offers, not everyone wants it and, in particular, some find the very idea of a multi-confessional society or one with the U. S.’s extreme versions of freedom of speech or religion intolerable.
When such are citizens and, in particular, native born citizens there isn’t much we can do about it. I see no particular reason to seek such people out and demand they enter the United States.
@CStanley, I think there remain similar questions on immigration forms today, which I believe are intended to make it easier to expel someone from the country or withdraw their citizenship if its later determined that they lied. (I’m reminded of my grandmother’s job application from the late 1930s in which she was asked whether she was “temperate.” Obviously she could (and probably did) lie, but she would probably have gone meekly if ever caught)
” I see no particular reason to seek such people out and demand they enter the United States.”
Who are we seeking out and demanding that they enter the US? How can we force people into the US?
Drew- sam should have also made the point that we were embracing slavery at the same time that the rest of the world was rejecting it. Mexico banned it in the early 1800s. Texas restored it when it left Mexico. Also, you are completely wrong. We on the left understand aspirational goals. We understand that partial virtue has value. However, we also see value in basic honesty. WE held onto slavery longer than a lot of other European countries and we had to fight a war to end it. Who knows how long it would have lasted in the South absent the Civil War. (Always fun to conjecture about. Since it was a cultural institution as well as an economic one, I have always favored the idea it would have lasted another 40 years at least.)
Steve
How many of those cultures’ founding document contains this….
How many cultures have foundational documents? Pretty much none. And that includes this county. The culture had been around over 100 years by the time the Declaration of Independence was written and signed.
…
Mexico banned [slavery] in the early 1800s.
Which, in point of fact, was several decades AFTER the Declaration was written.
WE held onto slavery longer than a lot of other European countries and we had to fight a war to end it.
That happened in large part because it was more economical (on a large scale) to use slaves here than elsewhere. It’s easy to be moral when the costs only apply to other people.
Mexico banned slavery in 1829, and exempted Texas from the ban, the only place in Mexico with significant slavery (with about 2,000 slaves, less than the number of slaves in Delaware at the time). The ban resulted from an emergency decree by the President using temporary dictatorship powers to be used against Spain, and he was arrested by the legislature later that year, eventually executed, and all of his laws rescinded. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1837 after Texas was gone.
So the short answer to the question is Mexico banned slavery through dictatorship and with very few slaves, and even then it was reluctant to disturb it where it was profitable. The long answer is that Spain met its labor demands through a racial caste system in which Indian peasants supplied the menial labor.
And that caste system persists right to the present day.
You all are making the Mexicans sound like Europeans who came to the Americas, stole the land, and killed the native inhabitants.
Happened to find some numbers on anarchists removed prior to 1980:
“From 1908–1980, 1,500 “subversives and anarchists†were removed. Add in 16,500 removed for being “immoral.†Oh, and 27,000 were “mentally or physically defective.†Another 48,000 had non-immigration criminal offenses, and 41,000 were multiple-deportee-offenders. 17,000 were removed for being illiterate. Another 9,500 were deported for being a “public charge†which means basically “being on welfare.â€
And that’s just removals. What about exclusions, people turned away at the border so to speak? From 1892–1920, there were 5,000 exclusions for adult illiteracy, 68,000 for mental or physical defects, 6,200 for being “immoral,†6,100 for drug offenses, 37 for political reasons, and a whopping 168,000 for likeliness to become a public charge.”
https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-deportations-change-the-immigration-debate-6f5a8fac10fa#.c9qdgnldv
Unfortunately, he is mixing two different time frames, but it appears that a few people did identify non-acceptable political opinions that prevented admission (perhaps they should be categorized as having mental defects), but far more appear to have been removed after admission, probably based upon discovering they had lied.