The debate over immigration and refugees –two different things– is back. Some historical perspective:
A PROMINENT American once said, about immigrants, ”Few of their children in the country learn English… The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages … Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”
The speaker was Ben Franklin.
Benjamin Franklin (National Portrait Gallery)
Back in 2007, I wrote “The Founding Immigrants” for the New York Times Op-Ed page as the debate over immigration policies raged back then.
In it, I wrote
Scratch the surface of the current immigration debate and beneath the posturing lies a dirty secret. Anti-immigrant sentiment is older than America itself. Born before the nation, this abiding fear of the ”huddled masses” emerged in the early republic and gathered steam into the 19th and 20th centuries, when nativist political parties, exclusionary laws and the Ku Klux Klan swept the land.
History does repeat.
America’s Hidden History, includes tales of “Forgotten Founders”
Don’t Know Much About® History: Anniversary Edition (Harper Perennial and Random House Audio)
