Four years ago, while I was visiting New York for a literary event, I took my daughter and niece to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was a cloudy day in June, but the air was thick with humid heat. Both gir ...
Tag Archives: History
The time a president deported 1 million Mexican Americans for supposedly stealing U.S. jobs
Suddenly, a large group of plainclothes officers armed with guns and batons entered the park. Two officers were posted at each entrance to La Placita so that no one could leave. Dozens of flatbed trucks circled the park’ ...
Immigration policy during Nazi era and now is not explained by “just following the law”
Holocaust historians’ first impulse is to reject comparisons between those dark decades and our present. We don’t want to be perceived as abusing history for political purposes, or engaging in overly emotional analyses. ...
How The Chinese Exclusion Act Can Help Us Understand Immigration Politics Today
In 1882, Congress voted to ban an entire ethnic group from immigrating to the United States. ...
Missing from the immigration debate: receipts
My friend Brian used to tell a charming story about the derivation of his last name. His paternal grandfather had been born "Dam." But upon arriving at Ellis Island, the first thing Grandpa Harry saw was a fruit seller, ...
Trump’s two-faced immigration strategy rides an ancient racist dichotomy
As the drama around Dreamers and the government shutdown unfolded, Donald Trump’s racism was on full display for anyone not dedicated to denying it. Referring to African and Latin American countries as “shitholes” behind ...
What the 1920 Wall Street bombing tells us about modern immigration scare tactics
hat same anti-immigrant hysteria, in which immigrants were scapegoated for acts of terrorist violence, appeared again this month when President Trump touted a Department of Justice study claiming that immigrants are disp ...
The Story Behind the Poem on the Statue of Liberty
The words of Emma Lazarus’s famous 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus” have seemed more visible since Donald Trump’s election. They can be found on the news and on posters, in tweets and in the streets. Lines 10 and 11 of the ...
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