OUR HISTORY OF HUDDLED MASSES
An immigrant’s story is seldom a happy one. It is filled with hardship and judgement and brings with it like a cheap suitcase, all the troubles of entering the United States of America. Make no mistake - banning, excluding and deporting people based on their nationality or political beliefs is a longstanding American occurrence. Our nation’s history is rife with Executive and Congressional actions that have tried to keep America predominantly white, male and Christian. Unfortunately, this isn’t an opinion. It’s fact. It’s based in the laws that decade after decade, century after century, have made America vulnerable and morally deaf to those we should be protecting most.
This past Friday, President Trump signed his executive order putting a halt, for a period of time, to the acceptance of immigrants and refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Those countries are Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and no citizen from any of them, as in zero people, has killed any U.S. citizen in a terrorist attack on our soil in the years following September 11, 2001. But, it doesn’t matter. Perception can be stronger than fact in politics.
For all the loving acceptance of Emma Lazarus’s words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” etched onto the Statue of Liberty, the truth is that the United States government has actively tried to stem it. It’s not crazy to imagine that in the future, Steve Bannon could help Trump round up Middle Eastern refugees in the United States from the seven selected countries and put them into a detainment camp. Dystopian? Yes. Out of the realm? No. We’ve done something like it before, most notably with Asian Americans during World War II and large portions of that Alien and Sedition Acts are still alive and well and the pompadour President has a walking Amber alert penning executive orders bent, seemingly, on a nationalistic view stuck in the 18th century.
After conflict, we react poorly to our immigrant population. Take that same example of World War II and the events which led up to it. In 1921, after First World War, then President Warren G. Harding put together a special session to basically block Eastern European Jews, poor Germans and Italians from the United States and to “prioritize” immigrants from the United Kingdom, a situation which aided a young Mary Anne MacLeod, the President’s mother. In the amended version three years later, the United States also shunned immigrants from Japan. Now, the country did this, according to the Office of the Historian in the US Department of State, to “preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity” and because “the racial composition of the country was more important than promoting good ties with Japan” who later made up one-third of the Axis Powers with, consequently, Italy and Germany. Many of those bans weren’t even fully amended until 1976.
So, the narrative that Trump’s ban is somehow against our history and values, is unfortunately, not correct. We do this all the time and it’s usually fueled by fear and masked by patriotism and protection.
It’s happening again. President Trump has highjacked patriotism and he did it with an executive order, not a congressional act. There was no oversight. He has put himself on the side of protecting America and painted his detractors into a corner of liberalism so that if anything goes wrong, he has someone to blame.
This executive action makes the country vulnerable by defining the United States as more open to Christianity then it is to Islam. This isn’t what I think. This fact, like our history, is written into the law. Trump’s executive action specifically says the United States will accept refugees but will “prioritize”, (sound familiar?) refugees “provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality” otherwise known, in the seven countries named, as Christianity.
The order pits Islam against Christianity and puts the United States at the cross-hairs of that fight, and by extension, the rest of the Western world. And this, consequently, is EXACTLY what Al-Qaeda and ISIS have been fighting to prove. Lawrence Wright in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower, states that Osama Bin Laden believed “only Islam offered a formula for creating a just and godly society” and that Christianity and modernity stood in the way of this strictly adherent ethos and thus, were the enemy. Trump’s order, by picking religious sides, plays directly into the unforgiving rhetoric of radical Islamic terrorism. It’s basically a recruitment tool and a call to arms. It should be seen as nothing less than extremely unproductive and unpatriotic. Though I fear, for those working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, any opposition to their order will fall on deaf ears.
