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TechnoratiEating American on the Fourth of July
On this Fourth of July, I will be eating hot dogs. While I was trying to fit in as an Indian immigrant child throughout the 1970's, they represented the quintessential American food. I begged my mother to let me have them for dinner every night instead of chicken curry and rice. She nixed the hotdogs but sometimes allowed spaghetti and meatballs -- straight from a can. Hotdogs were "invented" by German immigrants serving their traditional sausages in the hustling streets of the new world, and spaghetti, everyone knows, came from Italy. If I had been celebrating Independence Day 150 years ago, however, neither would have been on the menu. In those days, Germans and Italians weren't considered Americans, or even white. When they fought over the most lucrative street corner for food vendors in the 1880's, the press reported these incidents as "race riots."
I'll be sharing this holiday with a group of restaurant workers, largely immigrants. Along with the hotdogs, we'll have tacos, samosas, falafel. According to one side of the immigration debate, we can keep our goodies to ourselves. America doesn't want them, or us.
Immigration restrictionists argue not only that we need to stop undocumented immigration, but cut back drastically on legal immigration as well. They argue that this economy -- no longer industrial but focused on information and service -- has no room for masses of poor immigrants. There's a fear that technology makes travel and communication so easy that new immigrants won't break ties with the old country and reassign their loyalty. To them, the telephone is a dangerous device and communication with relatives a terribly un-American act.
Restrictionists have tried to modernize their argument, but it hasn't changed much through the years. Immigration of the late 19th century was dominated by Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Jews, and other groups from southern and eastern Europe. At that time, these new residents were widely seen as inferior to native-born whites. They were reviled for their refusal to speak English, for their political and economic demands on American corporations, for being so poor that they became "public charges" or undercut the wages of the native-born workers, and for their unacceptable sexual behavior.
The Immigration Acts of 1920 and 1924, the most restrictive immigration policies we've ever had, limited new entrants to 150,000 per year, which was less than a quarter of the total immigration rate at that time. These laws crafted large quotas for northern Europeans while setting limits for countries like Russia and Italy. Thousands of southern and eastern Europeans, however, continued to come.
As immigrants were deported for violating the quota policies, social reformers began to fight for long-time residents who had built families and communities in the U.S. These reformers won a series of changes that gave immigration officials the ability to change someone's status.
The liberalization remade the American identity, but kept it white. Mexicans, for example, were left behind by the process. According to historian Mae M. Ngai, They weren't explicitly excluded, but they had little access to the mechanisms through which to change their status, and no one cared to correct that oversight. In 1929, Congress also passed the Registry Act, allowing people to change their status if they paid $20, hadn't left the U.S. since 1921, and were of good moral character. Of the 115,000 people who were forgiven between 1930 and 1940, 80 percent were European or Canadian. The attorney general began to suspend deportation orders after 1940, and an internal Justice department study in 1943 revealed that the overwhelming majority of suspensions went, ironically, to Germans and Italians; only 8 percent involved Mexicans. Instead of liberalization, Mexicans got a guest worker program, and in 1954, Operation Wetback, the country's first mass deportation program.
Restrictionists have frozen images of a "true" America, as though our identity hasn't changed since 1776. Stasis, however, is a fiction. Cultures do not stand still, nor should we want them to. We have the chance now to remake our immigration policy in the modern era, not by taking it back to the 1920's, but by grappling honestly with the fact that the American identity is always undergoing cultural change. Modernity challenges us to create a policy that finally recognizes the full humanity of all immigrants without regard to their racial identity.
If we are indeed what we eat, Americans are already eating like the world. It's time for our policy to catch up to our palates.
Sen is the president of the Applied Research Center and the publisher of ColorLines magazine. Her book, The Accidental American, will be released in September.
Copyright (C) 2008 by the American Forum. 6/08
15 Comments so far
Show AllThe US uses illegal immigration to whitewash it's treatment of it's poor and medically challenged. While every chinese restaurant in the US is staffed by 'cousins' of the owner here on student visas and working for as little as $1.50 hourly US citizens rot in the streets because we refuse to treat their health problems and provide effective job training.
Construction crews were, until recently filled out with hundreds of thousands of mexican laborers working at low wages when US teens can't get a break. Contractors don't want to hire american born kids because they can demand fair wages and working conditions.
Pretending that somehow our problems with our own populace will go away by replacing them with imported labor doesn't really work. It just pushes the bodies under the rug.
Ladybug: Hypocrite? Last I looked, I was a democratic socialist. Oh well. I often refrain from posting on other topics because I generally agree with the comments already written.
I write about illegal immigration because I read many posts from presumed left-wingers who seem blind to the catastrophe of unemployment among African-American men (remember "Last hired, first fired?"), and its connection to the influx of millions of unskilled workers from other lands. I'm white, and while the building boom was on in our area, I noticed as I drove around that the construction workers quickly changed from black to Hispanic, and stayed that way. Now the boom is over, the immigrants are leaving, but the jobs are gone and blacks are still out in the cold. I think the lack of economic opportunity for blacks is a profoundly important NATIONAL issue.
Adele the Czech says she's not racist or xenophobic, but she only posts at CD when it's articles about immigration. You are a hypocrite!!!
"If we are indeed what we eat, Americans are already eating like the world. It's time for our policy to catch up to our palates."
Actually, Americans are eating the world and "our policies" have produced the fattest people on earth.
David
No. 10 -- hate to tell you this, but MORE people are LEAVING Ca., than are immigrating there. The majority are White and are heading to the Northwest, because they are sick to death of immigration and all the problems it creates.....
http://community.webtv.net/CNYWP/DontTalktoCops
AdeleTheCheck -- "As a child of immigrants, I am neither racist nor xenophobic. "
I find this hard to believe based on what you say here and elsewhere on CD. As long as we are willing to globalize Capital (inward-outward remittance) and make huge profits, we should be willing to globalize populations as well.
Also there is a net gain from immigration. I live in California, the most immigrant heavy state in the country and the attitude towards immigrants here is not half as virulent as it is elsewhere in the country. Why is that ? Why do people mostly living in the mid-west or other states where the population is almost 100% white, feel so threatened ? Considering California basically supports the U.S. economy on its shoulder maybe immigration does have something to do with it.
yawn ...
150 years ago Americans would not have been celebrating July 4th as it was not a holiday. It didn't become a holiday until the early 20th century. Alex Carey (in his book the "History of Propaganda in the US")writes about the invention of July 4th as Independence Day. However, it is all about immigration. The business world with organizations like the NAM (National Assoc.Of Manufacturers)saw that new immigrants were recognizing their common cause with working people and were being radicalized by the unions of that time. So they, the NAM, and others, sought to create the holiday to indoctrinate "proper American values" in these new Americans. Not surprisingly, the those values included associating America, apple pie,and democracy as inseparable from market capitalism. So, the patriotic rah,rah of the 4th of July originated and continues to be used as propaganda. Happy 4th.
Dear Rinku Sen:
This seems to be an era of name-calling, and sadly, you appear to have come up with a new one -- "Restrictionists" -- which will probably become popular with believers in Open Borders.
I assume you came here legally, as my parents did many years ago, and as my late husband did, waiting patiently on a list for his turn. As a child of immigrants, I am neither racist nor xenophobic. But we have an alarming low-wage labor SURPLUS in America, while we've been hemorrhaging jobs for the past 7 years; thus I'm in favor of a gradual migration of illegal workers back to their own countries. I also believe that the countries from which most people are arriving illegally will never make the reforms necessary for their citizens to have decent lives if we allow millions more of them to emigrate here, and give a path to citizenship to the 12-20 million already here.
If being "lefty" enough to care fiercely for the welfare of ALL low-paid CITIZENS, LEGAL residents and the UNEMPLOYED makes me a "Restrictionist" -- so be it. It has nothing to do with language differences, or worries about not "breaking ties with the old country."
I assume you became President of a research center through a combination of hard work and high intelligence. Good for you! Perhaps you can afford now to look at the big picture: the profound lack of well-paying blue-collar jobs in the U.S., and how too many illegal immigrants who will work under minimum wage and off the books are exacerbating our problems. These woes won't fit into a single snappy word like "restrictionist" -- but name-calling won't solve it either.
bottle: "Why did President Bush, the torturer, say that the United States was the greatest country in the world?"
The chimp's role is to convey messages to inspire the bloodthirsty christian/zionist mercenaries to kill, maim and torture the Earth's peoples to advance resource exploitation and wealth concentration. God Bless the United States of America!
Tonight, we are having chicken, broccoli, potato curry, all locally and organically grown/raised. I try to stay clear of nitrate tubes (hotdogs), myself.
I caught a commercial this week for a grocery store. In it, "customers" were sharing their picnic menus. One man said nothing was more American than a watermelon on the 4th. We live in Wisc and they aren't ripe until labor day, so his is coming from Equador, dripping in oil. Tres American. Go us.
Imagine, if the USA still had wide prairies teeming with bison. Pristine old growth forests. Clean rivers, full of salmon, flowing into oceans. Space for Native Americans to choose a migratory lifestyle, if they wanted to.
Imagine, if today's knowledge, progress in medicine, science, communications, and today's better grasp of human rights existed on an Earth with the population of the 1920's. Lacking would be the loooming ecological catastrophe.
Immigration into US was fueled by excesive birthrates in Europe and elswhere. Today, as birthrates are falling in some places, but remain way to high in others, let's try to see how we can all have enough water, air, land -- defending unlimited immigration, with the implication that somehow US should be open, like in the past, to absorb people from countries whose population is still growing, just does not make sense.
Why did President Bush, the torturer, say that the United States was the greatest country in the world? Other than that the day was the Fourth of July and he thought he should. Didn't he understand that even when you're standing at Monticello, or especially then, truth matters, and he has done all he could to lower the reputation of this proud nation throughout the world?
Happy Independence Day to all Usanians!
As we commemorate the independence of the third largest state in the world and the world's second-largest democracy, people of all nations would do well to contemplate the wisdom of their ancestors:
"So likewise a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."
George Washington
"Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder."
Ataturk
The notion of "race" has undergone many metamorphoses over the decades (highlighting the vacuity of the concept). As Jerry Hough in his recent book noted:
The European-Americans outside the South had called each other "races" prior to World War II, and the word connoted the kind of emotion we attribute to it today. Indeed, the phrase "race, creed, and color" was not redundant, and "race" referred primarily to white "races". A firm in the 1930s could answer a survey on its hiring practices by saying "no colored hired in office [and] no discrimination as of race."