Day 2: argument from John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe
Does Mr. Parrott offer a single argument against welcoming immigrants that was not also made against Irish immigration after the Potato Famine? I have not heard it.
At this point in our history, it would make sense to me to lay down a rule in policy debates: if you make an argument that applied to Irish immigrants after the Potato Famine, we should just ignore it. What do you think, Mr. Parrott? Are you comfortable recycling the arguments from the Know-Nothings, or do you have some other argument to offer?
James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, wrote a great study of the Civil War era, entitled Battle Cry of Freedom. It’s available from Amazon for 12 bucks, or on Kindle for 10 bucks. In chapter 4, “Slavery, Rum, and Romanism,” he offers a clear description of the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment on display in America in the 1850s. It’s great reading!
McPherson explains the “tensions between native and foreign-born workers which had sparked the riots.” (In this context, “native” means white Protestants, not Native Americans or Indians.) The riots and tension were especially bad during a depression. And then “the volume of immigration quadrupled following the European potato blight.”
McPherson writes: “Immigration during the first five years of the 1850s reached a level five times greater than a decade earlier. Most of the new arrivals were poor Catholic peasants or laborers from Ireland and Germany who crowded into the tenements of large cities. Crime and welfare costs soared. Cincinnati’s crime rate, for example, tripled between 1846 and 1853 and its murder rate increased sevenfold. Boston’s expenditures for poor relief rose threefold during the same period. Native-born Americans attributed these increases to immigrants, especially the Irish, whose arrest rate and share of relief funds were several times their percentage of the population.”
Does that sound familiar?
McPherson offers a fascinating insight about recent immigrants who resented the brand-new immigrants. “Natives were not necessarily the most nativist. Earlier Protestant immigrants from England, Scotland, and especially Ulster had brought their anti-Catholic sentiments with them and often formed the vanguard of anti-Irish rioters and voters in the United States.”
One of the great concerns about Latino immigration is that drugs are flowing across the same leaky border. Back then, the Temperance movement had a similar concern. They tried to persuade “the Protestant middle and working classes to cast out demon rum and become sober, hard-working, upward-striving citizens. As such it had enjoyed an astonishing success. But conspicuous holdouts against this dry crusade were Irish and German immigrants,” especially the Irish, who were perceived to be the cause of a “rise of drunkenness, brawling, and crime.”
The Know-Nothings tried to discourage new immigrants, and tried to keep the Irish off the voter rolls. They resented and feared the rapidly growing political power of immigrants.
Mr. Parrot, do you have an argument against Latino immigration that was not aimed at the Irish after the Potato Famine?
