Schrag: Republicans Play the Immigration Card in Presidential Politics

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

Who said this? "Immigration to this country is increasing and is making its greatest relative increase from races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes among those races … half of whom have no occupation and most of whom represent the rudest form of labor.

"The immigrants who come to the United States reduce the rate of wages by ruinous competition, and then take their savings out of the country. Home as a foreign country. … They have no interest or stake in country and never become American citizens." Many, he went on, are genetically prone to crime, insanity and disease.

Five points credit if you guessed it isn't Rep. (and late presidential candidate) Tom "throw all illegals out" Tancredo of Colorado, or Mitt Romney, or Rush Limbaugh or Lou Dobbs of CNN. Two more points if you recognized it as not coming from anyone in this century. A perfect 10 if you traced it back to the last decades of the 19th century.

The author, in a pair of articles on "The Restriction of Immigration" for The Atlantic magazine in 1891, was Rep. (later Sen.) Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. His undesirables were Jews, Italians, Poles and Hungarians, people like Tancredo's Sicilian great-grandparents. In those days, of course, everybody was undocumented.

So you can say that the current debate among GOP candidates Rudy Giuliani and Romney about who would be the meanest, toughest guy on illegal immigration is in an American tradition almost as old as immigration itself. Giuliani's father, an Italian immigrant who served prison time for robbery, and was a collector for Giuliani's mob-connected uncle, would have been a perfect example for Lodge.

The tradition goes back to the Salem witch trials – and "No Irish Need Apply" and "The Chinese Must Go," and "Japs keep moving." Not all of it was overtly racist. The official targets of the Great Red Scare of the 1920s were communists and anarchists, although most of them also happened to be Italian immigrants. In the notorious Sacco-Vanzetti case, two Italian immigrant anarchists were convicted and executed for a robbery-murder in Braintree, Mass. in 1920 that they probably didn't commit.