From the desk of… Anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new – The Ukiah Daily Journal

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Being of Irish Catholic descent, I’ve always been basically pro-immigrant. All eight of my great-grandparents were born in that country, and my family taught me to consider myself “Irish” before American.

Not that I always complied in ways that would have satisfied my sainted mother’s definition, which included active hostility to all rival traditions. My father’s Army service had left him more open-minded, and it was his example I followed. My many cousins had similar family dynamics. Irish American women can be fierce. Read Dennis Lehane’s terrific novel “Small Mercies” for details.

That said, when they arrived in the United States in the mid-19th century, the Irish were greeted with pretty much the same fear and anger expressed toward Spanish-speaking immigrants today. Abraham Lincoln wrote a famous letter in 1855 regarding the Know-Nothing Party, basically the MAGA faction of the era.

“As a nation,” Lincoln wrote, “we begin by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.'”

Fortunately, the Know-Nothing Party split over slavery in the years before the Civil War, although the bigotry at its core has never entirely faded. The current MAGA panic over the “border crisis” is yet another example of the same fearful instinct.

Here’s the Republican presidential candidate just the other day: “Under the Harris-Biden regime, your government imported murderers, child predators and serial rapists from all over the planet.” Needless to say, there is zero evidence for this claim. Immigrants are less apt to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans.

It’s also an absurd lie that undocumented immigrants are taking all of the new jobs created under the Biden administration. Use your head. What are the chances of that?

For that matter, I owe my health and well-being to a number of brilliant and compassionate Indian American doctors who treated me at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences during a recent bout of illness.

Legal immigrants all, and highly qualified, but I’m sure they get funny looks sometimes when they venture away from the hospital.

We are blessed to have them.

As for the undocumented, most are taking jobs native-born Americans don’t want — grunt-work jobs that don’t require speaking English: harvesting fruits and vegetables, laboring on rooftops in 100-degree temperatures, gutting and plucking chickens and turkeys, and working in slaughterhouses butchering pigs and cows — dirty, dangerous labor at best.

Pretty much the kinds of work my Irish ancestors did during the 19th and early 20th centuries before big-city political machines took over police and fire departments. I recently spoke with a young Chinese American woman from Los Angeles, a medical technician by trade. When I joked that our great-grandfathers might have met working on the transcontinental railroad, she had no idea what I was talking about.

Her grandparents spoke Mandarin in the home; she studied at UCLA. That’s the American way.

Anyway, the upshot is that in today’s America, basically everything we eat has been handled by Spanish-speaking immigrants at some point. Recently the state of Arkansas repealed most of its child labor laws because our MAGA-accented Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders assured us that parents are better qualified to make those decisions for their kids than government bureaucrats.

The reality behind the change is that pork and poultry producers wanted it. Underaged undocumented children are being employed to clean out slaughterhouses after midnight. Some have no parents to make decisions for them, or have lost touch with them, no doubt partly due to the Trump administration’s barbarous policy of family separation.

If he’s reelected, Trump says he’s going to deport them by the millions. No, he’s not. Even if the costs of such an operation were affordable, who’s going to clean the toilets? Dig the foundations? Nail the roof shingles? Somebody’s got to do the grunt work, and it won’t be MAGA Republicans.

Which is not to say that the United States can comfortably absorb the millions of campesinos and other desperate peasants from across the globe who want to come here. I’ve always suspected that President Biden’s own Irish Catholic sentimentality is somewhat to blame for his administration’s otherwise inexplicable failure to control events at the Mexican border for too long.

Even in Ireland itself, with its historic sympathy for the underdog, there’s growing anxiety over unchecked immigration. Human beings tend toward tribalism instinctively.

Scenes of chaos along the border, and in cities where busloads of undocumented immigrants were sent, caused understandable anxiety among even well-intentioned Americans. Having spent months at a time traveling in Mexico and speaking just enough Spanish to let people know I respect them, I found the spectacle unsettling.

Orderly immigration of talented, ambitious people has long been among America’s greatest strengths. Most of us understand that, but the key word is “orderly.”

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can email Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.

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