|
What Do You Think? In a representative democracy, competing interests vie for governmental support. But if there isn't equal access, who looks out for the interests of those who are excluded?"John Adams ... said ... Reason, Justice and Equity never had weight enough on the face of the earth to govern the councils of men. It is interest alone which does it." " ... they constantly demonstrate their ability to best the white man at his own game in farming, fishing and business. They will work harder; deprive themselves of every comfort and luxury; make beasts of burden of their women and stick together; making a combination that America cannot defeat." Miller Freeman (1875-1955) was a businessman and publisher involved in international fishing operations. He wrote about Japanese people as major economic competitors. As a land owner in Bellevue, Washington, he called for the mass removal of all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, and worked to prevent their return after World War II. What factors have contributed to the history of negative policies and mistreatment regarding immigrants in the United States--a country largely made up of immigrants and their descendants?"As a nation of immigrants, the United States has also been a nation of nativists. At times we have offered, in Tom Paine's words, 'an asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty' from all parts of the world. At other times Americans have done the persecuting--passing discriminatory laws against the foreign-born, denying their fundamental rights, and assaulting them with mob violence, even lynchings. We have welcomed immigrants in periods of expansion and optimism, reviled them in periods of stagnation and cynicism. Our attitudes have depended primarily on domestic politics and economics, secondarily on the volume and characteristics of the newcomers. In short, American nativism has had less to do with 'them' than us. Fear and loathing of foreigners reach such levels when the nation's problems become so intractable that some people seek scapegoats. Typically, these periods feature a political or economic crisis, combined with a loss of faith in American institutions and a sense that the national community is gravely fractured. Hence a yearning for social homogeneity that needs an internal enemy to sustain itself: the 'alien.'" "The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal." "Nativism: A policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants.
Xenophobia: Fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign." Copyright ©1997-2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved. |