Ryan Turnipseed joins me to talk about the history of immigration in the United States, from the founding of the country, to the current immigration crisis at the Texas border, and to the early days of settler-colonialism.
00:02:57.980So, this is something that we don't really see anymore just because there is not as much unclaimed land,
00:03:03.060especially not by governments and other world powers.
00:03:05.700But once upon a time, this was a very – settlers were once the source of most great empires' power.
00:03:13.660They were the people that were willing to risk life and limb, money, their progeny, material, and whatever else.
00:03:20.060Any social standing, perhaps, if the venturer seemed to be foolish or whatnot.
00:03:23.660And they were going to go out to the unsettled frontiers, at least by these great powers.
00:03:28.420Unsettled in terms that there was obviously not any major infrastructure.
00:03:31.760There were certainly no large civilizations to accept them and welcome them into communities.
00:03:36.920They were going to go out to these frontiers and actually build cities, build trading posts, ports.
00:03:41.780They were going to do things that benefited their empires from which they were coming from.
00:03:45.920Or they were going to do things for their own communities' benefit.
00:03:48.920So, not everything had to explicitly be for the furtherance of empire.
00:03:52.480You have quite a lot of especially religious-motivated settlers early on in American history.
00:03:57.600Because if there's no one there, no one's there to persecute you for your specific weird beliefs or whatnot else.
00:04:03.180There's no established church that's going to come knocking at your door about the crazy things that you were telling to the people in the village.
00:04:10.080As contrasted to an immigrant, who is specifically going from one civilization to another.
00:04:19.500They are not establishing these new cities out on the frontier necessarily.
00:04:23.200They are going from settled location A to settled location B.
00:04:28.900This would be the main difference, I think, that we want to draw here.
00:04:31.400So, not to jump the gun, but English settlers in the 1500s and 1600s going to the eastern seaboard of the U.S.
00:04:40.400usually are going to be settlers until the colonies are established, in which case you get waves of immigration there to do commerce and whatnot.
00:04:47.340Whereas every single person after, say, the frontier is closed in the United States, at least, would technically be considered an immigrant and usually would be by our definition.
00:04:57.220If there's no frontier for people to settle, there's not a lot of new land for you to go and stake and develop.
00:05:03.200You're going to have to go through any means like you would in the old world.
00:05:06.740You're going to have to buy up land, get the correct permissions and whatnot.
00:05:10.220And if you want to start something there, then that's your prerogative.
00:05:12.760And you can always receive back into civilization very easily if something goes awry.
00:05:16.940Yeah, I think that's really critical because there's this weird dichotomy in some ways we hear, you know, the United States is this nation of immigrants.
00:05:25.240But at the same time, we also have this frontier mentality.
00:05:29.700The United States has always been defined by its settler identity, by the way that it pushed westward, the way it settled the frontier.
00:05:39.820And that was ongoing. So there were waves of people who were immigrating in the sense that they were just moving into New York or Chicago or other cities that had been long established.
00:05:49.540And there was nothing for them to do but simply take up a job there, that kind of thing, live in a very well-established city.
00:05:58.040At the same time, there were people who were at the frontier and were settling and were creating new civilizations.
00:06:04.420And so America is going through this wave after wave scenario where the first group comes and they are a true settler culture.
00:06:13.040You know, they are building the very first settlements in the United States, the first colonies.
00:06:17.060They are settling, setting up civilization there.
00:06:20.300And as they push further westward and things are safer and there's an establishment of civilization, then you could start to see the next wave as immigrants.
00:06:28.120But many of those people then would turn into settlers.
00:06:31.740And so a very long time, there was this frontier settler culture that was happening.
00:06:38.400You know, that dynamic was occurring as people were also immigrating.
00:06:42.360And so I just want to dispel that myth early on that the United States is just a nation of immigrants because people moving here now, there is no frontier, right?
00:06:52.760And there's really not a lot of frontier in general, but there's definitely no frontier in the United States, really.
00:06:58.420And so the people moving here now, immigrants that we would refer to today, are much different than people who were, yes, moving to the United States at those times, but with the expectation that they would need to move further and settle their own land, establish it, defend it, build cities, build communities in a way that simply does not exist today.
00:07:19.400These people who are coming in now, many of them, you know, do doing very interesting things.
00:07:24.260You got, you know, somebody like somebody like Elon Musk, who's obviously an immigrant, but doing doing something very productive, but they're not settling anything.
00:07:34.860He's definitely moving to a civilization that already has many of the protections, many of the benefits, many of the things that you would want as somebody who's just normally shifting from one civilization to the next.
00:07:47.300Right, and this isn't necessarily to detract, rather, from immigration as a category.
00:07:54.220If you go into American history, a lot of the great industrialists that actually elevated the country out of the pre-industrial society that we were into, and industrial society were themselves European immigrants, typically.
00:08:06.080John D. Rockefeller being a major outlier in that regard, but Andrew Carnegie had huge ties to Scotland, as many people might know that people looking at the history of golf and the upper class will see that immediately.
00:08:20.640So this isn't necessarily to say that immigrants don't do anything productive or that they're less productive in settling or whatnot else.
00:08:26.400It's to say they're two separate categories that we need to distinguish in order to characterize the history of the U.S. by groups of people moving from one location to the next.
00:08:36.780Absolutely, and the other thing that I wanted to establish before we get too much into the history is that the Founding Fathers had very different ideas about kind of what immigration would look like.
00:08:50.300There were many that wanted a large amount of immigration so that it would swell the population quickly, and I guess I should say settlement, rather, because of the time.
00:09:02.760But a large inflow of people from specifically Europe, mostly, to make sure that they could fill out and they could compete against many of the other great powers that were claiming parts of North America at the time.
00:09:17.440There were many that wanted to use that to help create a larger merchant base or a larger agricultural base, but there were also those that were wary about the influence, the origins of where this would come from and how it would disrupt the kind of social fabric of the new nation and the dynamics there.
00:09:35.820And so I don't think there's one unified understanding, perhaps other than the fact that most Founding Fathers seem to think of the United States as a primarily European venture, a European nation.
00:09:52.720But their idea of how many and who should come into the United States was a very mixed bag.
00:09:58.920Right. And this is something to keep in mind as well, is that the dynamics at the time are certainly not what they were today.
00:10:05.320So you mentioned that you would have some factions in the U.S. that specifically wanted a large number of particularly European immigrants.
00:10:12.700Central Europe, Western Europe, Northern Europe were typically the major spots that they were talking about at the time.
00:10:17.980And as you mentioned, the idea was that we need to sell the frontier before someone else does.
00:10:22.320We need to establish our control over it with the with the American banner waving over the cities there so that we have control over the continent.
00:10:28.940This is a very similar to a how a lot of the European monarchies at the same time viewed the peopling of their uninhabited regions.
00:10:35.440This is what the Austrian Empire was doing, the Russian Empire to keep control of their vast vast lands.
00:10:40.960They would specifically send specific people to certain areas in order to establish a foothold and make sure that, say, the Ottomans or the Russians or whomever else do not get the strategic advantage.
00:10:51.520This was very similar thinking that we had over here, settling our frontier post-revolution.
00:10:55.860But as he mentioned, again, just to reiterate, every or the vast majority of the founders all viewed this as a very European project.
00:11:04.620And we'll see later that they reiterated this multiple times into law.
00:11:39.040OK, well, if we aren't going to go back and explain every minute detail of British colonists going to specific places, we just need a very basic baseline.
00:11:50.960And so at the start of our story, we're going to start with a post-independence America.
00:11:57.060And we're just going to give a brief overview of what were the colonies like?
00:12:00.120What were the what were the ethnic groups there, specifically the European nationalities there?
00:12:04.820And how would they change prior to this?
00:12:07.200Just so we have a very basic overview.
00:12:09.980And something that we'll see is that at this point in time, New England is still very English.
00:12:13.640It hasn't had the large influx of Irish, of Italians or any of these other types.
00:12:34.760It's very English, puritanical, with some outcroppings here and there from prior settlings of the frontier.
00:12:41.700And this is a it would also be much more industrial than the other parts of the country.
00:12:47.060So this is where a lot of the early factories, textile mills and all that would be.
00:12:52.460If it wasn't going to be in the mid-Atlantic, which we'll talk about right now, it was going to be in New England.
00:12:57.500With the mid-Atlantic, you're going to get Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, sometimes is lumped in there, Delaware.
00:13:03.720These were places that were much more mixed, talking about European peoples.
00:13:07.740So Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony originally, quite famously.
00:13:12.220It's the Penn family were Welsh Quakers.
00:13:15.740And for the longest time, up until the, I believe it would be the early 1700s, the Welsh were the largest power holders in Pennsylvania.
00:13:24.180But at the starting point, through immigration, they were kind of supplanted.
00:13:28.740They had Englishmen would settle there.
00:13:31.940Ulster Scots and the Irish would settle there.
00:13:34.680There's just Scots in general would settle and you would get some Germans as well.
00:13:39.580Holdovers from the old Swedish colonies would move to Pennsylvania.
00:13:42.660So they would be supplanted already by immigration by when we're starting.
00:13:46.420New York would be a similar mix with more Dutch thrown in.
00:13:49.620Maryland would be also majority English, save for a large Catholic presence by its colony's history.
00:13:56.080And that's just a very basic overview, just so we get a starting point.
00:13:59.000And then if you move to the south, it's all going to be heavily Anglican, heavily English, with some Germans in North Carolina in particular.
00:14:07.440And Georgia is going to be very unique, because whereas most of these other colonies had a heavy slave presence by the time of a,
00:14:14.480or not as heavy as it would be, but it was definitely present.
00:14:18.500Where we're starting, Georgia was originally founded as a colony for the poor Englishmen.
00:14:22.460The people that were unemployed, were homeless or wherever else, they would have a promise in Georgia was the idea.
00:14:29.420So it was much more, at the start, homogenous than some of these other states, didn't have as much of the demographic mix.
00:14:35.540And it was specifically poor Englishmen, usually Protestant.
00:16:25.700And there was also a large or a heavy clerical influence on, or clergy influence rather, on what these policies were,
00:16:34.060because you had previously in this backstory kind of had a shift in the American religious demographics because of the Great Awakening.
00:16:41.780Something that you might not have heard of in school when you're talking about the Great Awakening is that a lot of the new lights,
00:16:48.320a lot of these people going along with this Great Awakening, shaking up the establishments, were themselves recent immigrants.
00:16:54.740All of the older immigrants from the 17th century tended to be in the old establishment, old light sector.
00:17:00.680So the old puritans that you read about in your scarlet letter books or whatnot else would have been much more like these old lights just a few generations down the line.
00:17:09.220These new lights were the Jonathan Edwards types, these more radical lambasting fire and brimstone puritans that were much more focused on individuals,
00:17:19.520so the story goes, rather than rituals and whatnot else.
00:17:22.740So immigration was very relevant to these clergymen because their churches had been rocked either positively or negatively,
00:17:29.860depending on the faction, by immigrants.
00:17:31.780So the old establishment types in New England didn't like immigration as much.
00:17:35.740The younger, much more Great Awakening types loved it.
00:17:42.400Something you don't really get to see as much anymore, churches heavily commenting and swaying their congregations on policies of immigration.
00:17:49.180Well, I think you do actually see that quite often, but only in one direction.
00:18:46.920And then right before the Civil War, so we'll say early 1800s to about 1840 or so,
00:18:53.700we get something that's going to be distinct to what comes after.
00:18:58.100The majority of the immigrants at this point in time are going to still be from the British Isles
00:19:03.140and then minor bits from Ireland, the continent of Europe, and Scandinavia in particular.
00:19:07.720That's going to be the majority of our most early immigration waves are just more people coming to the New Republic.
00:19:14.580And those small groups from the continent are actually going to be very influential relative to their population size
00:19:22.340compared to some of their later immigrants.
00:19:25.460So these are where your more conservative, non-Anglo churches come from.
00:19:29.520So the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, nominally conservative, comes out of these groups in this 1800 to 1840 period
00:19:38.120before these major waves that we're going to talk about come to the continent.
00:19:41.700A lot of the more Scandinavian-inspired pietist churches that tend to be much more conservative,
00:19:46.600once again, at least nominally, will come during these small groups.
00:19:49.460So that's one reason to mention this is because it affects the religious makeup of the continent.
00:19:53.680But also, it's still one of the only few points where Englishmen, Scots, Ulster Scots are going to be the main immigrant waves.
00:20:02.080But during the 1840s and after is where you're going to get something much different.
00:20:07.740It's going to be where the Irish and the Germans in particular start to massively supplant any of the other immigration groups coming to the country.
00:20:17.320And not just Germans as well, and Germans and Irish, but also Central Europeans.
00:20:21.620So I believe the first Czechs in Texas technically came in the 1830s or so,
00:20:29.300but the vast majority of the ones that came after them were during this time period post-1840.
00:20:34.040So if you know that weird group in Texas, that's where they come from.
00:20:37.460If you want to know why the vast majority of the American Midwest is German, this is that wave in particular.
00:20:44.080Post-1840 particularly, 1848 gets a bad rap
00:20:47.660because the story goes that a lot of atheistic revolutionaries from the European continent were coming over here and corrupting the United States.
00:20:55.540I personally think that's a bit overblown, but there's no denying that you did get some German peoples who were sympathetic to the revolutions
00:21:03.020would settle in, say, Texas or these other frontier areas.
00:21:06.520And they tended to be much more, they would support the Whig Party and then later the Republicans.
00:33:08.420Okay, yeah, so the Irish and Germans are still going to be significant.
00:33:12.060The British are basically a minority group of immigrants at this point.
00:33:15.980If anyone was going to come over from the British Isles, they did it a few generations ago now, or a couple of generations, I should say.
00:33:23.100But what we're going to see after the civil war is economic expansion, some of it state-directed, so this is going to be your railroads, and some of it just organic.
00:33:33.180So this is going to be more like your steel mills and whatnot else.
00:33:37.840Both groups, particularly the railroads, though, this is what they're most renowned for, are going to start looking for new groups of temporary laborers.
00:33:45.880And this is in the British style, so they are very much temporary.
00:33:49.420They're just taking a job, and then once it's done, they get shipped back to wherever they're from on the company dime.
00:33:55.080You very much can legally pay them less.
00:33:59.400You know, they're willing to risk life and limb handling nitroglycerin and mountainside mines and whatnot else to get through to the other side,
00:34:08.320whereas your average American at this point probably does not want to just handle open nitroglycerin and blow off their arm.
00:34:17.300Handle explosives that Americans won't handle.
00:34:19.680Well, yeah, I mean, maybe not in the way that the companies wanted them to handle, but at this point in time, this is, or at least, this is what the companies would say.
00:34:29.720And this is where the railroad magnates are going to start importing temporary Chinese laborers.
00:34:35.140And this is very unpopular, because especially as you're getting more immigrant waves from Europe, and not much as in this early period, we're not going to see too terribly much change.
00:34:48.260But you are still getting positive immigration.
00:34:50.920People are going to want some sort of employment.
00:34:52.720Seeing these railroad magnates off on the other side of the country, having these perfectly good jobs and potential settlement opportunities and whatever else, or at least the jobs mainly being taken up by temporary laborers from Asia, is not popular, especially if the growing union movement.
00:35:07.900So, what we're going to see between the 1870s to, say, 1920 is going to be the next major episode we'll talk about later.
00:35:16.300Temporary Chinese laborers are going to be banned, in particular.
00:36:27.640I mean, and these Chinese aren't Christians either.
00:36:30.240You have to keep that in mind as well.
00:36:31.300So, along with the racial element, like, at least with the Protestants, the Catholics may be this weird parody of what Christianity is supposed to be.
00:36:38.840But at least they aren't these demon-worshipping pagans, as they would characterize the Chinese.
00:36:43.240That's how they would just typically characterize them, this sort of weird animist-style religion, or maybe this weird humanistic philosophy in the term of Confucianism or whatever, did not play well with anyone.
00:36:56.680And this is at a point in time where both left and right, either nominally or fervently, made an appeal to Christianity.
00:37:03.560So, having these pagans brought over from China, from Asia, this non-European continent, played well with no people, really, except for the railroad corporations.
00:37:13.500And the only reason they could do this without extreme backlash was because they were being bankrolled by the federal government.
00:37:18.680So, I guess that's an unintended consequence.
00:37:27.220After this, like, brief episode, we're going to see a major shift in immigration patterns by groups that really had not come over here yet.
00:37:37.220These are going to be Eastern and Southern Europeans.
00:37:39.500So, this is getting to the end of the 1800s and towards the 1900s.
00:37:43.900Instead of Germans, Irish, Brits, Scandinavians, and whatever else, we're going to start getting Italians.
00:37:49.220Italians, we're going to start getting Greeks, Balkans, we're going to start seeing Poles, Russians, Jews in heavy numbers coming from Eastern Europe, Ashkenazi Jews in particular.
00:38:00.660The South, at this point, had had a large, or a sizable Sephardi population.
00:38:06.780And, in fact, if you look at the Confederate government, there's going to be a lot of Sephardic representatives there.
00:38:12.760We had not really had Ashkenazi Jews up until this point.
00:38:15.960They're going to be coming along with the Italians, with the Russians, with the Poles, Ukrainians, and whomever else.
00:38:22.380And they are primarily going to be settling in the cities.
00:38:25.120In fact, it is a rarity for this new wave of people to go to the frontier at all.
00:38:29.760This is why, if you look at an ethnic breakdown of New England right now, it's majority Italian, because that's where they settled was this old Anglo countryside.
00:38:37.940They did not head to Wyoming or Oklahoma or Texas or the Texan panhandle to go settle new lands, primarily.
00:38:45.260So, this is also going to give rise to people living in basically shanty towns.
00:38:51.400It's going to become a main cause for progressive reformers later.
00:39:46.840If you were to ask someone which groups of Europe would be the best Americans, it certainly wouldn't be Italy or Poland or Russia or the Moscow Jews or whomever else.
00:39:56.060So, how much of this also played into the Industrial Revolution, the industrialization of these areas and the workforce there?
00:40:33.400Now, we were doing steel manufacturing and oil drilling and whatnot else.
00:40:39.240And a lot of the inventors are going to come from these older groups.
00:40:42.500Edison and Ford are certainly not Latin or Slavic in their heritage.
00:40:47.840So, this is one way you can frame it, is that they weren't driving it necessarily, but they were the labor force.
00:40:55.980This is something that was almost indisputable.
00:40:57.680A lot of these people, as was romanticized in The Jungle, the book that every mainstream history teacher likes to point to when talking about the progressive era,
00:41:10.460They were also characterized as, because of their strong ties to labor, as socialists.
00:41:14.260There was a heavy fear, especially among old Union generals at this point in time, that these Slavs and Latins were going to be red banner-waving anarchists.
00:41:27.260People that were going to cause violence, people that were just completely incompatible with the American way of life up until this point.
00:41:33.760In fact, one such of these people are going to shoot President McKinley, quite famously.
00:41:41.120I believe that would be a Serbian anarchist, if I'm not mistaken.
00:41:43.920I think it's a Balkan anarchist of some sort.
00:41:46.140I think his parents were, but he was born in the United States, if I remember correctly.
00:41:51.420So, he's one generation removed from, but certainly has the politics of his former homeland.
00:42:02.100So, in this sense, I guess that they called it.
00:42:05.500I mean, you can't say their fears are unfounded if supposedly the most important office in the country, the holder of it, was just shot by one of these people coming from, or at least descended from, these waves.
00:42:16.660So, this is, I guess, a merited fear, if you will.
00:42:21.940But you're going to get a lot of a union movement, in particular of Irish Germans and WASPs, for whatever WASPs actually joined unions, are going to push back against this.
00:42:32.300Because Italians, Poles, Russians, and whomever else were not in these unions already.
00:42:38.400It's against the union's interest to expand the labor force.
00:42:41.620It's very basic economics as it relates to unions there.
00:42:44.920So, that's one way that this plays out.
00:42:49.660And then, I don't want to say this is a hard fact, necessarily, for all of them.
00:42:55.040But you are even going to get inter-Catholic conflicts as well in the cities.
00:43:00.920So, like German Catholics and Irish Catholics that have established themselves in these large port cities.
00:43:05.800Suddenly, you're getting this large waves of other fellow Catholics that are not German or Irish or Swiss or Austrian or whatever else.
00:43:22.580This was the Irish parish or whatever else.
00:43:24.380And part of that is practical, because not everyone was just multilingual.
00:43:27.920It was very impractical for the average person to learn a different language.
00:43:31.340So, you're going to get that competition as well, almost, if you want to simplify it, as if ethnicity supersedes religious unity here, at least among the Roman Catholics.
00:43:47.040Oh, and this is something else as well.
00:43:49.960The progressives, for all their rhetoric about trying to keep America from being influenced and irreversibly shifted by these waves of immigration,
00:43:59.160they did not actually, the first wave of progressives, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, really didn't clamp down on the immigration.
00:44:05.780It would be their successors, the return to normalcy in the 20s, that would actually accomplish this.
00:44:09.580So, Italian immigration, for instance, would reach its height under the Progressive Era.
00:44:14.020And it was primarily these Italian and Slavic immigrants that would be the help of these social reformer causes in the cities.
00:44:22.700So, if you learn about the Progressive Era, you hear about all these different halfway houses and other initiatives that were supposed to lift these immigrants out of poverty.
00:44:30.860These new waves of immigrants were the main recipients.
00:44:33.160And, once again, due to their number and due to the spurious political leanings of some of their compatriots, this is going to cause the first Red Scare, especially as the Russian Civil War starts.
00:44:46.460Because suddenly you've had all of these Slavs, all these Southern Europeans coming to the country, and it looks like their homelands are turning very favorably towards some sort of socialistic system.
00:44:56.740The Red Scare is the only natural phenomenon. This is the one that people don't know about, necessarily.
00:45:02.160It's happening whenever Progressive Administrations actually start to conduct raids on what they perceive to be communist or socialist meeting places.
00:45:11.220So, I think I covered everything there.
00:45:15.600Absolutely. So, the melting pot is having some difficulty, right?
00:45:19.240Not quite working out, as some people might have envisioned.
00:45:23.000So, you mentioned 1920s, we're going to see a shift.
00:45:57.080And, depending on what motivations you think that foreign groups have for the United States,
00:46:02.500I guess you can make the judgment as to whether the melting pot is working or not.
00:46:06.180But, for the 1920s, this is where you get a reaction against, basically, the entire progressive movement.
00:46:11.220And, typical to most major reactions, you get – they accept part of the preceding philosophy.
00:46:22.360So, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were not pre-progressive right-wingers necessarily, but they certainly were right-wingers that were not like the progressives.
00:46:31.660So, along with all their other reforms that are going to take place, Harding and Coolidge, in particular, are going to clamp down immigration as harsh as it's ever been in the United States history before or since.
00:46:44.980They're going to introduce what is called the quota systems.
00:46:48.140Harding is going to start in either 1920 or 1921.
00:47:01.820It's just that the earlier bill signed by Harding is going to have a – they're going to look at the 1910 census.
00:47:09.340And they're going to look at all these different European ethnic groups of immigrants.
00:47:13.500And what they're going to do is they're going to determine how many arrivals did we have at this point in 1910.
00:47:21.220And the new law for the quota system is going to say that new arrivals for that specific racial and nationality group are going to be limited to 3% of that number.
00:47:33.020So, this is – if you look at a total number of immigrants chart for the United States over time, this is the first time that we actually experience a decline caused by policy and not by warfare, if I remember correctly.
00:47:45.060So, this is specifically to restrict Italian immigration, Slavic immigration, Jewish immigration from Russia, and some of these other groups from around the European area, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, that were not wanted, quite frankly, by most of these other established groups.
00:48:03.680By 1924, that number is going to be taken from 3% of that group to 2%.
00:48:09.100So, it's going to be even less than earlier.
00:48:11.420And also, during the 1924 Act, if I remember correctly, all immigration from Asia is banned.
00:48:18.960So, this is – that might seem to come out of nowhere, being as we haven't talked about Asian immigration really since the Chinese temporary laborers.
00:48:27.880But if you look at world history, China had just entered its civil war period.
00:48:32.200And the reasoning went – this is what might be called a yellow scare – the reasoning went that China in its civil war is going to have a large amount of people wanting to flee the civil war.
00:48:41.920Probably the United States, if they can.
00:48:44.460So, this was a measure to make sure by basically all groups involved that California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and all these other places by the Pacific did not experience a large influx of Asian populations.
00:48:57.140So, this was a – this was probably the most radical immigration policies that we will see yet and certainly have seen since.
00:49:08.320And also, during this point in time as well, this is where you get more internal migration.
00:49:12.200This is where it starts to come back to the forefront.
00:49:14.520This is where you get the largest amount of blacks coming from the south to the north.
00:49:18.280And that's going to cause strife and it's going to cause new settlements to be made.
00:49:24.300There's a whole separate analysis of that to be had elsewhere.
00:49:29.680And – oh, this is also where our first border control agency gets established.
00:49:33.840So, the border control was not needed up until this point.
00:49:38.400It was just kind of locally or devolved enforcement in its mechanism.
00:49:45.380But now it was – it was certainly an agency that was the concern of all levels of government.
00:49:51.840So, this is the reforms brought about in the 20s up until about the 40s or so is when we're going to see this change.
00:49:57.840So, obviously, we don't have these controls, that something has shifted.
00:50:03.580So, what was it that removed these controls?
00:50:24.580And all these Eastern European populations have limited to quotas of a tiny amount.
00:50:30.680And it should be worth noting as well, and I forgot to mention this again, that second act that we discussed for the quota systems looked at the 1890 census.
00:50:39.400So, it's even less southern Europeans and Slavs than previous.
00:50:44.520So, on both of those counts, the percent admitted and the census used, we're basically not getting any of these groups.
00:50:54.580But if you look at immigration in the modern day, you're certainly seeing probably – if you are getting European immigration, it's probably coming from the east now, just given the look of the warfare and refugee statuses and whatnot.
00:51:06.240You do see Muslim groups getting citizenship and running for office and whatnot.
00:51:11.140So, yes, something has changed quite drastically.
00:51:14.280And what we're going to see is a couple of things.
00:51:16.340Just to note about the Muslim thing, it's going to be overruled in 1944, near the end of FDR's administration after he's revolutionized the courts and whatnot else.
00:51:25.160I believe it's a Saudi Muslim man becomes the first Muslim citizen, I think would be the – I think was that court case.
00:51:35.280But after FDR's administration, the New Deal and whatnot else, the seeds are planted for the civil rights movement, which is probably a tired refrain for some people at this point.
00:51:45.280If you keep watching our own show or mine or anyone else's surrounding us and our friends, the civil rights movement seems to be behind a lot of modern problems.
00:51:53.600And this is no different for immigration.
00:51:55.960So what you're going to start seeing in the 1950s is that race-based quotas are discriminatory and thus should be repealed and struck down.
00:52:04.500This goes right along with the desegregation of the schools and whatnot else right when the ball gets moving for the civil rights movement.
00:52:12.360Now, I'd like to stop for just a second there because I think it's important for people to note the Civil Rights Act is supposed to correct problems of kind of racial tensions and inequalities in law in people who are already in the United States.
00:52:37.360That's the way it's sold to people is there is a – and I think rightly to state there is an injustice, of course, that is happening to many black citizens, and that needs to change, that they need to be equal before the law.
00:52:50.080And so that is the stated purpose of the Civil Rights Act.
00:52:53.280But almost immediately we see that its implications don't actually solve that problem.
00:52:58.980They're actually pointed at something that's entirely different.
00:53:02.080And so even though the stated goal and the way it was sold was to solve a specific problem between mainly two groups inside the United States, instead the logic was immediately extended to alter the way that the United States did business with pretty much anyone else across the world.
00:53:19.940Not just immediate, because that implies this is sequential, as if this was a natural outpropping.
00:53:26.020The same fervors and sentiments were used in the 1950s while this was happening, kind of before even the most major Civil Rights Acts, to basically just open up the borders, as long as the restrictions weren't race-based.
00:53:42.160Now, national origin discrimination existed up until 1965 with the Hard Seller Act.
00:53:48.520So we have this sort of, whenever the law is passed in the civil rights fervor to ban race-based discrimination and immigration, you get a sort of retreating by the anti-civil rights faction to say, well, then we'll just ban it by national origin.
00:54:05.460Because we can see that such and such country has had this amount of subversive activity for communism or whatever else.
00:54:11.440We don't want that here, so we're just going to ban immigration based off of X census from this country.
00:54:17.420So in 1965, you're going to get the Hard Seller Act.
00:54:22.300Philip Hart, who was erroneously nicknamed the conscience of the Senate, if I remember correctly, and Emmanuel Seller, who was a, if I remember correctly, I think he was a Jewish, born of a German-Jewish parents from one of these earlier immigration waves, sponsors this bill.
00:54:37.400So you can see how immigration is going to influence your country's political trajectory over time.
00:54:43.600It doesn't have to be within this generation.
00:54:47.760This act is going to open up everywhere except the Western Hemisphere.
00:54:52.680The countries south of the border are restricted to, I think, a couple hundred thousand yearly.
00:54:56.940Or, no, it might have been just slightly over a hundred thousand yearly.
00:55:00.520So, now suddenly, if you want to come in from Asia, any part of Europe, Africa, Antarctica, for whatever reason, if you were there, you can come right in.
00:55:11.160There's not going to be a quota put in on the amount of people we can accept.
00:55:14.260The Western Hemisphere, however, has a ban, and this is largely due to union movements within the Democratic Party at the time.
00:55:23.460What you might call labor Democrats were kind of on the ascendancy of the Johnson administration after Truman, Kennedy, and FDR.
00:55:31.120The Dixiecrats really had not had any sort of real power in a long time, and they were the conservative faction.
00:55:37.380And even they somewhat tacitly supported unions at times, if not outright.
00:55:41.040Right. This Western Hemisphere provision in the Hart-Cellar Act was to make sure that you wouldn't just have all of the people south of the border come in and compete with good American union workers for jobs.
00:55:55.360And then, as we know right now, judging by the recent events in the news, something's changed because we are certainly letting in a lot more than a little 100,000 to 200,000 people south of the border.
00:56:09.100Well, under the Reagan administration, if you could believe this, under the Reagan administration, that part of the act was repealed.
00:56:17.960I think there was like a 1986 Immigration Act that was passed that took off the – or nominally took away the quota on the southern border and just replaced it with normal controls.
00:56:28.680And there were some conservative concessions to really crack down on the immigration altogether.
00:56:35.280Of course, that was never really followed.
00:56:36.780And then Reagan, once again, is famous for giving amnesties out every single time that someone asked him to.
00:56:46.360So, that's just going to be the main – the ethnic history, if you will.
00:56:51.560And you can certainly see how, as time has gone on, you get this sort of – a leftist would call it – people trying to pull up the ladder behind them.
00:57:02.340Someone sensible might say that you just don't want your country to be filled with people from, like, completely different language and religious families.
00:57:09.520What not else that would make things difficult?
00:57:11.520You see that older generations of immigrants, and especially the oldest settlers, have probably gotten the worst deal out of all of this, don't want their country to be subsumed by the newer groups.
00:57:22.820That's always the case, and I think it's a rather merited fear.
00:57:26.760You know, if I come from a family that built this part of Oklahoma or something, I wouldn't want this part of Oklahoma to be settled by a large wave of Bosnians or Serbians or whatever.
00:57:38.060Yeah, and the joke in many of the states that are at the border is the last wave of Hispanic immigrants is trying to keep out the newest wave of Hispanic immigrants, and there's nothing new about that dynamic.
00:57:51.920There's nobody who understands the value of the United States and its difference between the place that many people immigrated from than the people who got here and realized that this is a much better place for them to live, and they want to keep it that way.
00:58:09.560I think that brings us up to pretty much our modern history of immigration.
00:58:13.180Obviously, now we're in an even more radical place because now we're kind of debating whether you can even have any control on a border ever.
00:58:21.340Forget where people come from or what you want the dynamic in your country to be, whether people have the right to decide who's going to live next to their country.
00:58:32.340Now we're at the point of, like, are borders even legal?
00:58:35.340You can't have any fences or barbed wire because that's a human rights violation.
00:58:41.660So, we're at the point now where obviously federal policy is just never going to get fixed, and that's why Greg Abbott had to take action.
00:58:48.540It's why more Republican governors need to take action because I don't think we're ever going to see a national or level solution to this until pressure is put on the legislature by action of these individual governors.
00:59:01.400So, I really appreciate you taking us through this history because I think it's really critical for people to get a real understanding of what immigration was like in the United States before they can understand how we kind of arrived here.
00:59:14.660But that's the – oh, sorry. Go ahead, Ron.
00:59:16.080I was just going to say, unless they can somehow get a national coalition to actually enforce border patrols, it literally has to be the states or no one else.
00:59:25.100And if you want to talk about, well, why do all these older waves of immigration seem more American, you can make many arguments for it.
00:59:32.300But one of it is what happened to assimilation, this policy of rigid assimilation that we once had.
00:59:37.740I mean, the Midwest and the Great Plains no longer speaks German.
00:59:41.080That used to be the second largest language in America up until the Progressive Era.
00:59:44.660So, they got assimilated somehow, and it was by force, basically.
00:59:49.340Social pressure, which is a form of coercion, or government edicts saying that you can't use such and such language on these telegraph wires or telephones or whatnot else.
00:59:58.680By the civil rights era, that's deemed discriminatory, and it's gone.
01:00:05.480Certainly, if you want to do with what the founders say and claim that only certain nationalities or peoples or races can actually be American, then go ahead.
01:00:14.280But there is something to be said of this idea, especially if you're an Anglo.
01:00:19.460The dissimilation probably was the best option if you are going to have it at all.
01:00:39.880There is a weekly show on Saturday mornings, pretty early, especially if you're the further west you go.
01:00:46.540It's called Turnipse Digest, and it's a series of economic or political topics that where I and a guest cover usually a primary source is involved.
01:00:55.520Well, for the past few weeks, and certainly this next week, we have been covering the neoconservatives and what they have wrote specifically.
01:01:02.280So we are not just saying the neocons are bad and here's why we think so.
01:01:05.380We are saying here's what the neocons say.
01:01:07.580Look at how absolutely buffoonish it sounds.
01:01:10.080Last Saturday, we went over an Irving Kristol article in the Wall Street Journal where he is saying that if you get pregnant and decide to keep the child, that's your fault.
01:02:42.840I don't think that if we just got in tomorrow that we'd suddenly have the manpower and resources right there for us to go and enacting what we need.
01:02:50.320But I do think, however, that we do have the ability to, if we do have the will, to actually turn things around.
01:03:00.240There's been a lot of talk now of repatriation, not just closing immigration, but actually going back and retroactively enforcing laws that have been broken, kind of like you would with any other law.
01:03:09.840You know, if I broke a law today that was major enough and it went on for a while, five years later I'd get caught so long as the statute of limitations hasn't passed, you'd expect me to be tried for it.
01:03:18.660Basic stuff, or they suspect I've broken a law, I guess you would say.
01:03:32.060And I tend not to lean optimistic, but I can't help but shake the feeling that maybe something was learned in the last eight years, if not by Trump, then by the people around him.
01:03:43.440Like, I feel like the fact that we can openly have a conversation about repatriation or expatriation, I think something is developing positively here.
01:03:52.540So if there has been the will to do it, it certainly wasn't there in 2008, wasn't there in 2012, probably not 2016, certainly not right now under this administration.
01:04:03.160I think that this is your next best hope is what's coming next.
01:05:05.420Again, I said this before in a previous episode, but just knowing.
01:05:09.920People coming across the border is actually a high-risk activity for them.
01:05:14.300They have to pay a lot of money, obviously.
01:05:16.220A lot of times they're paying their life savings.
01:05:18.160They're putting themselves in very dangerous situations, especially women and children are often abused or human trafficking occurs because of this.
01:05:26.920They're putting themselves at great risk entering the United States.
01:05:30.640The incentive to do this is once they get across the border, there's just no way they're getting sent back.
01:05:35.040There's no way they're getting turned away.
01:05:36.860Well, if you remove that guarantee, you automatically drop.
01:06:23.640This needs to be an ongoing mission that is assumed by all governors, not something that is, you just, oh, we solved this flashpoint, and now we can go back to normal.
01:06:33.640Right, and just, this is sort of secondary, but also the super chat asks, you know, what else would happen?
01:06:44.980The other thing might be in the education system.
01:06:46.860There needs to, you need to break this cultic adherence to this idea that immigration is always positive, always has been positive in American history, and that we're a nation of immigrants.
01:06:56.580Even then, if you want to take this in a left-wing direction, it doesn't even work there either.
01:07:03.380Every native tribe's oral history talks about arriving from somewhere, destroying another tribe, or being destroyed by another tribe that arrives from the Great Plains up out to the west or the east or wherever else they're coming from.
01:07:15.500So, I mean, they too get to share in this version of history where immigration and settling is evil.
01:07:23.000So, a good thing to do would be to actually start checking over what is allowed in the classrooms and breaking this idea that immigration is just a good thing in and of itself.
01:07:34.220There needs to be an actual, I guess you would say, academic treatment of the subject if you want it to be neutral.
01:07:39.300Well, and the GOP has to get over this fear that talking about that subject is going to, like, lose them the Hispanic vote or something.
01:07:46.400Actually, that's very clearly not the case when they have chosen to be more forceful on this.
01:07:52.000Hispanics who are citizens have actually agreed with them for the most part.
01:07:56.440You see guys like Trump making gains in that community.
01:07:58.740You see governors like DeSantis making vast gains in that community.
01:08:02.720And they're doing it by talking about the need for borders and immigration control.
01:08:08.100So, the idea that it's good to pander by saying, oh, well, no, this is always an unmitigated good.
01:08:14.600No, many of the people of the very group you're trying to pander to don't agree with that.
01:08:18.160They actually want to see law and order.
01:08:33.680Well, make sure that you're checking out Ryan's work.
01:08:36.040Make sure you're checking out his Twitter and his YouTube channel.
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