The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Real History of American Immigration ｜ Guest： Ryan Turnipseed ｜ 1⧸31⧸24

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00:00:30.300 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.200 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.620 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.900 So, we hear a lot about immigration.

00:00:40.640 Obviously, it's a huge issue right now.

00:00:43.020 We've got the showdown at the Texas border.

00:00:45.820 A lot of people are talking about what immigration policy could possibly go going forward.

00:00:51.680 Restrict what is happening to the United States.

00:00:54.600 Whether they should take the deal that had been floated through the Senate.

00:00:56.980 All this stuff.

00:00:57.840 So, I thought it would be very valuable at this time to go back and look at the real history of immigration in the United States.

00:01:04.320 Because we hear a lot about how the United States is a nation of immigrants.

00:01:09.280 And we've kind of always had this policy.

00:01:11.440 It's always been the same.

00:01:12.160 But it's not true.

00:01:12.920 There's been very different attitudes and ways that immigration has been handled throughout U.S. history.

00:01:18.900 And I don't think any one of them is particularly the American way.

00:01:23.220 And so, I want to go through and look at the history of immigration in the United States.

00:01:27.480 And doing that with me is a member of the old Glory Club.

00:01:31.020 He's a great YouTuber and a historical genius.

00:01:35.200 Ryan Turnipseed, thanks for joining me, man.

00:01:37.200 Thank you very much for having me back.

00:01:39.740 Absolutely.

00:01:40.480 I know people are going to be like, Ryan, the hair.

00:01:42.700 And I've been telling them, his historical powers are contained in the hair.

00:01:47.120 It's like Samson, if he cuts the hair, he loses all of the history of autism.

00:01:52.320 And so, we have to, you know, I understand.

00:01:55.040 But for the greater good, we need Ryan's superpowers.

00:01:58.680 He has to continue to have that history.

00:02:02.340 All right.

00:02:02.720 So, just to jump in here at the beginning, man.

00:02:06.440 I think the most common thing we hear is, America is a nation of immigrants.

00:02:11.840 The nation of immigrants.

00:02:13.000 And it's easy for people, I think, to go with that because, like, oh, well, it's the new world, right?

00:02:19.800 It was founded and all these people from Europe came over.

00:02:23.600 Obviously, there were some people here.

00:02:25.580 And so, you know, there's some displacement involved.

00:02:28.400 But a lot of people think of that as kind of the justification for calling it a nation of immigrants.

00:02:35.580 However, I think it's important at the outset to set the difference between an immigrant and a settler.

00:02:41.280 Because I think those are very different mentalities.

00:02:44.100 Yes, technically, both of them are moving to a new area.

00:02:48.000 But an immigrant is doing something very different from a settler. 0.81

00:02:50.760 So, could you explain at the outset just kind of what that framework is?

00:02:54.580 What's the difference between an immigrant and a settler?

00:02:57.440 Right.

00:02:57.980 So, this is something that we don't really see anymore just because there is not as much unclaimed land,

00:03:03.060 especially not by governments and other world powers.

00:03:05.700 But once upon a time, this was a very – settlers were once the source of most great empires' power.

00:03:13.660 They were the people that were willing to risk life and limb, money, their progeny, material, and whatever else.

00:03:20.060 Any social standing, perhaps, if the venturer seemed to be foolish or whatnot.

00:03:23.660 And they were going to go out to the unsettled frontiers, at least by these great powers.

00:03:28.420 Unsettled in terms that there was obviously not any major infrastructure.

00:03:31.760 There were certainly no large civilizations to accept them and welcome them into communities.

00:03:36.920 They were going to go out to these frontiers and actually build cities, build trading posts, ports.

00:03:41.780 They were going to do things that benefited their empires from which they were coming from.

00:03:45.920 Or they were going to do things for their own communities' benefit.

00:03:48.920 So, not everything had to explicitly be for the furtherance of empire.

00:03:52.480 You have quite a lot of especially religious-motivated settlers early on in American history.

00:03:57.600 Because if there's no one there, no one's there to persecute you for your specific weird beliefs or whatnot else.

00:04:03.180 There'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.

00:04:10.080 As contrasted to an immigrant, who is specifically going from one civilization to another. 1.00

00:04:17.300 They are not building anything new.

00:04:19.500 They are not establishing these new cities out on the frontier necessarily.

00:04:23.200 They are going from settled location A to settled location B.

00:04:28.900 This would be the main difference, I think, that we want to draw here.

00:04:31.400 So, not to jump the gun, but English settlers in the 1500s and 1600s going to the eastern seaboard of the U.S.

00:04:40.400 usually are going to be settlers until the colonies are established, in which case you get waves of immigration there to do commerce and whatnot.

00:04:47.340 Whereas 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.

00:04:57.220 If there's no frontier for people to settle, there's not a lot of new land for you to go and stake and develop.

00:05:03.200 You're going to have to go through any means like you would in the old world. 0.98

00:05:06.740 You're going to have to buy up land, get the correct permissions and whatnot.

00:05:10.220 And if you want to start something there, then that's your prerogative.

00:05:12.760 And you can always receive back into civilization very easily if something goes awry.

00:05:16.940 Yeah, 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.

00:05:25.240 But at the same time, we also have this frontier mentality.

00:05:29.700 The United States has always been defined by its settler identity, by the way that it pushed westward, the way it settled the frontier.

00:05:39.820 And 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.

00:05:49.540 And 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.

00:05:58.040 At the same time, there were people who were at the frontier and were settling and were creating new civilizations.

00:06:04.420 And so America is going through this wave after wave scenario where the first group comes and they are a true settler culture. 0.92

00:06:13.040 You know, they are building the very first settlements in the United States, the first colonies.

00:06:17.060 They are settling, setting up civilization there.

00:06:20.300 And 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. 0.99

00:06:28.120 But many of those people then would turn into settlers.

00:06:30.500 They would move further west.

00:06:31.740 And so a very long time, there was this frontier settler culture that was happening.

00:06:38.400 You know, that dynamic was occurring as people were also immigrating.

00:06:42.360 And 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?

00:06:52.760 And there's really not a lot of frontier in general, but there's definitely no frontier in the United States, really.

00:06:58.420 And 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.

00:07:19.400 These people who are coming in now, many of them, you know, do doing very interesting things.

00:07:24.260 You 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. 0.99

00:07:34.860 He'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.

00:07:47.300 Right, and this isn't necessarily to detract, rather, from immigration as a category.

00:07:54.220 If 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.

00:08:06.080 John 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.

00:08:20.640 So this isn't necessarily to say that immigrants don't do anything productive or that they're less productive in settling or whatnot else.

00:08:26.400 It'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.

00:08:36.780 Absolutely, 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.

00:08:50.300 There 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.

00:09:02.760 But 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.

00:09:17.440 There 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.

00:09:35.820 And 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.

00:09:52.720 But their idea of how many and who should come into the United States was a very mixed bag.

00:09:58.920 Right. And this is something to keep in mind as well, is that the dynamics at the time are certainly not what they were today.

00:10:05.320 So you mentioned that you would have some factions in the U.S. that specifically wanted a large number of particularly European immigrants.

00:10:12.700 Central Europe, Western Europe, Northern Europe were typically the major spots that they were talking about at the time.

00:10:17.980 And as you mentioned, the idea was that we need to sell the frontier before someone else does.

00:10:22.320 We 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.

00:10:28.940 This is a very similar to a how a lot of the European monarchies at the same time viewed the peopling of their uninhabited regions.

00:10:35.440 This is what the Austrian Empire was doing, the Russian Empire to keep control of their vast vast lands. 0.88

00:10:40.960 They 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.

00:10:51.520 This was very similar thinking that we had over here, settling our frontier post-revolution.

00:10:55.860 But as he mentioned, again, just to reiterate, every or the vast majority of the founders all viewed this as a very European project.

00:11:04.620 And we'll see later that they reiterated this multiple times into law.

00:11:08.860 So those are the dynamics.

00:11:10.900 It's not like today where they're just blathering about immigration being our strength for no apparent reason.

00:11:17.780 So what's the first time that we need to really look at the way that immigration is shifted and formed?

00:11:23.000 Because there's a number of things we could start with, the Alien and Sedition Act or all kinds of different things.

00:11:27.860 But where do you think that we need to look at if we want to understand the modern history of immigration?

00:11:33.780 Because we can't go all the way back to the 1600s.

00:11:37.460 So where should we begin our story?

00:11:39.040 OK, 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.

00:11:50.960 And so at the start of our story, we're going to start with a post-independence America.

00:11:57.060 And we're just going to give a brief overview of what were the colonies like?

00:12:00.120 What were the what were the ethnic groups there, specifically the European nationalities there?

00:12:04.820 And how would they change prior to this?

00:12:07.200 Just so we have a very basic overview.

00:12:09.980 And something that we'll see is that at this point in time, New England is still very English.

00:12:13.640 It hasn't had the large influx of Irish, of Italians or any of these other types.

00:12:18.220 It was very much true to its name.

00:12:20.180 It was very congregationalist.

00:12:22.200 You had a few outcroppings of breakaway factions, Rhode Island being the main state of religious tolerance, being founded by Baptists.

00:12:30.640 But you would have heavy congregationalist presence in New England.

00:12:33.760 So that's its makeup.

00:12:34.760 It's very English, puritanical, with some outcroppings here and there from prior settlings of the frontier.

00:12:41.700 And this is a it would also be much more industrial than the other parts of the country.

00:12:47.060 So this is where a lot of the early factories, textile mills and all that would be.

00:12:52.460 If 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.

00:12:57.500 With the mid-Atlantic, you're going to get Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, sometimes is lumped in there, Delaware.

00:13:03.720 These were places that were much more mixed, talking about European peoples.

00:13:07.740 So Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony originally, quite famously.

00:13:12.220 It's the Penn family were Welsh Quakers.

00:13:15.740 And for the longest time, up until the, I believe it would be the early 1700s, the Welsh were the largest power holders in Pennsylvania.

00:13:24.180 But at the starting point, through immigration, they were kind of supplanted.

00:13:28.740 They had Englishmen would settle there.

00:13:31.940 Ulster Scots and the Irish would settle there.

00:13:34.680 There's just Scots in general would settle and you would get some Germans as well.

00:13:39.580 Holdovers from the old Swedish colonies would move to Pennsylvania.

00:13:42.660 So they would be supplanted already by immigration by when we're starting.

00:13:46.420 New York would be a similar mix with more Dutch thrown in.

00:13:49.620 Maryland would be also majority English, save for a large Catholic presence by its colony's history.

00:13:56.080 And that's just a very basic overview, just so we get a starting point.

00:13:59.000 And 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. 0.66

00:14:07.440 And Georgia is going to be very unique, because whereas most of these other colonies had a heavy slave presence by the time of a,

00:14:14.480 or not as heavy as it would be, but it was definitely present.

00:14:18.500 Where we're starting, Georgia was originally founded as a colony for the poor Englishmen.

00:14:22.460 The people that were unemployed, were homeless or wherever else, they would have a promise in Georgia was the idea.

00:14:29.420 So it was much more, at the start, homogenous than some of these other states, didn't have as much of the demographic mix.

00:14:35.540 And it was specifically poor Englishmen, usually Protestant.

00:14:38.720 So that's where we're starting.

00:14:39.760 America is just now independent, and immigration policy needs to be decided almost immediately.

00:14:46.000 Because, as we mentioned, there wasn't a unified consensus amongst these founders.

00:14:52.140 What are we going to do with the immigrants and naturalizing them into citizens and whatnot? 1.00

00:14:56.500 So we're going to get two major acts of naturalization and immigration, basically, in the 1790s,

00:15:02.740 that are specifically going to limit immigration into the United States to free whites or free European descendants of good character,

00:15:12.460 of good moral characters, what it would be eventually amended to.

00:15:16.960 And it's also worth noting that up until the 1940s, this was also interpreted to mean that no Muslims were allowed either,

00:15:24.680 because they were seen not necessarily as just a religion, but also peoples that were not European.

00:15:29.180 So this was passed into law, and I believe it would be 1790.

00:15:33.840 And then it was reiterated again in 1795, with the only major change of the act being a change in the period of naturalization.

00:15:41.540 So that's what we're starting with.

00:15:43.300 This is our first major policy of the Republic after the Constitution is ratified.

00:15:48.280 We have our government we've been stuck with now for ever since.

00:15:52.500 This is their policy.

00:15:53.620 Yeah, it jumps from like two years to five or five years to two years, back to five years,

00:15:59.100 because they're worried about the number of people who might come in and influence elections specifically.

00:16:04.220 Right, yes.

00:16:05.440 And there's also the dynamic that the states had more control over immigration.

00:16:13.740 The role of the federal government beyond naturalization policy wasn't really clear.

00:16:18.540 And so there was more of a mixture of how that was actually going to be enforced at a state level.

00:16:24.980 Right.

00:16:25.700 And there was also a large or a heavy clerical influence on, or clergy influence rather, on what these policies were,

00:16:34.060 because you had previously in this backstory kind of had a shift in the American religious demographics because of the Great Awakening.

00:16:41.780 Something 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,

00:16:48.320 a lot of these people going along with this Great Awakening, shaking up the establishments, were themselves recent immigrants.

00:16:54.740 All of the older immigrants from the 17th century tended to be in the old establishment, old light sector.

00:17:00.680 So 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. 0.98

00:17:09.220 These new lights were the Jonathan Edwards types, these more radical lambasting fire and brimstone puritans that were much more focused on individuals,

00:17:19.520 so the story goes, rather than rituals and whatnot else.

00:17:22.740 So immigration was very relevant to these clergymen because their churches had been rocked either positively or negatively,

00:17:29.860 depending on the faction, by immigrants.

00:17:31.780 So the old establishment types in New England didn't like immigration as much.

00:17:35.740 The younger, much more Great Awakening types loved it.

00:17:40.200 So basic thing there as well.

00:17:42.400 Something you don't really get to see as much anymore, churches heavily commenting and swaying their congregations on policies of immigration.

00:17:49.180 Well, I think you do actually see that quite often, but only in one direction.

00:17:53.560 Right, yeah.

00:17:55.340 It turns out that if you're pro-immigrant, you're doing God's work, and if you're like,

00:17:59.700 maybe we should be able to protect the country, it's like, oh, you're making an idol of politics.

00:18:03.960 Right, exactly.

00:18:05.840 Amazing how that works.

00:18:08.320 So I think as so often is the case, the Civil War is going to be a big dividing line here.

00:18:14.160 So let's set the stage before we get there.

00:18:16.240 Are there any immigration changes that we need to know about, any demographic shifts,

00:18:22.000 people coming into the country in large ways that we should know pre-Civil War?

00:18:26.480 What's that dynamic look like?

00:18:27.640 Right, and just right before we get there, I should just quickly also iterate that the Europeans-only policy

00:18:34.700 that we just talked about from the founders would again be reiterated in 1802 and another naturalization law.

00:18:40.500 So you get it three times there.

00:18:43.300 You can't really misconstrue it.

00:18:44.620 It just is what it is.

00:18:45.660 You can make of it what you will.

00:18:46.920 And then right before the Civil War, so we'll say early 1800s to about 1840 or so,

00:18:53.700 we get something that's going to be distinct to what comes after.

00:18:58.100 The majority of the immigrants at this point in time are going to still be from the British Isles

00:19:03.140 and then minor bits from Ireland, the continent of Europe, and Scandinavia in particular.

00:19:07.720 That's going to be the majority of our most early immigration waves are just more people coming to the New Republic.

00:19:14.580 And those small groups from the continent are actually going to be very influential relative to their population size

00:19:22.340 compared to some of their later immigrants.

00:19:25.460 So these are where your more conservative, non-Anglo churches come from.

00:19:29.520 So the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, nominally conservative, comes out of these groups in this 1800 to 1840 period

00:19:38.120 before these major waves that we're going to talk about come to the continent.

00:19:41.700 A lot of the more Scandinavian-inspired pietist churches that tend to be much more conservative,

00:19:46.600 once again, at least nominally, will come during these small groups.

00:19:49.460 So that's one reason to mention this is because it affects the religious makeup of the continent.

00:19:53.680 But also, it's still one of the only few points where Englishmen, Scots, Ulster Scots are going to be the main immigrant waves.

00:20:02.080 But during the 1840s and after is where you're going to get something much different.

00:20:07.740 It'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. 0.85

00:20:17.320 And not just Germans as well, and Germans and Irish, but also Central Europeans.

00:20:21.620 So I believe the first Czechs in Texas technically came in the 1830s or so,

00:20:29.300 but the vast majority of the ones that came after them were during this time period post-1840.

00:20:34.040 So if you know that weird group in Texas, that's where they come from.

00:20:37.460 If you want to know why the vast majority of the American Midwest is German, this is that wave in particular. 1.00

00:20:44.080 Post-1840 particularly, 1848 gets a bad rap

00:20:47.660 because the story goes that a lot of atheistic revolutionaries from the European continent were coming over here and corrupting the United States.

00:20:55.540 I 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

00:21:03.020 would settle in, say, Texas or these other frontier areas.

00:21:06.520 And they tended to be much more, they would support the Whig Party and then later the Republicans.

00:21:11.820 So much more abolitionist minded.

00:21:14.920 This is also where you get a lot of sort of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant bristling against the Germans. 0.53

00:21:22.840 This is where Germans are going to be characterized as these brash, loud drunkards playing these weird instruments at the town square, 1.00

00:21:29.680 thinking that they're still in Germany and not over here in the enlightened Anglo-Sphere America.

00:21:36.320 So there's going to be that clash and it's going to continue really until the Progressive Era.

00:21:40.580 But that's just something to note in the background.

00:21:43.460 But I think that's our main groups leading up to the Civil War.

00:21:46.860 Just a quick aside, because you mentioned it a number of times,

00:21:49.460 and I think a lot of people, modern people today would have a harder time understanding this,

00:21:54.900 but it was very obvious at the time, why were churches and their migration so critical in the immigration process?

00:22:03.060 Because you've mentioned the different religious makeup, and that's important.

00:22:06.260 But of course, those churches are community centers that allow for assimilation, 0.98

00:22:11.760 allow communities to bind together for young men who move in to find a wife and find a job, those kind of things.

00:22:18.780 Can you talk a little bit about the role that that plays?

00:22:21.000 Right. So this is, especially in immigration patterns or settling patterns,

00:22:26.940 this is very similar to what you see in the early colonies.

00:22:29.380 If you get a group of people that are diehards in their faith, they're probably going to go together.

00:22:34.980 So what you're going to see are these large groups of people of one specific faith settling on the frontier.

00:22:40.360 And during the Second Great Awakening in particular, you're going to get so much of these 0.99

00:22:43.540 that you'll get what are called circuit riders, pastors that are pastored over like three parishes or whatnot,

00:22:49.040 and they just ride across week by week to each different parish.

00:22:53.320 So that's one main pattern there.

00:22:58.680 And that circuit riding heritage is also how you're going to get a lot of the Southern Baptist heritage.

00:23:04.300 It comes from these groups out on the frontier.

00:23:07.220 But just as you mentioned, these churches are going to be major hubs of settlement on the frontier

00:23:13.340 or major hubs for immigrants arriving in already established towns.

00:23:17.800 So something that we'll see in the 1840s for the first time, we're going to get a large wave of Catholics coming from Ireland,

00:23:23.540 coming from South Germany, parts of Switzerland, Austria, the holdouts in northern Germany.

00:23:28.900 They're going to come over here.

00:23:30.040 And they're mainly going to – their churches in particular are mainly going to encourage them to join the Democratic Party

00:23:36.000 just because it was much more Catholic-friendly at this point in time.

00:23:40.200 So churches will use these immigration patterns, especially in the port cities, New York City being a main one,

00:23:47.380 and they're going to use it to influence local politics and national politics.

00:23:51.000 So if there's something in there that I missed that you think is worth saying, then point it out.

00:23:57.520 No, that was great.

00:23:58.740 So we talked about the pre-Civil War and kind of the way that immigration is shaping the nation.

00:24:04.720 Obviously, if people have seen Gangs of New York, that's a movie a lot of people will be like,

00:24:09.980 ah, I know something about this period because I've seen some of this, and it's a great movie to be sure.

00:24:15.760 But what role did immigration play during that war?

00:24:19.360 Obviously, there's a lot of other factors involved, but I think it's a key moment in people understanding

00:24:26.460 kind of the role that a large wave of immigrants can play, particularly when a nation is fighting itself.

00:24:35.820 Right, and sorry, I just remembered this, and I should have mentioned it being as we were just talking about the religious stuff,

00:24:40.960 but those waves of Catholics are really going to galvanize some of the older Protestant groups in the country.

00:24:46.500 So this is where you'll get the know-nothings in particular, just because, once again, these Protestants took their faith very seriously.

00:24:53.980 And this is still at the time where the Reformation, the resulting wars of religion were still – people remembered them.

00:25:01.020 They remembered stories that were passed down from their grandfather, whose grandfather told them, and all this other stuff.

00:25:05.240 An invasion of Papists. 1.00

00:25:07.400 Right, exactly, yes. So these Papists hordes coming across the ocean are actually a very serious threat to them. 1.00

00:25:13.060 And then, conversely to the Papists, you know, Maryland was once theirs, at least nominally, for religious freedom.

00:25:18.500 So, you know, you get these play-by-plays, and certainly some might have a stronger claim to legitimacy.

00:25:24.440 But during the Civil War, you're going to see two very strange things take place.

00:25:30.880 One is you're going to see the North particularly rely on immigration for their army, which seems very Roman Empire-esque.

00:25:37.800 A lot of people might know you're not supposed to do that unless you have something very nice to offer them,

00:25:41.640 and they aren't going to take you over afterwards.

00:25:44.480 The North, I think, wasn't necessarily couped by a roving army of immigrants,

00:25:49.800 so I think they handled that pretty well, at least from their perspective.

00:25:54.500 The other thing is that these immigrants are going to resist joining the Northern armies as well.

00:25:59.200 So you get this, it goes both ways.

00:26:01.700 It turns out that a bunch of people fleeing from Ireland and all the different wars of Europe and whatnot

00:26:06.380 don't actually want to go fight another war, especially as technology becomes more modern.

00:26:11.020 So, on the one hand, the South, who makes much less use of recent immigrants than their army,

00:26:16.680 are going to start characterizing the North rather accurately of roaming bands of mercenaries

00:26:22.060 and hordes of foreigners, like the famous Confederate Song Southern soldier

00:26:27.080 is going to call the Northern armies mercenary hordes.

00:26:30.620 This was a common sentiment because the South was primarily British in its heritage.

00:26:36.160 English, Ulster Scots, Irish at this point in time had kind of settled there, and just normal Scots.

00:26:42.080 These waves of, like, Germans, who, some of them still spoke these weird continental languages

00:26:49.160 that certainly no one over in the South had heard for generations,

00:26:53.920 and these Irishmen coming from these other parts of Ireland.

00:26:58.580 These are going to be very grating.

00:27:01.400 It would be like if right now, if just hypothetically, a state tried to secede

00:27:07.740 and we just decided to import a large variety of people south of the border to go fight them.

00:27:13.580 That would obviously...

00:27:14.820 Theoretically.

00:27:15.280 Right, yeah.

00:27:16.100 Not that that could be happening now.

00:27:18.720 In a weird alternate, you know, timeline.

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00:27:53.000 Right, yeah.

00:27:53.860 It wouldn't play well, might be a good way to put it.

00:27:56.520 For anyone, really.

00:27:57.740 Because Northerners are going to start wondering if this really is for good and whatnot else.

00:28:02.660 Why are our people not joining it?

00:28:04.060 Why can't they make up for the shortage of men without going to these immigrant populations? 1.00

00:28:08.880 So it doesn't play well for anyone.

00:28:10.980 It certainly discredits the North on all sides, basically, 0.95

00:28:14.280 except for the most hardcore of abolitionists.

00:28:16.320 And then the other thing that we mentioned,

00:28:19.660 the immigrants don't like getting conscripted to fight these people that they don't even know yet.

00:28:23.620 This is a completely new political system.

00:28:25.800 Certainly, if you're coming from, say, Ireland or Germany,

00:28:28.000 you haven't had to deal with abolitionism.

00:28:30.540 You barely had to deal with serfdom.

00:28:32.960 So what gives?

00:28:34.260 They're being conscripted now.

00:28:35.260 So you're going to have several major draft riots.

00:28:37.600 The New York City draft riots, in particular, might come to mind.

00:28:40.420 These were a large portion of these rioters are going to be Irish,

00:28:47.140 just because they certainly didn't have this tradition of being conscripted to fight for abolition

00:28:52.140 basically half a continent away, if we're going by European distance.

00:28:57.560 So that's the main dynamics in the Civil War.

00:29:01.920 And those previous waves that we were mentioning, Germans and Irish,

00:29:05.700 are going to still continue.

00:29:07.040 So that's not stopped just yet.

00:29:08.780 It's going to decline slightly as the war is going on,

00:29:11.680 but it's not going to stop.

00:29:13.720 So go on.

00:29:16.520 I was just going to say, so the other big effect of the Civil War,

00:29:19.960 obviously, is going to be the 14th Amendment.

00:29:22.140 And what has now been understood as birthright citizenship.

00:29:27.120 Now, obviously, the 14th Amendment was originally created to solve the problem

00:29:31.500 of whether former slaves were citizens or not.

00:29:35.600 And so the clarification was, well, if you were born in the United States,

00:29:39.360 even if you were not free at that time, you are a citizen because you were born there.

00:29:44.560 Obviously, that dynamic has changed.

00:29:47.120 That fix at that time has changed the immigration dynamic since

00:29:51.500 in a very drastic way.

00:29:53.540 Right, exactly.

00:29:54.960 Certainly, these radical Republicans who I think we've talked about on this show

00:29:59.860 that push through these amendments, especially after Reconstruction,

00:30:04.680 they aren't ever going to predict that birthright citizenship would be used as a way to ensure

00:30:12.140 that a large Mexican or South American contingent or Central American contingent of the population

00:30:17.040 is going to establish itself here just because they technically had a child inside the border

00:30:22.140 and therefore that child now has birthright citizenship.

00:30:24.980 Obviously, not the plan.

00:30:26.960 But like most things with the radical Republicans, they didn't predict these things.

00:30:30.940 And it's very much been used in the left's favor.

00:30:34.700 So it doesn't really matter what their intentions were.

00:30:37.180 That's how it's been used.

00:30:38.060 And that's what the law reads, which maybe you should have opposed it while you still could have.

00:30:43.320 But some people did, and they were forced to not do that at gunpoint.

00:30:47.960 Yeah, and unfortunately, like you said, in so many of these situations,

00:30:53.020 the emergency solution is not well thought out.

00:30:56.680 Right.

00:30:57.180 And we have to pay for that for a very long time.

00:31:00.220 And I think a lot of people now would recognize that this is kind of a disastrous plan long term.

00:31:06.860 But at this point, it's been around so long that people have a hard time

00:31:10.600 of conceptualizing how you would even change that.

00:31:13.220 An amendment to the 14th Amendment, most people would have a hard time grasping that.

00:31:18.060 Or perhaps we could even dream big and hope for an amendment abolishing the 14th Amendment.

00:31:23.940 But that's neither here nor there.

00:31:25.800 Yeah.

00:31:26.860 That's a whole other episode.

00:31:28.700 Yeah, yeah.

00:31:29.080 Perhaps one that needs to happen, but a whole other episode.

00:31:31.300 All right.

00:31:31.660 So.

00:31:32.640 There's one more thing, though.

00:31:33.960 Yes.

00:31:34.360 This is the first time outside of going to the frontier that we're going to see massive amounts of internal migration.

00:31:40.480 So civil war is done.

00:31:42.700 Suddenly, there's a lot of opportunities, especially financially for northerners,

00:31:46.400 to go to this newly devastated south and just do business there.

00:31:50.480 And land is cheap and whatnot, so it's a good way to get land.

00:31:53.380 I know I've talked about this on the show before.

00:31:55.420 Those are going to be the carpetbaggers. 1.00

00:31:57.860 So that's one group of internal migrants.

00:32:00.440 They're typically European descended, and that's just going to be the vast majority of that group. 0.96

00:32:06.220 The other one is going to be newly freed blacks in the south going to the north. 0.55

00:32:13.140 Not as much as they will later in history, but this certainly does happen for the first time.

00:32:18.140 So all of these Midwestern and northern towns are suddenly going to see their first black person,

00:32:25.080 perhaps for the first time in a few generations.

00:32:27.380 Yeah, and that definitely changes the dynamic in a lot of areas that they had not expected.

00:32:37.120 Right.

00:32:37.260 But okay, so post-civil war, leading up to kind of the 1900s, what you said, obviously, the Irish and German immigration continues.

00:32:49.240 But is there any other key groups or any other key changes we need to know during that time?

00:32:55.120 Leading up to the civil war, you say?

00:32:57.040 No, post-civil war.

00:32:58.080 Oh, post-civil war.

00:32:58.860 Because obviously we get things like the Homestead Act, and there's the interest in expanding the frontier even more rapidly again.

00:33:06.560 What is the approach after that?

00:33:08.420 Okay, yeah, so the Irish and Germans are still going to be significant.

00:33:12.060 The British are basically a minority group of immigrants at this point.

00:33:15.980 If 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. 1.00

00:33:23.100 But 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.

00:33:33.180 So this is going to be more like your steel mills and whatnot else.

00:33:37.840 Both groups, particularly the railroads, though, this is what they're most renowned for, are going to start looking for new groups of temporary laborers.

00:33:45.880 And this is in the British style, so they are very much temporary.

00:33:49.420 They're just taking a job, and then once it's done, they get shipped back to wherever they're from on the company dime.

00:33:55.080 You very much can legally pay them less.

00:33:58.080 They can take more damage.

00:33:59.400 You know, they're willing to risk life and limb handling nitroglycerin and mountainside mines and whatnot else to get through to the other side,

00:34:08.320 whereas your average American at this point probably does not want to just handle open nitroglycerin and blow off their arm.

00:34:14.600 So, what's going to happen?

00:34:17.300 Handle explosives that Americans won't handle.

00:34:19.680 Well, 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.

00:34:29.720 And this is where the railroad magnates are going to start importing temporary Chinese laborers.

00:34:35.140 And 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.

00:34:47.120 It's going to come just afterwards.

00:34:48.260 But you are still getting positive immigration.

00:34:50.920 People are going to want some sort of employment.

00:34:52.720 Seeing 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.

00:35:07.900 So, 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.

00:35:16.300 Temporary Chinese laborers are going to be banned, in particular.

00:35:20.040 They were never becoming citizens.

00:35:21.700 They were still banned under the aforementioned acts that we talked about probably 20 minutes ago now.

00:35:26.040 But they were taking up jobs, so the story goes, and therefore banned.

00:35:32.700 And I believe this would be under the Arthur administration, I think, would have been this, so 1880s, give or take.

00:35:40.140 So, this is one main group.

00:35:41.760 It's sort of like an anomaly.

00:35:44.840 First main group of Asians brought over to the continent, and then also they were then shipped back quite promptly.

00:35:50.280 So, this is perhaps one of our main successful examples of expatriation.

00:35:55.760 You know, these workers weren't here and then just decided to stay here, and they were naturalized after an amnesty.

00:36:00.660 They were sent back.

00:36:02.220 That's why Oregon and Washington don't have this ancient Chinese population there.

00:36:07.300 And that's, again, probably because the idea of America as a European project was still very strong.

00:36:14.560 There was not this idea that you would just move people in, and as soon as they worked, they suddenly had the right to become a citizen.

00:36:23.060 That was still not a...

00:36:25.160 Yeah, most certainly.

00:36:27.640 I mean, and these Chinese aren't Christians either.

00:36:30.240 You have to keep that in mind as well.

00:36:31.300 So, 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. 0.53

00:36:38.840 But at least they aren't these demon-worshipping pagans, as they would characterize the Chinese. 0.99

00:36:43.240 That'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.

00:36:56.680 And this is at a point in time where both left and right, either nominally or fervently, made an appeal to Christianity.

00:37:03.560 So, having these pagans brought over from China, from Asia, this non-European continent, played well with no people, really, except for the railroad corporations.

00:37:13.500 And the only reason they could do this without extreme backlash was because they were being bankrolled by the federal government.

00:37:18.680 So, I guess that's an unintended consequence.

00:37:23.560 But after this...

00:37:24.540 Oh, sorry, what were you going to say?

00:37:25.840 No, no, no.

00:37:26.540 Okay, all right.

00:37:27.220 After 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.

00:37:37.220 These are going to be Eastern and Southern Europeans.

00:37:39.500 So, this is getting to the end of the 1800s and towards the 1900s.

00:37:43.900 Instead of Germans, Irish, Brits, Scandinavians, and whatever else, we're going to start getting Italians. 1.00

00:37:49.220 Italians, 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.

00:38:00.660 The South, at this point, had had a large, or a sizable Sephardi population.

00:38:06.780 And, in fact, if you look at the Confederate government, there's going to be a lot of Sephardic representatives there.

00:38:12.760 We had not really had Ashkenazi Jews up until this point.

00:38:15.960 They're going to be coming along with the Italians, with the Russians, with the Poles, Ukrainians, and whomever else. 0.86

00:38:22.380 And they are primarily going to be settling in the cities.

00:38:25.120 In fact, it is a rarity for this new wave of people to go to the frontier at all.

00:38:29.760 This 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.

00:38:37.940 They did not head to Wyoming or Oklahoma or Texas or the Texan panhandle to go settle new lands, primarily.

00:38:45.260 So, this is also going to give rise to people living in basically shanty towns. 0.87

00:38:51.400 It's going to become a main cause for progressive reformers later.

00:38:54.920 The cities were not clean.

00:38:56.020 They were slums.

00:38:57.140 And it had partly been due to this giant influx of peoples that were almost universally seen to be backwards.

00:39:04.740 This is another thing to note down.

00:39:07.100 It didn't matter which immigrant group you were from prior to this, just so long as you were. 0.66

00:39:13.660 The Italians, the Poles, and whomever else coming in were extremely foreign.

00:39:18.800 They were, once again, another Roman Catholic group, so you've lost the Protestants. 0.65

00:39:24.660 But they're also Slavic or they're Latin.

00:39:28.000 We haven't really had either of those groups in large numbers to this point.

00:39:31.600 So, this is a completely new language group coming in.

00:39:35.040 This is a completely new hereditary group coming in.

00:39:38.760 So, no one really saw these people as natural Americans, if you will.

00:39:46.060 Certainly not.

00:39:46.840 If 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. 0.93

00:39:56.060 So, how much of this also played into the Industrial Revolution, the industrialization of these areas and the workforce there?

00:40:04.840 Right.

00:40:05.300 So, this is where you get into the minutia of how do you define industrialization.

00:40:09.420 Because before these waves of people, you had had rapid industrialization.

00:40:13.280 This is past the point where Carnegie was on the rise.

00:40:16.720 He was basically sold out at this point to J.P. Morgan.

00:40:19.900 Rockefeller had already established his empire and was competing with oil companies from the old world.

00:40:27.420 So, we had had this, I think this was technically what I just described to be the second industrial revolution.

00:40:32.140 We've had steam power already.

00:40:33.400 Now, we were doing steel manufacturing and oil drilling and whatnot else.

00:40:39.240 And a lot of the inventors are going to come from these older groups.

00:40:42.500 Edison and Ford are certainly not Latin or Slavic in their heritage.

00:40:47.840 So, this is one way you can frame it, is that they weren't driving it necessarily, but they were the labor force.

00:40:55.980 This is something that was almost indisputable.

00:40:57.680 A 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,

00:41:08.320 these people were the labor force. 0.80

00:41:10.460 They were also characterized as, because of their strong ties to labor, as socialists.

00:41:14.260 There 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.

00:41:27.260 People that were going to cause violence, people that were just completely incompatible with the American way of life up until this point.

00:41:33.760 In fact, one such of these people are going to shoot President McKinley, quite famously.

00:41:41.120 I believe that would be a Serbian anarchist, if I'm not mistaken.

00:41:43.920 I think it's a Balkan anarchist of some sort.

00:41:46.140 I think his parents were, but he was born in the United States, if I remember correctly.

00:41:51.420 So, he's one generation removed from, but certainly has the politics of his former homeland.

00:41:59.760 Right, exactly.

00:42:02.100 So, in this sense, I guess that they called it.

00:42:05.500 I 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. 0.98

00:42:16.660 So, this is, I guess, a merited fear, if you will.

00:42:21.940 But 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.

00:42:32.300 Because Italians, Poles, Russians, and whomever else were not in these unions already.

00:42:38.400 It's against the union's interest to expand the labor force.

00:42:41.620 It's very basic economics as it relates to unions there.

00:42:44.920 So, that's one way that this plays out.

00:42:49.660 And then, I don't want to say this is a hard fact, necessarily, for all of them.

00:42:55.040 But you are even going to get inter-Catholic conflicts as well in the cities.

00:43:00.920 So, like German Catholics and Irish Catholics that have established themselves in these large port cities.

00:43:05.800 Suddenly, you're getting this large waves of other fellow Catholics that are not German or Irish or Swiss or Austrian or whatever else.

00:43:12.560 It's going to be a big issue.

00:43:16.340 This is why, if you go to these large cities, you're going to see that there's basically self-segregation.

00:43:20.620 This was the Polish parish.

00:43:22.580 This was the Irish parish or whatever else.

00:43:24.380 And part of that is practical, because not everyone was just multilingual.

00:43:27.920 It was very impractical for the average person to learn a different language.

00:43:31.340 So, 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.

00:43:42.560 So, just to make sure.

00:43:47.040 Oh, and this is something else as well.

00:43:49.960 The progressives, for all their rhetoric about trying to keep America from being influenced and irreversibly shifted by these waves of immigration, 1.00

00:43:59.160 they did not actually, the first wave of progressives, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, really didn't clamp down on the immigration.

00:44:05.780 It would be their successors, the return to normalcy in the 20s, that would actually accomplish this.

00:44:09.580 So, Italian immigration, for instance, would reach its height under the Progressive Era.

00:44:14.020 And it was primarily these Italian and Slavic immigrants that would be the help of these social reformer causes in the cities.

00:44:22.700 So, 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.

00:44:30.860 These new waves of immigrants were the main recipients.

00:44:33.160 And, 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.

00:44:46.460 Because 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.

00:44:56.740 The Red Scare is the only natural phenomenon. This is the one that people don't know about, necessarily.

00:45:02.160 It's happening whenever Progressive Administrations actually start to conduct raids on what they perceive to be communist or socialist meeting places.

00:45:11.220 So, I think I covered everything there.

00:45:15.600 Absolutely. So, the melting pot is having some difficulty, right?

00:45:19.240 Not quite working out, as some people might have envisioned.

00:45:23.000 So, you mentioned 1920s, we're going to see a shift.

00:45:26.540 What is the reaction here?

00:45:28.380 How do they implement this shift?

00:45:31.280 Right. And, just as a side note for anyone in the audience, the term melting pot is actually a very foreign word to the United States.

00:45:37.520 You can look up the play that it comes from that popularized the phrase.

00:45:41.300 It was not an American that it wrote it.

00:45:42.960 It was a British Jew. 0.69

00:45:44.120 So, long lineage of famous British Jews actually influencing Anglo politics.

00:45:50.040 Disraeli comes to mind, for instance, as a major conservative leader.

00:45:53.000 This is another instance of that.

00:45:54.900 So, it's a very foreign thing.

00:45:57.080 And, depending on what motivations you think that foreign groups have for the United States,

00:46:02.500 I guess you can make the judgment as to whether the melting pot is working or not.

00:46:06.180 But, for the 1920s, this is where you get a reaction against, basically, the entire progressive movement.

00:46:11.220 And, typical to most major reactions, you get – they accept part of the preceding philosophy.

00:46:22.360 So, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were not pre-progressive right-wingers necessarily, but they certainly were right-wingers that were not like the progressives.

00:46:31.660 So, 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.

00:46:44.980 They're going to introduce what is called the quota systems.

00:46:48.140 Harding is going to start in either 1920 or 1921.

00:46:51.100 I forget the specific year.

00:46:52.620 I think it's 21.

00:46:54.040 He's going to sign a bill into law.

00:46:55.420 And then Coolidge is going to continue it in 1924.

00:46:59.340 Both of these are basically the same.

00:47:01.820 It's just that the earlier bill signed by Harding is going to have a – they're going to look at the 1910 census.

00:47:09.340 And they're going to look at all these different European ethnic groups of immigrants.

00:47:13.500 And what they're going to do is they're going to determine how many arrivals did we have at this point in 1910.

00:47:21.220 And 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.

00:47:33.020 So, 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.

00:47:45.060 So, 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.

00:48:03.680 By 1924, that number is going to be taken from 3% of that group to 2%.

00:48:09.100 So, it's going to be even less than earlier.

00:48:11.420 And also, during the 1924 Act, if I remember correctly, all immigration from Asia is banned.

00:48:17.640 Just blanket.

00:48:18.960 So, 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.

00:48:27.880 But if you look at world history, China had just entered its civil war period.

00:48:32.200 And 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.

00:48:40.540 Where are they going to go to?

00:48:41.920 Probably the United States, if they can.

00:48:44.460 So, 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.

00:48:57.140 So, this was a – this was probably the most radical immigration policies that we will see yet and certainly have seen since.

00:49:08.320 And also, during this point in time as well, this is where you get more internal migration.

00:49:12.200 This is where it starts to come back to the forefront.

00:49:14.520 This is where you get the largest amount of blacks coming from the south to the north.

00:49:18.280 And that's going to cause strife and it's going to cause new settlements to be made.

00:49:24.300 There's a whole separate analysis of that to be had elsewhere.

00:49:29.680 And – oh, this is also where our first border control agency gets established.

00:49:33.840 So, the border control was not needed up until this point.

00:49:38.400 It was just kind of locally or devolved enforcement in its mechanism.

00:49:45.380 But now it was – it was certainly an agency that was the concern of all levels of government.

00:49:51.840 So, 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.

00:49:57.840 So, obviously, we don't have these controls, that something has shifted.

00:50:03.580 So, what was it that removed these controls?

00:50:06.960 Why aren't they still in place today?

00:50:08.620 Right.

00:50:09.200 So, as you – if you've been listening right now, this sounds like fantasy land because we've established that Muslims can't emigrate.

00:50:15.120 They can't become citizens. 0.71

00:50:16.920 We've only just barely established that blacks in the south could be citizens.

00:50:21.460 Certainly, no new Africans can emigrate.

00:50:23.500 No Asians can emigrate.

00:50:24.580 And all these Eastern European populations have limited to quotas of a tiny amount.

00:50:30.680 And 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.

00:50:39.400 So, it's even less southern Europeans and Slavs than previous.

00:50:44.520 So, on both of those counts, the percent admitted and the census used, we're basically not getting any of these groups.

00:50:54.580 But 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.

00:51:06.240 You do see Muslim groups getting citizenship and running for office and whatnot.

00:51:11.140 So, yes, something has changed quite drastically.

00:51:14.280 And what we're going to see is a couple of things.

00:51:16.340 Just 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.

00:51:25.160 I believe it's a Saudi Muslim man becomes the first Muslim citizen, I think would be the – I think was that court case.

00:51:33.440 I forget the name.

00:51:35.280 But 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.

00:51:45.280 If 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.

00:51:53.600 And this is no different for immigration. 0.59

00:51:55.960 So 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.

00:52:04.500 This goes right along with the desegregation of the schools and whatnot else right when the ball gets moving for the civil rights movement.

00:52:12.360 Now, 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.

00:52:33.760 That's its original purpose.

00:52:36.200 That's the stated purpose.

00:52:37.360 That'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.

00:52:50.080 And so that is the stated purpose of the Civil Rights Act.

00:52:53.280 But almost immediately we see that its implications don't actually solve that problem.

00:52:58.980 They're actually pointed at something that's entirely different.

00:53:02.080 And 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.

00:53:19.940 Not just immediate, because that implies this is sequential, as if this was a natural outpropping.

00:53:24.720 It happened at the same time.

00:53:26.020 The 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.

00:53:42.160 Now, national origin discrimination existed up until 1965 with the Hard Seller Act.

00:53:48.520 So 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.

00:54:05.460 Because we can see that such and such country has had this amount of subversive activity for communism or whatever else.

00:54:11.440 We don't want that here, so we're just going to ban immigration based off of X census from this country. 1.00

00:54:16.260 Basically doing the same thing.

00:54:17.420 So in 1965, you're going to get the Hard Seller Act.

00:54:22.300 Philip 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.

00:54:37.400 So you can see how immigration is going to influence your country's political trajectory over time.

00:54:43.600 It doesn't have to be within this generation.

00:54:45.480 It could be a few down the line.

00:54:47.760 This act is going to open up everywhere except the Western Hemisphere.

00:54:52.680 The countries south of the border are restricted to, I think, a couple hundred thousand yearly.

00:54:56.940 Or, no, it might have been just slightly over a hundred thousand yearly.

00:55:00.520 So, 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.

00:55:11.160 There's not going to be a quota put in on the amount of people we can accept.

00:55:14.260 The Western Hemisphere, however, has a ban, and this is largely due to union movements within the Democratic Party at the time.

00:55:23.460 What you might call labor Democrats were kind of on the ascendancy of the Johnson administration after Truman, Kennedy, and FDR.

00:55:31.120 The Dixiecrats really had not had any sort of real power in a long time, and they were the conservative faction.

00:55:37.380 And even they somewhat tacitly supported unions at times, if not outright.

00:55:41.040 Right. 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.

00:55:52.660 That was the rationale behind it.

00:55:55.360 And 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.

00:56:07.400 So, what's happened then?

00:56:09.100 Well, under the Reagan administration, if you could believe this, under the Reagan administration, that part of the act was repealed.

00:56:17.960 I 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.

00:56:28.680 And there were some conservative concessions to really crack down on the immigration altogether.

00:56:35.280 Of course, that was never really followed.

00:56:36.780 And then Reagan, once again, is famous for giving amnesties out every single time that someone asked him to.

00:56:44.320 This is also what's going to follow.

00:56:46.360 So, that's just going to be the main – the ethnic history, if you will.

00:56:51.560 And 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.

00:57:02.340 Someone sensible might say that you just don't want your country to be filled with people from, like, completely different language and religious families. 1.00

00:57:09.520 What not else that would make things difficult?

00:57:11.520 You 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. 1.00

00:57:22.820 That's always the case, and I think it's a rather merited fear.

00:57:26.760 You 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. 1.00

00:57:38.060 Yeah, 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. 1.00

00:57:50.300 That's been the case for a long time.

00:57:51.920 There'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.

00:58:06.180 So, there's nothing new there.

00:58:08.060 So, yeah, that's a great sweep.

00:58:09.560 I think that brings us up to pretty much our modern history of immigration.

00:58:13.180 Obviously, 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.

00:58:21.340 Forget 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.

00:58:32.340 Now we're at the point of, like, are borders even legal?

00:58:35.340 You can't have any fences or barbed wire because that's a human rights violation.

00:58:41.660 So, 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.

00:58:48.540 It'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.

00:59:01.400 So, 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.

00:59:14.660 But that's the – oh, sorry. Go ahead, Ron.

00:59:16.080 I 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.

00:59:25.100 And 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.

00:59:32.300 But one of it is what happened to assimilation, this policy of rigid assimilation that we once had.

00:59:37.740 I mean, the Midwest and the Great Plains no longer speaks German.

00:59:41.080 That used to be the second largest language in America up until the Progressive Era.

00:59:44.660 So, they got assimilated somehow, and it was by force, basically.

00:59:49.340 Social 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.

00:59:58.680 By the civil rights era, that's deemed discriminatory, and it's gone.

01:00:02.680 So, that might be part of it.

01:00:05.480 Certainly, 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.

01:00:14.280 But there is something to be said of this idea, especially if you're an Anglo.

01:00:19.460 The dissimilation probably was the best option if you are going to have it at all. 1.00

01:00:24.720 All right.

01:00:25.400 We're going to go ahead and pivot to the questions of the people.

01:00:27.940 But before we do, Ryan, anything coming up?

01:00:31.440 Something people should check out?

01:00:32.740 Your work?

01:00:33.280 What's going on?

01:00:33.780 I'm back on YouTube pretty regularly.

01:00:36.380 You can find my channel.

01:00:37.940 It's just my name, Ryan Turnipseed.

01:00:39.880 There is a weekly show on Saturday mornings, pretty early, especially if you're the further west you go.

01:00:46.540 It'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.

01:00:55.520 Well, for the past few weeks, and certainly this next week, we have been covering the neoconservatives and what they have wrote specifically.

01:01:02.280 So we are not just saying the neocons are bad and here's why we think so.

01:01:05.380 We are saying here's what the neocons say. 0.94

01:01:07.580 Look at how absolutely buffoonish it sounds.

01:01:10.080 Last 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. 0.74

01:01:19.580 You don't deserve welfare.

01:01:20.800 But the elderly should have unlimited benefits from Social Security. 0.93

01:01:24.080 He wrote this at the time he was 72.

01:01:27.020 That's some real boomer energy right there.

01:01:30.440 Well, I don't even think he's a boomer.

01:01:32.420 I think he personifies it, though, if you will.

01:01:35.480 He doesn't qualify as one, but that energy is carried through.

01:01:39.660 Yeah, so go find me over there.

01:01:42.320 And then my Twitter account, at Turnip Merchant, you can find me on Twitter.

01:01:46.780 There's always something to be talking about over there.

01:01:51.340 Yeah, Ryan is a man of meticulous receipts.

01:01:55.160 And so that's why he is always so valuable.

01:01:58.000 He stores, again, that power in his hair.

01:02:00.300 So do not ask him to cut it because we must retain it for the good of America.

01:02:06.080 All right.

01:02:06.700 So Charles Perkins says, if you're in the second Trump administration, what is your day one plan for immigration?

01:02:14.680 Do you have the legal infrastructure or will to do it?

01:02:24.120 Does Trump make a deal?

01:02:26.440 I'll go ahead and get your answer first, Ryan.

01:02:28.520 And what do you think?

01:02:29.640 I guess these are two pretty different questions.

01:02:32.160 But do you think we have what we need now to change the border policy?

01:02:36.900 And do you think Trump has the will to do it?

01:02:39.540 Do we have what we need?

01:02:41.700 Technically, no.

01:02:42.840 I 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.

01:02:50.320 But I do think, however, that we do have the ability to, if we do have the will, to actually turn things around.

01:03:00.240 There'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.

01:03:09.840 You 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.

01:03:18.660 Basic stuff, or they suspect I've broken a law, I guess you would say.

01:03:23.700 But this is a basic thing.

01:03:26.460 You know, we have the ability to send back people that should not be here. 0.98

01:03:30.720 It's just a question of will we.

01:03:32.060 And 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.

01:03:43.440 Like, I feel like the fact that we can openly have a conversation about repatriation or expatriation, I think something is developing positively here.

01:03:52.540 So 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.

01:04:03.160 I think that this is your next best hope is what's coming next.

01:04:08.480 I can only hope.

01:04:10.560 Yeah, it's amazing that illegal immigration is the only crime that has a two-second statute of limitations.

01:04:16.280 It's just immediately, oh, sorry, there's nothing we can do.

01:04:19.120 I mean, he's over the border now.

01:04:20.280 I mean, he already committed the murder.

01:04:22.940 It's two seconds later.

01:04:23.720 There's nothing we can do.

01:04:24.960 There's no action that can be taken.

01:04:27.780 It's no solution to that problem.

01:04:29.860 Yeah, that is an amazing thing.

01:04:31.700 I think you're right.

01:04:32.540 I think that there is a growing understanding, even on the left, that things are out of control with this.

01:04:39.300 They're not going to stop themselves, obviously.

01:04:41.600 It's a large part of their plan to kind of make sure democracy is in their favor and perpetuity.

01:04:46.960 However, I think there is a growing desire to see real action taken on this.

01:04:52.580 Again, I think the key thing is going to be pressure.

01:04:56.340 Trump being there could matter.

01:04:58.660 Again, when he was president, you did see more enforcement.

01:05:02.500 You did see numbers down.

01:05:04.260 Just people knowing.

01:05:05.420 Again, I said this before in a previous episode, but just knowing.

01:05:09.920 People coming across the border is actually a high-risk activity for them.

01:05:14.300 They have to pay a lot of money, obviously.

01:05:16.220 A lot of times they're paying their life savings.

01:05:18.160 They're putting themselves in very dangerous situations, especially women and children are often abused or human trafficking occurs because of this.

01:05:26.920 They're putting themselves at great risk entering the United States.

01:05:30.640 The incentive to do this is once they get across the border, there's just no way they're getting sent back.

01:05:35.040 There's no way they're getting turned away.

01:05:36.860 Well, if you remove that guarantee, you automatically drop.

01:05:40.180 The calculus just shifts immediately.

01:05:43.680 Oh, I had a 100% chance basically of getting into the Biden administration.

01:05:46.960 I have a way lower chance under the Trump administration.

01:05:49.780 Am I really going to put myself through all this?

01:05:52.560 Am I really going to gamble my entire life savings?

01:05:54.780 Am I really going to put my child in this dangerous situation?

01:05:57.880 All of that calculus changes.

01:05:59.800 But obviously, I think that you need a big change that can only come again if the states are willing to take action.

01:06:07.020 That's why Greg Abbott's actions matter so much, and the fallout from that is going to be huge.

01:06:11.780 Right.

01:06:11.980 And they can't become complacent if their guy wins.

01:06:14.820 They can't start thinking that just because the election went their way that they don't have to enforce their own border now.

01:06:20.180 It's clear this needs to be done in coalition with the feds.

01:06:23.300 Right.

01:06:23.640 This 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.

01:06:33.640 Right, and just, this is sort of secondary, but also the super chat asks, you know, what else would happen?

01:06:41.020 Obviously, we're not taking the deal.

01:06:42.940 But what's the day one plan?

01:06:44.980 The other thing might be in the education system.

01:06:46.860 There 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.

01:06:55.180 It doesn't bear out.

01:06:56.580 Even then, if you want to take this in a left-wing direction, it doesn't even work there either.

01:07:03.380 Every 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.

01:07:15.500 So, I mean, they too get to share in this version of history where immigration and settling is evil. 1.00

01:07:23.000 So, 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. 0.88

01:07:34.220 There needs to be an actual, I guess you would say, academic treatment of the subject if you want it to be neutral.

01:07:39.300 Well, 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.

01:07:46.400 Actually, that's very clearly not the case when they have chosen to be more forceful on this.

01:07:52.000 Hispanics who are citizens have actually agreed with them for the most part.

01:07:56.440 You see guys like Trump making gains in that community.

01:07:58.740 You see governors like DeSantis making vast gains in that community.

01:08:02.720 And they're doing it by talking about the need for borders and immigration control.

01:08:08.100 So, the idea that it's good to pander by saying, oh, well, no, this is always an unmitigated good.

01:08:14.600 No, many of the people of the very group you're trying to pander to don't agree with that.

01:08:18.160 They actually want to see law and order.

01:08:20.140 They want to see border control.

01:08:21.400 They want to see the United States stay in the United States.

01:08:24.000 And they want to see that happen by making sure that large amount of people are entering the United States illegally.

01:08:30.160 So, a lot that the GOP needs to shift.

01:08:33.300 All right, guys.

01:08:33.680 Well, make sure that you're checking out Ryan's work.

01:08:36.040 Make sure you're checking out his Twitter and his YouTube channel.

01:08:39.400 And, of course, if this is your first time coming by my channel, please make sure that you go ahead and subscribe.

01:08:45.260 And, of course, also make sure that you hit the notifications so you know when these streams go live.

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01:09:00.720 Thanks for watching, guys.

01:09:01.580 And, as always, I'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - January 31, 2024

The Real History of American Immigration ｜ Guest： Ryan Turnipseed ｜ 1⧸31⧸24

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