Posted On: Friday - October 4th 2019 7:42PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity History
As Peak Stupidity's 1200th post here, this may as well be on our most written about brand of stupidity, the Immigration Stupidity. It's just that this type is an existential form of stupidity for America, meaning, if it keeps up, none of the rest will matter. There will be no America and therefore no point in worrying about any of the other stupidity. I just won't care.
Not a bad picture from when all you had was a Nokia brick, right?
Anyway, herein we will look again at the rhyming of history, in this case with the history of cessation of mass immigration (got a NICE rhyme to it). It's the rhyming of history, NOT the repeating of history, we have, per some smart fellow. That means that it won't necessarily end the same way. I finally found some VDare writing I'd been looking for, and it was hard to find, being a VDare reader's letter, rather than a post by one of the great writers. A guy named Delmar Jackson (if he's bright enough to write there, probably not his real name), wrote this short letter* about the impetus for the almost complete curtailment of immigration to America in the early 1920's.**
There really are large parallels between the mass immigration to America in the earlier period, the 1880's to early 1920's and that of today. There are differences too, one being that the people involved in the mass immigration of that previous day, though being from different lands from the traditional British Isles and partially Western Europe of the settler, were not THAT different, as is the case today. Assimilation of these large numbers took a long time, even so. Back to the parallels, there were large numbers that brought the population up to ~ 15% foreign-born at the peak. The period of time, 45 to 50 years, WOULD BE roughly similar to the current era had we quit in 2010 or 2015. The common people had had about enough! It's very similar, except for the exotic mixture of people and the much greater lawlessness and stupidity involved in the current version.
100 years ago, Misters Jackson and Fulford maintain, the elites of this nation were feeling some of the heat from that period's out-of-control immigration. The large numbers people from southern Italy gave us the mob, of which we have still not gotten rid of, but it was large numbers from eastern Europe that gave us the Communists and the Anarchists. Though it was the Commies that were much more a problem for us in the long run, a century back the Anarchists were doing things like assassination of Presidents, as with the shooting of President McKinley by one Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo, New York on September 6th of the 1st year of the 20th century. Mr. Czolgosz was not an immigrant himself, having been born in Michigan of Polish immigrant parents. His parents were not at all down with the anarchy thing, as serious Roman Catholics, but just as with today, when you bring in large groups with strange new beliefs, new kinds of trouble may bubble up that nobody's had to worry about before.
The fear of these Anarchists was already felt by the time of the McKinley assassination, but violence in the name of their cause continued through serious bombings of Wall Street.
The smoke hadn't even cleared yet at the time of this shot.
This was September of 1920 and 30 people were killed and more injured.
Once the elites felt the heat, people in Washington were going to do something about the problem. The 1924 immigration bill signed by Peak Stupidity's favorite, Calvin Coolidge was damn close to a complete moratorium on immigration. The numbers were reduced by an order of magnitude, giving the country > 40 years to solidify.
Mr. Peter Brimelow, the erudite founder and leader of VDare, wrote his book Alien Nation (great title, eh?!) about immigration in the early 1990's. This was also a time, as the VDare writer have mentioned that there was an "interglacial" period of softening of the PC of the media and elites that had before (and has since) worked to punish the speaking and writing about this important matter. So, if Mr. Brimelow's (and lots of others', of course) call for an immigration moratorium at that time had been heeded, < 40 years after the horrific 1965 immigration act, this threat to our nation may have been neutralized. Even had that happened, we'd need more than the previous century's 40 years for solidification.
The problem we have now is, as Tucker Carlson got partially correct in his great book Ship of Fools (review continued in Part 2 and Part 3), the American elites of today don't have any inclination to help the commoners of their country. The Gate's, Zuckerbergs, Gore's, etc, can live so extremely aloof from the people, that I think they just don't get it... "it" being how lives are being lived outside their gated compounds and private islands.
A century ago, a Rockefeller or JP Morgan may have a number of houses out on hundreds of acres to stay away, but he still had to ride that carriage or motorcar into town or the city and deal with people once in a while. It took a week-long ocean voyage to get out of America to somewhere else civilized and there were still regular people on the ship. These current-era elites can get driven to a secure place on the ramp of an airport, get on their Gulfstream or Challenger, and head off way above the heads of the hoi polloi to a waiting bulletproof car across the country or another continent.
A 2nd factor in neutralizing the late 19th/early 20th century immigration threat was that the US Gov't was but a small fraction of its current size, even percentage wise (from budget spending of ~ 1/100 of the GDP to a ratio of 1/4 to 1/3!). People had much more of a say in the matter. This is the point which caused me to write about Mr. Carlson being only partially correct. The elites of a century ago had less power to control the government, as there was only so much it could do back then. On the immigration issue sooner or later, the American people could have gotten their congresscritters to get the bills passed as per Mr. Fulford's history (in the link above).
In addition, States' rights really meant something. Were the illegal immigration going on a century ago, and the Feral Gov't not doing their job, as today, for its part, Texas could have said "we're going to take care of it", and that would have been that. None of that State power is a factor today.
Anyway, so as not to negate the original thesis any more than that, yes, when the elites feel the heat, things will change. There have got to be ways to make them feel the heat.***
* I like the way VDare labels the guy's letter too: "A Reader Points Out That The Last Immigration Pause Didn't Come Until Elites Felt The Heat Themselves"
** For a lot more history, one can read an 18 year-old article by James Fulford in which he had expounded on this topic of the history of the immigration moratorium. See The (First) Thirty Years War For Immigration Reform
*** No, not involving anarchists and their methods.
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