You’re probably told in junior high school that America’s national motto is e pluribus unum: out of many one. Well you were told wrong. Where the immigration debate is concerned, the real motto is there goes the neighborhood. You see dating back to the first immigrants — the Germans who came to what would later become the American colonies in the late 1600s — the American tradition has been for those who are already here to view those who have just arrived as dirty, defective and dangerous. The newcomers are always seen as inferior. As less than and not as good as the native born in every way. 

Says who? Why the natives, of course, try to keep up. By the way, the first significant batch of German immigrants arrived in 1683, to be precise. That was the year that 13 families of German Mennonites seeking religious freedom arrived in Pennsylvania and founded Germantown just six miles north of Philadelphia. They were not exactly greeted with parades and cotton candy. In fact, by the mid 1700s, the Germans chief tormentor would be revealed. It was none other than inventor, newspaper publisher and founding father Benjamin Franklin. 

Boston born by an English man heart, Franklin worried publicly that Pennsylvania would become, quote, a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion. You see, Franklin’s bigotry toward the Germans hinged on skin color. What the Englishman considered a swarthy complexion. Of course, that’s racism straight up. It doesn’t matter that there’s no German race per se. We know exactly what Franklin was and what he turned out to be was not unique in the story of US immigration policy.

Anti-immigrant bigotry in America was just getting started. In 1896, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a blueblood Democrat from Massachusetts, had beef with Irish immigrants coming into Boston. He accused them of changing the quote, mental and moral qualities which make what we call our race, and diminishing quote the quality of our race and citizenship.

In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson Reed Act, which is also known as the Immigration Act of 1924, crafted by Representative Albert Johnson, a Republican from Washington State, and Senator David Reed, a Republican from Pennsylvania. The law limited the number of immigrants from Southern Europe. Read: Italy and Eastern Europe. Read: Russia. It also excluded outright Asians from entering the United States. Not surprisingly, the law was very popular with the Klu Klux Klan and nativist groups. 

Today, the anti immigrant bigotry, exemplified by Franklin and Cabot Lodge and Johnson and Reed lives on in the body of former President Donald Trump. In a recent interview, with the National pulse a right leaning website, Trump said that recent waves of immigrants are, quote, poisoning the blood of our country. Some critics said Trump’s remarks which sounded a lot like the race baiting rhetoric, he used to win the White House in 2016 carry the stench of white supremacy and echoed back to Adolf Hitler. 

They included Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the anti Defamation League, who called Mr. Trump’s comments racist and xenophobic, and said, quote, this kind of toxic rhetoric should have no place in our politics period. Unfortunately, that’s not right. Here in the United States, Trump’s racist take on immigrants does have a place in our politics, in our history in our society. It’s been there all along. Since before this region was even a country. It’s never going away. It’s baked into the DNA of this place. 

In a way all this is refreshing. I’ve spent three decades writing about immigration and trying to get my fellow Americans to see the racism in the current immigration debate. No such luck. They refuse to acknowledge the obvious, instead preferring to talk about border security, public health, crime along the border and in the interior, anything but racism. I was just about to go out and try once more to make the case. Then what do you know Trump and his big mouth made the case for me