My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-…? grandfather on my mother's side immigrated to Massachusetts in 1621 from Suffolk, England. He helped found Ipswich, MA, before the United States existed. His descendants served in the American Revolution—I could join the DAR if I wanted to— and later descendants served in the Union Army during the Civil War.
My father's immigrant ancestors were Huguenots who immigrated to the New York area in the 1720s to escape persecution as Protestants in Catholic France. Some of them probably served in the American Revolution and Civil War, too. So I'm about as WASPy as they come.
And yet, I'm a descendant of immigrants. Any white American is here because of immigration, whether their ancestors came over on the Mayflower or in one of the later waves of peoples from Europe escaping famine, poverty, or religious and/or political persecution. I don't care how long your clan has been here, you are still the offspring of immigrants. And your immigrant forebears may well have experienced discrimination, even bigoted violence, when they first arrived.
The President, who has just signed an executive order stopping refugees and Muslims from crossing our border, is himself descended from much more recent immigrants than I am. His father's family arrived from Germany in 1885; his mother came from Scotland in 1930 and didn't become a U.S. citizen until 1942, just four years before Donald was born.
When the first of the Trump clan, Friederich, immigrated to the U.S. in 1885, Germans were considered “aliens” who should be denied their rights.
Nativist politicians called for restricting the rights of aliens (who live and work legally in the country but are not citizens) and foreign-born citizens, especially with respect to voting and holding political office. … German Americans probably became the targets of the nativists because of their large numbers. With a different language, customs, and in some cases, a different set of religious or political beliefs, Germans were viewed by some as foreign and therefore dangerous. Many German Americans were Catholics, another target of the Know-Nothings [party], who claimed that the pope was conspiring to get political control in the United States. Some Americans, too, were beginning to feel the intense competition from German American tradesmen and merchants. ("German Immigration," U.S. History in Context)Sound familiar? The President and his supporters need a serious history lesson. In the words of Marcus Tulius Cicero (106-43 BCE):
Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
