The Dillingham Commission Lives......
Trump's "shithole" remarks have just laid out in the open the backwards and racist thinking of he and his administration. This is nothing new in this country-just something we thought we had put behind us. At the turn of the 20th Century, the Dillingham Commission was created to study the characteristics of immigrants to the U.S. It had ties to the Eugenics movement that eventually resulted in the Nazi concepts of a "master race".
The commission's report contained a "directory" of characteristics of different countries that reads like a bad ethnic joke...drunken Slavs, wealthy Jews, excitable Italians-except for Scandanavians, who were the preferred 'race' of immigrants. It's findings were the basis of the Johnson-Reed Act that severely limited immigration from certain countries. The Johnson-Reed Act, drastically limited immigration and made permanent restrictions designed to keep out Southern and Eastern Europeans, particularly Italians and Jews, Africans, and Middle Easterners and barred Asian immigration entirely.
The directory expounded undesirable qualities of southern and eastern Europeans. Slavs possessed a fanaticism "in religion, carelessness as to the business virtues of punctuality and often honesty, [and were prone to] periods of besotted drunkenness [and] unexpected cruelty." The classification of Jews emphasized facial characteristics to denote race, a propensity to live in cities, non-Aryan ancestry, and, incorporating the Shylock stereotype, "millions in wealth." Sharp divisions divided southern and northern Italians. Southern Italians, depicted as illiterate, poverty stricken and dependent on charity, embodied "excitable, impulsive, highly imaginative, impracticable [qualities and had] little adaptability to highly organized society" while northerners were "patient, practical and ... capable of great progress in political and social organizations." Nevertheless, Catholicism separated all Italians from Protestant America. In contrast, Scandinavians "the purest type"--99 percent Protestant with the lowest rate of illiteracy--made "ideal farmers and ... Americanize more rapidly than other peoples." Dillingham, who had selected Swedes over other nationalities to repopulate abandoned hill-town farms in Vermont as governor of the state from 1888 to 1890, declared that "the proportion of Scandinavian immigrants, who make admirable citizens, is lower than formerly."
The racist policies of Johnson-Reed were undone in 1965 by Congress and President Johnson in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Not surprisingly Jeff Sessions is a big supporter of the Johnson-Reed Act. He and Trump live in a world populated by cartoonish stereotypes of different ethnic groups. The mustachioed Italian serving up spaghetti with a thick accent, the cop with the Irish brogue, the Jews, the Asians, and yes the Haitians with Aids, the Africans in their huts and the laudable Norwegians. Nobody is just a human being. This is their world view-if you can call such a myopic vision a "world view".
These tendencies are always lurking in our society. Sometimes they go dormant but hide like a virus waiting to re-emerge and make us sick again. They just needed exposure to a foul substance like Trump and his entourage to bring about the active infection again.
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