Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Hey, Tom Friedman: Openness to foreigners is one of the "core elements of American identity"?

Oh yeah, it sure is:



...As a result of pressure from western states and nativist organizations, the federal government enacted laws that specifically targeted Asian immigrants, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and the "Gentlemen's Agreement" with Japan in 1907.

... The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 limited immigration to three percent of the number of immigrants of any particular country that had been living in the United States in 1910, which only partially stemmed the flow. Three years later, Congress passed a more stringent law, the Immigration Act of 1924, by an overwhelming majority. This law restricted new arrivals to just two percent of foreign-born residents according to the Census of 1890, when the number of "new" immigrants was relatively small. As a result, immigration law all but eliminated the flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and it effectively excluded all immigration from most of Asia until World War Two....


I won't even get into "No Irish Need Apply" in the 19th century or internment camps in the mid-20th. We seem to be more broad-minded now, but jeez, Tom, that's not in our national "DNA"....

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