My immigrant ancestors were despised by America

And within three generations became American nativists who despised the next wave

What awaits the newcomer in 2024

Prepare yourself to be heartbroken by what’s coming for those seeking a new life here during an election cycle in which they will be vilified and dehumanized.

In the 18th century when the first waves of famine driven Irish came here, my immigrant ancestors were depicted in newspaper cartoons as vermin, as baboons and chimps, drunken thugs, lazy ignorant disease-carrying addle-brained slack-jawed apes.

And criminals. And superstitious. The Irish were statue-worshipping Catholics, in league with the devil, the Pope himself. Worse, the Irish were a sly, conniving, thieving, sneaky un-trustworthy race of parasites come to this great land to spread their vile contagion of seditious Papist anti-American ways. The Irish, if allowed to breed here, would replace the Protestant citizenry and destroy America.

As depicted below I am not just a racial inferior but a species entirely apart, a subhuman descendant of the monkey, a creature destined by DNA to be “put down” by the racially superior noble British leonine overlord. Such beliefs gave the British the moral justification to subjugate, colonize, starve, brutalize, and exploit the Irish as surely as white American southerners found Biblical justification for subjugating and enslaving Africans.

Ethnic stereotypes are used to marginalize groups as a “strange alien people” apart from “us”. Whatever can be used to separate “us” from “them” is exploited as a handy device, including dietary habits. American cartoonists, my ink slinging brethren, depicted my forebears as alcohol swilling pickled cabbage eaters as in the cartoon below. And as depicted below, the Irish were all treasonous subhumans who merited dunce caps atop their thick simian skulls.

The cartoon below titled “The Great Fear of the Period”, sums up the fear generated every election season by American politicians seeking scapegoats to frighten the voters into showing up at the polls. What better motivating mission to excite the voter than a crusade to save “our nation from being swallowed by foreigners”, by building a fruitless wall or banning Muslims or conducting mass deportations or separating children from their families and caging them or threatening to build concentration camps? Lacking votes, the immigrant, being no politician’s constituent, whether legally seeking asylum or crossing our borders illegally politically painless to stereotype, bully and disparage. In the cartoon below the great fear back then was that the Asian or Irish foreigner would devour our Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation.

The marginalization and exploitation that greeted my Irish forebears who arrived here legally through Ellis Island was a seedbed of desperate chronic poverty, offering crime and corruption as the only ladder rung up for the ambitious. The vicious prejudice, poverty and brutal gang warfare depicted in Scorsese’s film “Gangs of New York” was not an exaggeration of what greeted my kin in the neighborhood of Five Points on Manhattan in the 1860s.

Still from the Scorsese film “Gangs of New York” depicting a gang of Protestant nativists gathering to set upon a gang of Irish Catholics in the Five Points area of New York City in the 1860s.

Those who are shocked by the violence and chaos along both sides of the Mexican border are ignorant of the rhyming nature of history and the predictable behavior of our species. The stereotype of my immigrant forefathers as lowly creatures with a natural penchant for criminal behavior is neatly captured in the cartoon below.

The Irish, like today’s Latino or Asian newcomers were stereotyped and dehumanized as either lazy simians who refused to assimilate or industrious criminal masterminds. Sound familiar? It should. It reflects the bigot’s lack of originality or imagination.

Within three generations the Irish newcomer forgot his or her struggles and assimilated so well into American life that they soon adopted the nativist positions themselves turning on the next influx of newcomers, deriding and dehumanizing them as they once were vilified. The teeming masses, yearning to be free, eventually yearn to claim they were here first and that Lady Liberty should extinguish her lamp and slam shut her golden door.

We Americans always salt our scapegoating bigotry with fanciful conspiracy theories. In the case of the Irish it was the trope of a sinister Catholic conspiracy to drive out the Protestants and conquer the United States. Nearly a century later the myth remained so tenacious that as late as 1960 there were questions about Presidential candidate John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s loyalty to America. Would he be a slave to his Pope in Rome? Such nonsense, capitalizing on our fear of the “other” can still grip the dull-witted masses, even in today. Who can forget when a nativist huckster named Trump demanded our first Black President offer proof he was born in America and not in Kenya. And millions of yahoos believed the fable of the African born President to be true.

Which brings us to the present moment when immigration’s complex abiding problems remain unaddressed by a paralyzed craven Congress. Ever since Ted Kennedy and John McCain cobbled together a meaningful Immigration reform bill in the last century America’s political class has been rejecting reasonable solutions foe one simple reason. In election after election, you, the American voter, rewards bullies. In 2024 the predictable racist scapegoating will flower and immigrants will continue to die in our deserts because exacerbating the chaos serves the ends of the cynical nativists who will run on the age-old American campaign theme of promising to rescue our great nation from the newcomer. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and the American politician will use them to scare the hell out of you.

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