Racist anti-immigrant hysteria is aimed at blinding voters to reality

“The bomb outrage in New York emphasizes the extent to which the alien scum from the cesspools of the Old World has polluted the clear spring of American democracy.

- Marc H. Morial

While hundreds of detectives scour the haunts of the anarchist and the terrorist in the slums and outlandish foreign quarters of American Babels, the doors of Ellis Island stand open to fresh hordes of warped and half-crazed deserters from Europe.” – The Washington Post editorial board, Sept. 20, 1920

Replace the bombing in New York with the death of Laken Riley… “cesspools of the Old World” with “sh**hole countries” … “polluted the clear spring” with “poisoning the blood” and Ellis Island with the southwest border, and the 1920 editorial could be a 2024 presidential campaign speech.

In 1920, the targets of anti-immigration hatred were European, not Central and South American, but were no less targets of the racial and religious bigotry of the era. The newcomers from Italy, Greece, and Eastern Europe were considered inferior--dirtier, less intelligent, more criminally inclined--than Americans of northern European and Anglo-Saxon descent. The current GOP presidential nominee’s own father, the son of a German immigrant, was arrested at an anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan march in 1927.

The racist stereotypes at the heart of anti-immigrant hatred are no more true today than they were a century ago, but bigots and extremists still cling to them just as tightly.