Same Old Song

Anoted political figure unleashes a blistering attack against new immigrants who "swarm" into our neighborhoods without regard for our laws, customs and shared values. Why, he asks, should we suffer outsiders who prefer ethnic enclaves where they "establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?" The painful truth, he adds, is that these newcomers are so culturally different from the rest of us that they will never assimilate like past immigrants, posing a grave threat to the society we cherish.

The latest rant on illegal Mexican immigration by Pat Buchanan or Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo? No--the political provocateur was Benjamin Franklin, and his unforgiving pen was aimed at Germans in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Franklin was convinced that his home had become "a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them." Franklin later mellowed on the subject, recognizing the economic benefits of immigration, but we can hear echoes of his original animus toward immigrants in every age of the American experience.

Over the course of our history, xenophobic opinion has episodically crystallized into formidable nativist movements. Fueled by the economic stresses of working-class Americans, ethnic and racial animosities, security jitters and compelling demagogic leadership, earlier nativist movements underscore the Shakespearean insight that "what's past is prologue."

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