 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. We're back. We're live with Think Tech. And today we're going to do, I guess it's Community Matters, and we're going to talk about immigration because it's appropriate to examine the history of immigration when we talk about all these new initiatives and restrictions and bans and what have you to understand where this country has been on immigration. And for this purpose, we have John David Ann, and he's professor of history at Hawaii Pacific University. And while he knows so much about these kinds of things, you have to look at everything through your term, the lens of history, John. Exactly, exactly, Jay. Good to be here. Good to have you. So let's talk about the history of immigration in this country. It didn't take too long. For a melting pot, back in the early 19th century, it didn't take too long before people started to get exclusive again. That's true. But first of all, it's never been quite a melting pot. That's a common term. But historians who have studied this go, actually, that didn't happen at all. There really was very little melting, actually. That's going to be the final exam. Write that down. Some historians or some pundits have used the term salad bowl, where the people didn't really mix together. It doesn't work that well either. The thing is, especially in the late 19th, early 20th century, when immigrants came to the United States, they carried their culture and their life ways with them. They didn't really—I mean, largely they became patriotic Americans. But culturally, they kept their customs. They kept their ways of doing things, their connection to their local communities and their institutions. For instance, the Catholic Church for South European immigrants was terribly important, and it was something they brought with them from the old world. And so it's never been melting. Oh, it's true. I grew up in Queens, New York. My block was Jewish Block. The next block was the Irish Block. The one down from there was the Italian Block. And as a little kid, you didn't go on the other block, you stayed on your block. Yeah, yeah. This is a modern city, right? Wow. That's amazing. But it was not really a melting pot. It was block by block. Right, right, right. And of course, there have been tensions, right? And that's its own story. The tensions between older immigrants and newer immigrants, between Western European immigrants, kind of the Anglo-Saxon immigrants, and immigrants considered to be lesser than. There was this strong ethnocentrism in the United States at the turn of the century when you had all kinds of Italian and southern and Eastern European immigrants coming in. And Americans, Anglo-Saxons, looked at them and thought, these people, they're clearly not, they're clearly inferior to us. Unwashed masses. Yes, exactly. And so there's labor competition, and not between Anglo-Saxons and Italians, between Italians and Irish and African-Americans. And mobility was hard. Mobility was very hard. That stuck in the, say, the Lower East Side ghetto in Manhattan. It was hard to break out of that. Yeah, there was, I mean, there was, you know, those low-wage jobs, the unskilled jobs were very poor pay. You probably lived in it, if you lived in the New York City area, you probably lived in a tenement, which was essentially a structure that was built on the back of one of these nice brick buildings. And it had maybe one toilet for three or four floors. You had, you know, no running water. And you know... It was a firetrap. Yeah, I mean, it was heated with, you know, these old stoves that, you know, could blow up and, you know, you'd have big fires. So yeah, it was a pretty terrible existence for some of these immigrants. So yeah, I mean, the history of American immigration is very interesting, especially when you consider it in the current situation. So what we can do is we can see the current immigration issue, which is really kind of anti-immigration because of Donald Trump and the Trump administration's focus on immigration as a bad thing, which is, you know, it's like actually the last half of the 20th century, at least since 1965, immigration was thought to be a good thing that enhanced the United States. I wanted to ask you about that. So you had the exclusion acts of the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Right, right. But Karen Walters in there in the 1920s. We'll come back and we'll talk about that history, but yeah. But I thought, I thought at some point the country hit a kind of positive note. Yes, it's true. Maybe it was that reference you made in the 1960s. In 1965, Congress passed the Heart Seller Immigration Act, which really opened up immigration. And it was still based upon skill, but it was primarily based upon families. If you had a family member in the country, then relatives could come fairly easily. And this was in part because the immigration in the time period before that was really focused on these old line Anglo-Saxon countries, Great Britain, Germany, Lesceau from France, and so with quotas. Exactly. And so these the second generation immigrants from Greece, from Italy, from Eastern Europe, they were bitter about this. They didn't like this because they couldn't bring their family, their extended family. The quota for those countries was way low. Oh, you could never get somebody from Greece in the country. So they appealed to the Kennedy administration. And so in some ways, you can see it as a part of the civil rights movement, enhancing freedom, enhancing the ability to come to this country. So in 1965, things opened up. And since that time, you've had immigration policy that's been quite open. It's been attacked by right-wingers for quite some time. They've not liked this. Now they finally have a president who thinks like them, who thinks, actually, we should close this down. We should cut immigration in half. We should actually go away from family-centered immigration to the skills-based immigration. And that's really all we need. And we should really limit the number of immigrants. So you've got this. Currently, you've got what is a president who is playing on anti-immigrant sentiment. Actually, that was a big part of the reason why he won the election. How close is that to old-fashioned bigotry? So it is. But let's look back at the history of this, and so the history of immigration and then anti-immigrant. It's actually, it's hand-in-hand. You have a big immigration, and then you have an upsurge in anti-immigrant feeling. It's a sign curve with reaction. It's unbelievable. So it's very consistent in history. So the first big immigration we have is in the 1830s and especially in the 1840s, then, after the potato famine in Great Britain and in Ireland, especially then, there's a big immigration of Irish to the United States in the 1840s, millions. And sure enough, by the 1850s, old-line Americans have organized. They create a secret society called the Know-Nothings. Oh, yeah. Yes. And they create a political party called the Native American Party. Yes, and it has nothing to do with those Native Americans. You know what just popped up in the gangs of New York? Exactly. Exactly. It was a wonderful movie. Well, it's a very violent movie. And it's an exaggeration of what's going on. But there are, in fact, in New York City, there are, in fact, Irish and nativist gangs fighting it out on the streets of New York, and in where Wall Street is, you know, it's the southern reaches of Manhattan. And what you're seeing right now is actually a flag, the flag, of the Native American Party, which ran in every state in the Union in the early 1850s. That's correct. And they won elections in Massachusetts and in Maine. They did pretty well in some parts of the South and the Midwest. For a short period of time, the Know-Nothings, and again, this is the Native American Party, the Know-Nothings were very successful. And they captivated former Whigs. They were actually, believe it or not, somewhat anti-slavery and nativist. How do you like that? You know, it's very strange. Anybody strange was on their bad list. Yes, but they were anti-slavery as well. So they were against enslavement. Maybe they're saying they didn't like the slaves. Well, yeah, I mean, I think part of it is that you're in the 1850s, the question is, are you going to allow slavery into the new territories, into new territories gained during the Mexican War? Right. And so those who are opposed to this, they're not necessarily abolitionists. They don't really like African Americans. They don't want to actually. Not in my backyard. Exactly. They don't want African Americans and these slaves in these new territories. Yeah, so that's true. That's worse, actually. It lines up, that's a good point. It does line up with the anti-immigrant feeling. But so that party is very strong for a few years. And then in the mid-1850s, then Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party emerge. And they actually pull a lot of voters away from the Know-Nothings because they settle on a moderate anti-slavery platform. But the anti-slavery can go several different ways. It can go abolitionist anti-slavery. It can go moderate anti-slavery. Really don't like slavery in the South, but definitely don't want it to spread. Not going to touch slavery in the South, but just don't want it to spread to the new areas because it degrades free labor. It's bad for the economy. It's a competition argument. Yeah, it's counter to American values of industry and thrift and productivity. And then you have the right-wing part of the anti-slavery movement. And those guys, they just don't like African-Americans. They don't want African-American slaves to be in their backyard. So the Republican Party has a big tent, and they cover all of those anti-slavery folks. So interesting that the moderate ones you mentioned, if that had been the rule, if they had prevailed somehow, that might have avoided the Civil War. They did prevail. Abraham Lincoln was right there in the center of this anti-slavery Republican Party. He was there in the middle. He said, you know, it's against American values. We'll accept it in the South. We're not going to change it in the South, but we don't want it to spread. Oh, how interesting. And he would not have started the Civil War himself. They started it. Exactly, exactly. He claimed again and again after his election that he was not going to touch slavery in the South, but Southerners didn't believe him. They believed that he was a John Brown in secret. He was a secret abolitionist, and he was going to destroy slavery. But interesting, Lincoln hated the know-nothings. Lincoln made a statement to the effect, this is a paraphrase, that if we're going to have a political party that excludes people from different origins, we may as well have our totalitarianism and authoritarianism without any cover of innocence and move to Imperial Russia, which was a totalitarian authoritarian place where, you know, people- You knew exactly what you were getting there. Exactly. He didn't want the cover of nice words about equality and freedom and the rest of it. So Lincoln was actually very sensitive to the immigration issue, and he was in favor of it. He believed that it brought industry and productivity to the country. So yeah, that's the first major reaction to this big influx of immigrants in the 1830s and the 1840s. Yeah, but you say big influx in the 1830s and 40s and gangs in New York and all that. Right. And by the time we got to 1880 and 1890, that big influx looked really small. Exactly. Because now it was huge. Exactly, exactly so. And right after this break, John, we're going to examine how huge it was and why the reaction was different. Okay. That's John Davidan. He's a history professor at HPU and we're talking about immigration in this country because we need to know about the history of it to understand or at least try to understand what's going on now. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Aloha, I'm Marsha Joyner, inviting you to navigate the journey. Spend the time with us as we look through and discover all of the ins and outs of this journey through life. We're on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. And I would love to have you with us. Come navigate the journey. Aloha. Guys, don't forget to check me out right here. The Prince of Investing, I'm your host, Prince Dykes. Each and every Tuesdays at 11 a.m. Hawaii time. I'm going to be right here. Stop by here from some of the best investment minds across the globe. And real estate, finances, stocks, hedge funds, managers, all that great stuff. Thank you. Hey, we're back, we're live with John David Ann, history professor at HPU, talking about immigration in America. Wow, here on Community Matters. So in the 1880s, and I'm guessing you'll have to correct me, 1885, 1890, all that 20-year period. The Brown Decades, as Lewis Mumford called it, right? Yeah. Things were Victorian in many ways, but at the same time, the ships were laden with new immigrants and they were coming in left and right, so much so that they had to build structures like Ellis Island in order to handle all these people. That's right. There had to be reaction. What was the reaction? Right, so you have between 1880 and 1940, you have almost 40 million immigrants coming into the United States. There are some parts of the country where first-generation immigrants dominate, like Chicago. Two-thirds of the population of Chicago is first-generation immigrant in 1900. So it's a very powerful force. And so early on, you have progressives in this time period, from 1900 on to about the time period of World War I, 1914. Progressives are approaching immigrants as people with alien cultures and languages who need to be educated in the ways of America, a so-called campaign of Americanization, right? So, and it's innocent. You imbue them with American ideals. You teach them English. You teach them how to be patriotic. No problem. In fact, some progressives actually work to protect immigrant interests. There was research into why immigrants didn't get jobs and there was the treatment of immigrants. There was some of that. But this all changes in World War I. World War I breaks out in 1914, but it's Germany against Great Britain and France. And in Germany, it becomes quite evil in the eyes of Americans. And by the time the United States enters the war, then German immigrants in the United States are considered very suspect. Spies. Possibly spies, but certainly not American sympathizers. Yes, so this is considered to the immigrants all of a sudden go from being these innocents who need to be taught to dangerous, suspicious people who absolutely need to be watched. They need to be watched, surveilled. And they also still need to be taught. But it's much more coercive. So during World War I, then one way to coerce immigrants was to encourage them to buy Liberty Bonds. And I have a slide there on Liberty Bonds. And so there it is. Are you 100% American? Prove it. So interesting, the onus is on the immigrants. You must buy Liberty Bonds in order to prove that you are a patriotic American. So this. You must go fighting the 442nd a few years later to prove you're a patriotic American. This is what is happening with immigration. So what happens then is this Americanization movement becomes coercive. And by 1917, the Congress has decided, you know, enough with this immigration, they pass a law restricting immigration. They pass another law in 1921, further restricting immigration. That's with Karen Walters. That's right. And they put in the quota system, where a very small percentage of the population of these countries can actually become immigrants. But it's really this reaction becomes quite violent, especially against German Americans during World War I. There's this farmer in Minnesota, a German American, first generation, and some people come up to him and say, you want to buy Liberty Bonds. He says, oh, no, no, I'm not going to buy Liberty Bonds. They tar and feather him. There are German immigrants attacked all over the country. Some lynchings take place. Wow. So it's a very serious counter reaction. So you have the 1921 law. And then in 1924, this anti-immigrant feeling is extended to the Japanese and all other Asians. The Asian Exclusion Law is passed in 1924. And that means that no Asians can come to the United States. Zero. Zero. And it creates a very, very bad blood between the United States and Japan, especially. Yeah. Well, we certainly made some mistakes there. But it sounds to me like it was a consequence of having a lot of immigrants come. People envy them for their vitality and are threatened by the fact they might take jobs. And the war comes. And all of a sudden, we have what you call jingoism, right? Everybody wants to be America first. You've heard that recently. America first. And we exclude everybody who's not like us. It's tribalism in the 20th century. That's a good term for it. And that's a term that pundits used to criticize it, that America had gone tribal. And it does, in a way, go tribal. And it becomes this. There's a very, just a very strong, virulent, anti-immigrant feeling in the United States. And of course, the Ku Klux Klan. I've got a picture of the Klan here marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1926. Hoods unmasked. They're unafraid. They're unabashed. The Klan at this time period probably has 6 million members to it. The Klan had become anti-immigrant. And they rode in on that coattail. We talked about this, didn't we? They had gone dormant around 1900. 1915, they take this anti-immigrant feeling and they run with it. And they become very large, a very big organization at that point. So these decades before World War II, there's this just very strong anti-immigrant feeling. And of course, in some ways, a culmination of it is the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Now, there were actually internment camps for German-Americans in World War I. A few German-Americans were actually interned. So it's not the first time it happened in World War II. But it's the largest number. So many thousands of Japanese-Americans were interned in World War II. So this is kind of a culmination of that anti-immigrant feeling that you simply can't trust these alien people. They're not real Americans. So this is a great country. I'd like to hold on to that. And certainly, at the end of the 19th century, it was troublesome because we had the robber barons. And we'd dump on the immigrants. We'd dump on the poor. And I remember, to me, the big change of direction was the triangle shirt-waist fire. Because they were all immigrants, not only Jewish, Italian, Irish. They were all there, all getting burned up because nobody respected them. And they abused them and exploited them and so forth. And that changed things because the press got involved and the courts got involved. And before you know it, people had a different attitude about it. But until that moment, this country was dumping on immigrants. Now, what is in the national psyche that lets us be so vital and so innovative and manifest destiny, if you will, but at the same time dump on people who have come here for the Statue of Liberty? Well, I think it's a number of things. In that early 20th century time period, then it's part of it's a question of, we don't understand their cultures. They're very different from us. And so why should we tolerate them? Truth is, in this time period, racism and ethnocentrism were at an all-time high in the United States. So it's really actually more a piece of a larger framework of American attitudes to not tolerate people who are not like you. And color is a big issue. And religion is a big issue. Catholics are not well tolerated. It's a Protestant country. And the pope is considered to be a very corrupt guy. So I think your question is, how can a country so committed to equality and liberty and freedom? How can this country actually go down that road? And the truth is, it was never quite the commitment. We had slavery. We started with slavery. There were always contradictions. Equally. And then we got 80 years, 90 years of slavery. So there were always contradictions in this idea. I think this, in some ways, maybe we can see the United States as a work in progress for all of these years, a kind of a becoming of a nation of freedom. Now, I would say that in the civil rights movement, from the 1950s and then into the 1960s and onward, we've much more embraced that idea of freedom and emancipation and civil rights for all. And we've become a much more tolerant society, I think, than we were. So present-day anti-immigrant attitudes are probably, in some ways, a reaction. They're a reaction, of course, against Muslim immigrants and terror that's fear about terror. There's certainly that. But there is also a counter-movement to more civil rights, to more freedoms, freedoms for more groups, freedoms for gays and lesbians, people with disabilities. So there's been this tremendous opening up of freedom and this tremendous new awareness of that freedom, of who has freedom and who doesn't, and why we all should share in that freedom. This is during our lifetime. Yeah, absolutely. You and me, John. And I saw this coming up in the 50s, the 60s. The 60s was a renaissance of some kind. And the 70s, it was up and down, but basically it was good. All of a sudden, Trump and the people who elected him and the old-time story is coming back again. How do you explain that? Well, again, I think it's still a battle. I think it's a battle between those who value freedom and those who are afraid of threats. It's not that no one in the anti-immigrant movement values freedom, but they differentiate their freedom from the freedom of others. It's still a becoming nation. I think we're going to continue to see these kinds of battles for a long time, depending upon how history goes and how maybe the third wave of civil rights is coming now with an African-American president. And certainly you see the success of Trump being a reaction against that African-American presidency. So we probably need a third reconstruction. The first reconstruction failed. The second reconstruction in the civil rights era of the 1960s was fairly successful. Maybe we need a third reconstruction to further push forward this project. It's not going to be complete. I firmly believe that it won't be complete for a long time. Somehow we've fallen behind other countries who got the message from us and rode that horse. And then ironically, we fell off the horse. So what does immigration reform look like? What does immigration, the new immigration mentality and legislation look like, say, in the next five or 10 years? I think it really depends. It looks to me like the DACA folks are going to get folded in. So they're going to be OK. There's going to be an attempt to limit immigration. There's going to be an attempt to move immigration from family-oriented immigration to skill-based immigration. Like Canada. That's Canada has that. That's correct. And there's going to be an attempt to basically exclude Middle Eastern peoples completely. And that's kind of the baseline of anti-immigrant feeling is when you look at an anti-immigrant person, they probably distrust Muslims more than anything else. So Trump, in order to appeal to that group. Now, these are proposals. Who knows if they'll get passed? I think Democrats are going to resist this mightily because Democrats are on the other side. They're emancipationists. And they'll lose. The Democrats don't want to lose their political base in the immigrant communities. So they're going to fight pretty hard against this. The Republicans will have to have every vote they can get in order to pass up a significantly more restrictive immigration law. What's ironic, we only have a minute left here, but I'm interested in your thought about this. What's ironic is it's not just the old white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who call for this anti-immigration policy. Many of the people who call for this anti-immigration policy have come from immigrant families themselves. Have they no memories? Shall they relive history without a memory? It's the old Santayana story. Well, but the thing is, even those immigrants, the Archie Bunker immigrants, right? Well, they took their values with them. Their values back in their home countries were not particularly open to others. And so they brought a mix of closed values about immigrants. And you become a second generation immigrant. I guess these folks consider that they're no longer immigrants. But Americans love to talk about their immigrant past, not about letting new immigrants in. Somebody else's immigrants. That's right. That's right. Thank you, John. John David, history professor at HPU. Thank you so much for coming down.