Our Proud Shithole Ancestry

Americans, more than citizens of other immigrant countries, celebrate their pre-immigrant nationalities. New York City alone hosts literally scores of annual parades and festivals for that purpose, from the Albanian Parade to the Vietnamese Moon Festival. Citizens of other immigrant countries, like Australia and Israel, don’t seem to maintain such strong identification with their pre-immigration countries.

Our affinity for our pre-American heritage doesn’t necessarily diminish over the generations. New York’s Irish-Americans’ first parade in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day was in 1762. New York’s Italian-Americans’ first parade in celebration of Columbus Day in 1892, the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first landfall in the Americas. Two centuries on, Americans’ pride in their Irish and Italian origins is undiminished.

Celebration of national origin is at least partly a way to combat prejudices against that national origin. Irish and Italian immigrants were regarded as inferior by the Protestant Anglo-Saxons who got here before them, and today’s heirs to those two immigrant groups are painfully aware that their national origins were not always celebrated here in the New World.

A different kind of prejudice was at issue when German-Americans held their first parade in New York City in 1957, shortly after World War II, when German-Americans’ loyalty was questioned. They carefully named the parade after Friedrich von Steuben, a Prussian military officer who became a hero of the American Revolutionary War.

Fully two-thirds of Americans reported English ancestry to census-takers in 1790. There never has been, as far as I know, an annual English-American parade or festival, perhaps because none was ever needed. English-Americans were firmly in charge of the early United States, and have never been subjected to widespread discrimination or stigmatization.

As a general matter, people who are well off where they are don’t pick up and leave their countries, their cultures, their friends and neighbors, and everything and everyone they have ever known to try their luck in a new country, among a strange people, with a culture and customs that are strange and sometimes even offensive to them. The Irish potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century killed a million Irish people, and drove a million more to emigration. The less-remembered Irish famine of a century earlier killed nearly 40 percent of the population and drove the first wave of Irish-American immigration. As recently as the 1980s, poverty drove large numbers of Irish natives to the United States – many of those immigrants, by the way, immigrated illegally; until the Ronald Reagan immigration amnesty of 1986, an Irish accent in a New York City restaurant worker was a reliable indication of undocumented status.

Even England, which during early American history was the world’s richest country, endured deep and desperate poverty during the Industrial Revolution – just read pretty much any Charles Dickens novel to see what I mean. As a general matter, it was those poor, not their overseers, who left England for America.

In even just the few days since Donald Trump decried immigration from “shithole countries,” there has begun a reactionary effort by anti-immigration ideologues to re-cast his remarks as nothing more than a factual observation that living conditions in some countries are very bad. This is a deliberate lie; everyone knows that Trump meant no such thing.

Trump’s complaint was not about the countries, but about the people from those countries. His point was crystal clear: he doesn’t want more people from “shithole countries,” he wants more people from countries like Norway; people from poor countries are unfit for immigration to the United States. He wasn’t condemning bad living conditions, he was condemning the people who would come here to get away from those conditions.

Furthermore, Trump’s complaint was not about all poor countries, but poor countries not primarily inhabited by white people. He didn’t mention Albania, Armenia, Bosnia, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro or Serbia, white-populated countries that are poorer than, say, black-populated Botswana or Gabon. His concern was immigrants who are black, Hispanic or Arab.

For the most part, the media have treated Trump’s despicable comment as one that was intended for the audience of those few present in the room. I don’t believe that. I think Trump knew his comment would be leaked, and in fact intended that it be leaked, to appeal to and shore up his base. My guess is that Trump was worried that his base would be mad at him for his televised openness to legislative authorization of Barack Obama’s DACA program. My evidence is that Trump didn’t issue an immediate denial, but sent his deputy press secretary out to accuse his opponents of putting foreign countries ahead of the United States, a dog whistle to the base; and second, a few hours later, Trump spent the evening phoning around for opinions about how his base would react to the episode.

This was the moment of truth for the Republican Party, the moment when President Trump’s racism became no longer a matter of opinion but a matter of demonstrated fact. This was the moment when President Trump made clear that his slogan, Make America Great Again, really means Make America White Again. This was the moment when President Trump confessed – or bragged – that the purpose of his presidency is not to improve the economic lot of the forgotten American worker but to restore white privilege.

Many Republican commentators and conservative intellectuals have risen to the moment to reject Trump’s racism and his racist agenda for America. But for the most part, the Republican Party establishment – party officials and Republican office-holders – have not. The Republican Party establishment thus shows itself willing to mark its party as the party of white privilege, in order to gain the benefit of conservative federal judicial appointments and tax breaks for the unneedy, at the cost of rejection by the rising non-white majority for generations to come.