A revealing look at the immigration controversy

By A. Peter Bailey
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

Anyone who is shocked or surprised by the current immigration battles in Europe and the United States must not have read a 2016 column in The New York Post newspaper written by Ralph Peters. They also must be unaware of the 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant.

Peters, who was a military analyst for Fox News, noted in his column titled the ‘Eurobia’ myth, that “The notion that continental Europeans, who are world-champion haters, will let the impoverished Muslim immigrants they confine to ghettos take over their societies and extend the caliphate from the Amalfi Coast to Amsterdam has it exactly wrong. The endangered species isn’t the ‘peace-loving Europeans tolling in his or her welfare state, but the continent’s Muslim immigrant and their multi-generational descendants—who were foolish enough to imagine that Europeans would share their toys… Don’t let Europe’s current round of playing pacifist dress-up fool you. This is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing… The historical patterns are clear: When Europeans feel sufficiently threatened… They don’t just react, they overreact with stunning ferocity. One of their more humane (and frequently employed techniques) has been ethnic cleansing.”

By changing Europeans to Americans and Muslims to Latinos, one will see what President Trump and his Trumpettes are all about when it comes to immigration.

The irony is that many of the Trumpettes would have been rejected by Grant, who was a first-class White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) supremacist. In his book, he divided Europeans into three “races”—Nordics, Alpines and Mediterranean. To say that he was disgusted by the quality of the Europeans pouring into the United States in the late 1890s and early 1900s is an understatement. The following is a small sampling of his repulsion over the incoming immigrants:

“These new immigrants were no longer exclusively members of the Nordic race as were the earlier ones… The transportation lines advertised America as a land flowing with milk and honey, and the European governments took the opportunity to unload upon careless, wealthy and hospitable America the sweepings from their jails and asylums. The result was that the new immigrants… contained a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish ghettos… The American taxed himself to sanitize and educate these poor helots, and as soon as they could speak English, encouraged them to enter into the political life, first of the municipalities and then of the nation. The result is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of Colonial stock will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew…”

Grant was especially outraged and disgusted with what was happening in New York City, his hometown, as shown in the following: “The man of old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners, just as he is today being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes; they steal his name; and they are beginning to take his women…”

Basically, Grant’s words are very similar to what President Trump is saying today about Latinos and other immigrant who aren’t coming from Norway. And the irony is that many of the decedents of those immigrants so bitterly denounced by Grant are now vigorous, ranting Trumpettes.

Finally, two personal observations on the so-called immigration crisis. The first is that it is impossible to smuggle 12 million people into the United States. If that many people come in, someone is allowing them to cross the border, most likely to provide a passive, captive labor force for the agricultural and construction industries. Secondly, I will always believe until concretely proven otherwise that the so-called caravan launched in Honduras about two weeks before the mid-term elections was set up by Trump supporters.

This article originally published in the November 26, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.