Recently, I saw the movie “Cabrini” because I was raised Catholic, had Italian relatives and married an Italian. I highly recommend the movie for what it shows of the life of the heroic Mother Cabrini and her nuns. But more than that, I want people introduced to the discrimination and hardships faced by Italians who came to America in three waves: 1861-90, 1900-14, 1945-76.
These Italians faced many of the same slurs laid on today’s immigrants at our southern borders. Charges of infesting America with crime, racial impurities, racial inferiority. Italians were caricatured in cartoons as dark-skinned, non-white, non-English- speaking vermin. Read Daniel Okrent’s book “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and other European Immigrants Out of America.”
It is proper to be concerned about illegal immigration and the immense numbers of immigrants flooding across Mexico to our borders. But we must not fall victim to all the false, prejudiced portrayals of these asylum-seekers. They are not vermin, or racial inferiors, as Donald Trump would have us believe. They are the modern-day versions of past immigrants who came to escape poverty and turmoil in their homelands.
Finally, Trump must be reminded that Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1753 of the non-English-speaking Germans coming to America that “those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant stupid sort of their own nation.” Perhaps Germanic Trump proves Franklin correct.
Bruce Braden
Carmel, Ind.