On Sunday's "Meet the Press", NBC's Chuck Todd engaged in the sort of moralistic preening and poorly informed right-mindedness that sometimes makes me want to throw a history book at the television.
With Olympian disdain and pained disbelief, shaking his head sadly and smiling ruefully, Todd declared: "We have the same debate every two generations, with another immigrant group. It was the Chinese in the nineteenth century."
Well, actually, no. That's not even close. Chuck Todd is an astute observer of American politics. And he comes across as a genuinely nice guy. But like so many other members of the bien pensant chattering class, when it comes to immigration, his observations are a mish-mash of junk history mush.
U.S. immigration history really doesn't just run in symmetrical, bi-generational, 40-year loops. And the debate that we're having now is not a new debate at all. As a matter of fact, it's probably best understood as the continuation of a debate that has been going on for nearly a century.
As exhibits A, B, and C, I offer these three excerpts from the long national discussion.
The Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1928:
Alarmed over the threatened loss of its labor supply, California today started bombarding its Senators and Congressmen with demands that they use all their resources to defeat a movement on foot in Congress to put Mexico under the 3 percent restrictive immigration law. … "All the California messages agree that the annual supply of migratory labor is absolutely necessary to meet the peek harvest demands in the State and that the Mexican is the only satisfactory laborer available."
The New York Times, August 9, 1951:
Three United States Immigration and Naturalization Service officers charged today that a powerful "pressure group" of farmers annually was forcing suspension of law enforcement against illegal Mexican immigrants in order to get cheap labor.
Statement by U.S. Rep. Peter Rodino (D-N.J.), October 22, 1971:
The illegal alien displaces American workers, depresses wages, burdens the welfare rolls, and taxes local, state, and federal government by use of medical facilities at public charge. In fiscal year 1970, the federal government alone spent $35 million for the apprehension, detention, and removal of 343,000 illegal aliens.