There is a long history of double standards benefiting European immigrants both legal and illegal in this country

Before I go off on another tangent, let’s get this out of the way first: The new Trump “public charge” rule targeting legal immigrants should be struck down by the courts because it discriminates against taxpayers who happened to be legal immigrants; as I pointed out yesterday, illegal immigrants also pay taxes for services they will never see, like Social Security and Medicaid, but we’ll stick to the legal immigrant issue before we get back to the question of illegal immigration—the European variety and what they were allowed to benefit from simply because they were white. 

The Trump rule clearly targets non-white immigrants who work in low-wage jobs, and have families to shelter and put food on the table for; many if not most of those children are U.S. citizens. It is not their fault that many are paid low wages and often not provided medical benefits by their employers, as it is not the “fault” of native-born citizens in the same situation. But it is clearly discriminatory to treat people as separate classes of taxpayers with different “rights”—let alone disseminate the myth that immigrants don’t pay taxes at all—just because one group is a “citizen” and the other is merely a legal immigrant. It is not only discriminatory, it simply isn’t right. I worked at the airport for seven years, and on at least three occasions I had to load tiny wooden coffins originating in Yakima; the names on them were Spanish, and headed for burial in Mexico. And we have these inhuman beasts currently occupying the White House. 

In the aftermath of the El Paso massacre, the Trump administration didn’t waste any time in doubling -down on its racist anti-Hispanic campaign. First it was the Mississippi ICE raids that detained  nearly 700 people in their workplaces (working in jobs the “natives” don’t want to do is a “crime,” you see), and now  legal immigrants are being targeted if they dare to use any public services that they pay taxes into for others to use, a plan that Stephen Miller and Ken Cuccinelli cooked-up in their desperate efforts to rid the country of Hispanics, which is idiotic—but then again, who are we dealing with here, neo-Nazis? 

The hypocrisy of anti-immigrant white people can be quite astonishing, as is their ignorance of history. On the website Scholars.org, an article written by Cybelle Fox of UC Berkeley dealing with this issue notes that European immigrants had for decades benefitted from government largesse to help them become “good citizens.” But

Not until the 1970s, long after most white European immigrants became U.S. citizens, did the federal government start mandating legal residency or citizenship to receive Social Security, Medicaid, Food Stamps, assistance to poor families with children, and other welfare benefits. Few immigrants, past or present, have come to America with their “hands out for welfare checks.” But our nation’s laws and practices have changed to make it much harder for needy newcomers to get public help. The change has been sharp for many kinds of immigrants, although not for Mexican Americans. They have always been treated harshly.

American farmers who employed Mexican agricultural workers sought to keep them nearby and ready by helping them seek relief funds in between harvests. But white America saw this differently:

Relief for Mexicans led to resentment – and as hostility grew, many were expelled simply for requesting assistance. Cities in the Southwest cooperated with immigration agents to deport needy individuals. During the 1920s, officials in Los Angeles allowed federal agents to investigate all relief applicants; and encouraged raids during the Depression. Across the country, officials used their own funds to hire trains to repatriate as many as forty thousand Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who requested assistance. Hundreds of thousands were removed, including those who left on their own due to the hostility they experienced.

But for European illegal immigrants, there was somewhat less concern—or of a different kind:

In contrast, welfare officials in the Northeast and Midwest were wary of immigration agents and did not target Europeans newcomers for repatriation. Unlike in Los Angeles, officials in Chicago worried that admitting immigration agents to welfare offices would cause European newcomers to grow “suspicious and frightened” and would not “accomplish enough…to compensate for the harassment it would cause.”

Furthermore, the passage of New Deal social programs often disproportionately benefited newly arrived European immigrants than even white U.S. citizens (let alone non-white citizens):

Because immigration was restricted after 1924, almost half of the European-born were in their later working years when the first Social Security checks were issued in 1940. By law 65-year-olds needed only a few quarters on the job to be eligible so many European immigrants contributed little but collected almost as much as younger people who paid taxes their whole working lives.

More evidence of white double-standards and blatant hypocrisy:

European immigrants also benefited because there were no federal citizenship or legal-residence restrictions for most New Deal programs. Then as now, surveys say that most Americans oppose relief for aliens. But New Deal reformers ignored public opinion and fought for assistance for aliens. Federal officials at the time reassured wary newcomers that immigration officials would not have access to Social Security files; officials did not even ask applicants whether they were citizens or aliens, or inquire how they had entered the country.

So the concept of “public charge” did not apply to European immigrants who illegally entered the country. Of course, all Europeans who have come to this land would be illegal by today’s laws, but we’ll set that aside. Before 1882 there was no law that forbad the entry of any European into country; no visa or paperwork of any kind was required, just registration at a port of entry. Two immigration acts were passed in 1882 and 1891, the latter which required the obtaining of a visa at a consular office. But in practice it was business as usual for European immigration; between the 1882 law and the start of the World War I—which made overseas passage dangerous—99 percent of the at least 25 million Europeans who crossed the Atlantic were given “legal” status. In order to stop the inflow of "inferior" Southern and Central Europeans the 1924 quota law was passed which gave preference to Northern and Western Europeans (but no quota at all on immigration within the Western Hemisphere; that would not come until 1965). 

What happened then? Immigration from, say, Italy, did not exactly “stop,” it was just called something else: illegal immigration. After the 1924 law went into effect, the number of illegal immigrants entering the country per year rivaled numbers we have seen in recent years. In 1925, immigration authorities estimated that 1.4 million immigrants entered the country illegally, most of them from Europe, but many from Asian countries as well. Similar numbers were seen the following years until the start of the Great Depression, when immigration authorities took a tougher stance on “border control.” Many of these European immigrants were in fact coming to this country to escape prosecution for such things as avoiding the payment of debts. Some, like Donald Trump’s grandfather, did so to escape mandatory military service—making them essentially criminals in their own home countries before they even set foot in the U.S.

But as it turned out, illegal immigrants from Europe had little to fear from immigration authorities; in fact, immigration authorities went out of their way to find a way to “legalize” them. This is hardly surprising, given that today there are at least 50,000 Irish who are in this country illegally and nobody seems to find that a “crime.” Ever heard of the word “amnesty”? The Registry Act of 1929 allowed hundreds of thousands of mostly European immigrants to simply declare they were “morally fit” and voila, they were legalized. Italians in the country illegally benefited especially from this act, and tens of thousands of others saw their deportation proceedings “suspended” and forgotten in the decades after World War II. 

History has not always been kind to white immigrants in this country, dating back to the “Know-Nothing Party in the mid-19^th Century in response to the “invasion” of Irish, Italian and German Catholic immigrants. Jacob Riis’ famous photographic essay How the Other Half Lives was in fact a two-edged sword. While he was legitimately concerned with the problem of poverty and the conditions the poor lived in, and even advocated for social relief programs and a more equitable distribution of income, in other ways it attracted the opposite reaction. Riis’ himself has accused of an acceptance of the tenets of scientific racism, and in the book he discusses his belief that some “ethnicities” and “races” of Europeans possessed some rather unflattering traits which could explain their poverty and the conditions in which they lived. Southern Europeans (like Italians) and eastern Europeans (of Slavic origin) were particularly “concerning” to him. He was, of course, not the only person of the time who mixed racist eugenics theory with an allegedly “progressive” agenda: the founder of what was to become Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, for instance; some passages in her tome The Pivot of Civilization would make Trump’s racist screeds seem positively “socialist” in comparison: 

The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit, and therefore less fertile, parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem to-day is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective…Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.

One should remember that in Sanger’s time, words like “unfit” and “inferior class” were used to describe the people in Riis’ photographs; some of them were probably Italian immigrants. Thus it is intensely hypocritical for someone like Cuccinelli to “imply” that a group of people as self-reliant as Hispanic immigrants can’t “stand on their own two feet” when he himself doesn’t have two feet to stand on—like many right-wing Italian-Americans who are self-conscious about the stereotypes applied to them in the past, he needs to someone to beat on by disseminating despicable stereotypes and racist myths against other groups to mask a history in this country that doesn’t always bear close scrutiny.