Immigration anxiety: A voice from the past

Our recent snowstorm allowed me to catch up on some reading, including an essay in “Imprimis,” a newsletter I have received since the late 1980s. The piece addressed our current immigration issues, comparing the rate of crossings to those in 1960 when the Eisenhower Administration began keeping track of those numbers. As most of us have over the past few years, I have seen these numbers expressed in various configurations, but this essay broke them down in a way that added additional, if not startling, context.

The piece pointed out that over the past three years, apprehensions at the border have averaged 6,940 per day. In 2022 alone, the apprehensions were at 6,575; in 2023, that number rose to 8,219. It is now being reported that in 2024, apprehensions are running higher still, yet those numbers are only the people we can count, and there are many that we cannot.

Just for comparison, let’s look at some numbers closer to home. In 2020, the US Census Bureau pegged the population of McCook at 7,698. In 2021, that dropped to 7,356, and the projection for 2024 is a further drop to 7,236.

Can we conclude that a population roughly the size of McCook is crossing the border daily? The numbers suggest as much. How do we feel about it? That’s an even more interesting question.

I have given up trying to understand the motivations behind the current unfettered influx, whether out of compassion, to replenish our diminishing population, to provide a source of cheap labor, or just for cynical, identity-focussed political gain. Nor do I try to understand the attitudes of the extreme right, which go beyond legitimate concerns about economic and cultural impacts but tend to be rooted in nativism, xenophobia, or worse.

Long ago, before immigration issues reached the top-of-mind status it occupy today, I read another bit of history about attitudes toward immigration that has currency today but would also be worthy of a Paul Harvey broadcast. Do you remember Paul Harvey?

As the story goes, a prominent politician (not a president, but a name you know) wrote a letter to a colleague expressing concerns about the difficulties in his community caused by immigration. He suggested that the then-current influx of foreign nationals were not the brightest and best in their homeland, characterizing them as the “ignorant, stupid sort of their nation.”

He also discussed the language barrier as an impediment to assimilation, saying that few migrants attempted to understand our language and could not be socialized “either from the press or pulpit.” He added that as long as they refuse to adopt our language, they can never help their children achieve literacy in English.

“Now they come in droves,” he wrote, and “it’s foreseeable that we will be unable to preserve our language.” The migrants publish their newspapers, advertisements, street signs, and legal writings in their native language.

One strategy he suggested was to distribute the migrants evenly across multiple geographic

areas to promote assimilation in a way that would not happen if they settled in clusters of their kind. Does any of that sound familiar? Isn’t there a redistribution of immigrants taking place right now?

At this point, I am resigned to looking at “what is,” which is a human migration that rivals those in history driven by war, political oppression, or famine. Throughout history, large masses of people have moved about the planet, pulling up stakes, leaving familiar cultures behind, and bringing change to their new environs.

Politics notwithstanding, the story is as old as humanity, which brings me back to our letter. Was it written about Mexicans, the Chinese, the Irish, or European Jews? No, but the language being discussed was German. Was the migration driven by World War I or World War II? No. It was earlier than that.

Our letter of interest was written to an English businessman, Peter Collinson. Collinson was a botanist and a member of the Royal Society who was active in cross-Atlantic information exchanges about horticulture and other scientific interests.

The letter was written in 1753, and the minority influx came from various German-speaking regions of Europe, including the Rhine Valley, Alsace, and Switzerland. Those immigrants are now known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, and the letter was written by none other than Benjamin Franklin.

Paul Harvey fans will recall how his daily broadcasts of surprising bits of history similar to this would end, and now you also know the rest of the story.