Nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment in the US has a long history
Do you have no shame, Mr. President?
No, Donald Trump has no shame in taking children away from parents as they attempt to appeal for asylum and refuge in the United States. What a heartless and cruel thing to do and yet Trump does it. While he now says that he will stop this practice, he will do nothing apparently for those children and parents who already have been separated. The same public and political pressure that has forced Trump to change his policy needs to continue to deal with those already separated.
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But there are larger issues here. Trump's immigration policies and views may go against the ideology of America as a country of immigrants, but it is still in line with nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States that has a long history.
Early naturalization laws, for example, only permitted white European immigrants to be eligible for naturalization. Nativists such as the Know-Nothings objected in the mid-19th century to the entrance of German and Irish immigrants. In 1882, the Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act barring Chinese immigration to the United States. This was spearheaded in California where white Americans claimed the threat of a "Yellow Peril."
In the early 20th century, nativists protested the mass immigration of the "new immigrants" from Eastern and Southern Europe, such as from Russia, Poland, Italy and Greece. Nativists viewed these immigrants as too Jewish and too Catholic. These immigrants were not even considered "whites" at least through the first generation. This opposition led to infamous laws in the early 1920s that significantly curtailed immigration from these parts of Europe by placing strict and limited quotas from these areas.
At the same time, as thousands of Mexican immigrants began to cross the border, nativists began to talk about a "Mexican problem." While Mexico was never included under the quota laws, Mexican immigrants were racially exploited, discriminated against and segregated. The very term Mexican became racialized in the Southwest and along the U.S.-Mexico border in the early 20th century. That is, white Americans considered anyone Mexican a member of an inferior "race."
This racist perception was expanded in the early 1930s, when Mexicans were blamed in some circles for the Great Depression. Acting on this, the Hoover administration deported about half a million people of Mexican descent to Mexico. The majority should have never been deported because they were U.S.-born children. Talk about cruelty to children! Sending children born in the United States to Mexico was an emotional crisis for many who either didn't speak Spanish or didn't speak it well enough to be easily integrated into their new schools in Mexico
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https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/ncr-today/nativist-anti-immigrant-sentiment-us-has-long-history
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