Perhaps its Becoming a Fragile Mosaic?
By James McCoy, TOWNHALL
The melting pot metaphor applies to a society where many different types of people blend together as one. A national identity bouillabaisse if you will. It is essentially an environment in which many ideas, religions and races are socially assimilated. Since its inception America has prided itself in being a melting pot. While some countries are composed of people who are almost all the same in terms of race, religion, and culture (Scandinavia, the Middle East, Asia and India come to mind), the United States is a nation of many different types of people.
This concept was recognized with the gift of the Statue of Liberty to America back in 1886. In recent years, however, it seems that the assimilation of peoples and cultures has become more of a distant memory than a present reality
After the close of the Civil War, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi was commissioned by the French government to create a statue that would commemorate the allegiance between the two countries in honor of America’s first centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence in 1876. Work was begun by Bartholdi a year earlier and officially titled “The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.”
In 1892, the U.S. government opened a federal immigration station on Ellis Island, located near Bedloe’s Island in Upper New York Bay. Immigrants were greeted by the Statue of Liberty as they arrived in Ellis Island for processing. Between 1892 and 1954, some 12 million immigrants were processed on Ellis Island before receiving permission to enter the United States. Lady Liberty carries the saying: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
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Now some 124 years later, many Americans are wondering if we remain a melting pot or if we have become simply an incoherent mosaic of difference. If we have departed from our early melting pot ambition and identity, it is because many of our most prominent politicians have promoted societal, cultural and religious division to advance their own political careers over the best interest of the nation. Bi-lingual K-12 education is but an example.
This purposeful fracturing of American society for political gain was plainly evident in the Democratic Presidential Primary in South Carolina on February 25, 2020, as presidential candidates groveled for the black vote before Super Tuesday. Tom Steyer even went so far as to claim he was the only candidate on stage in favor of reparations for the black population. He also proposed the establishment of a race commission to retell the story of discrimination and injustice towards African-Americans. It is hard to imagine the political, social and cultural chaos that would surround efforts to enact such legislation. Nonetheless, each candidate seized their opportunity to convince the listening audience why they were the best candidate to represent the black population despite South Carolina being a melting pot, like America.
Each candidate similarly courted the Hispanic vote in Nevada. The identity of an American electorate seems to be blindly lost in the fervor for tribal voting blocs. The two largest minority voting blocs are firmly rooted in race and culture. Consequently, you have the political promises and pandering. Since the civil rights movement in the 1960s, democrats and the left have perpetuated a social tension between minority groups, which are quickly approaching a majority level, and Caucasian populations as a political lever to garner support for federal social programs which disproportionately benefit those minority groups. This in turn increases their appeal to those same groups. The loser in these divisive tactics are the American middle class taxpayers. The one candidate who seems to advocate most often for an all-inclusive American electorate is President Donald Trump. He believes that the best way to realize the benefits of a true blending melting pot is a prosperous economy for all groups.
Many citizens and the MSM like to spin the narrative that the 2016 election was stolen from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton by a coarse, pugnacious and decidedly unpresidential Donald Trump. On the other hand, others believed that Hillary and the Clinton Family Foundation would represent the creation of a Clinton political royalty, even a new type of monarchy, a form of government we freed ourselves from during the Revolutionary War. Never mind the fact that she had committed felonious acts like lying to the government about her private email server kept in her home, her bleach-biting government files from said server and lying about the attack on and death of America’s Ambassador in Benghazi. Worse, the Clinton Foundation’s ties to unsavory foreign actors was anathema to our federalist form of government and idea of a true American melting pot.
Pew Research documents that there are nearly 11 million illegal immigrants in our country. Unlike previous years, many are actual family units, not individuals. Some believe this is good for America and support open borders. Others believe America has both a right and obligation to control who enters our borders and that our safety is at risk with unbridled illegal immigration. The reality of the immigration issue is that the United States economy simply cannot afford open borders. The flood of immigrants from Latin and South America, and quite possibly elsewhere, will overwhelm the social safety network programs that the Democrats and the left are so willing to extend to them to further expand and consolidate their political base.
At the heart of this issue is whether America continues to be a melting pot or becomes a mosaic dystopia. These diametrical views are not insignificant and are critical for our nation’s continued success.
The history goes on. This is the government’s website. It became more restrictive over time, periodically relaxing restrictions after WWII, particularly from the 60s on. The notion of a time when the country was a melting pot with open borders is mostly a myth.
Israel Zangwill invented the concept of the melting pot. At the time that Emma Lazarus wrote that, there were many restrictions, and in fact, in the 90s, Emma Lazarus’s poem was put in a glass case inside the Statue of Liberty, no longer on the base.
“Early American Immigration Policies”
“Americans encouraged relatively free and open immigration during the 18th and early 19th centuries, and rarely questioned that policy until the late 1800s. After certain states passed immigration laws following the Civil War, the Supreme Court in 1875 declared regulation of immigration a federal responsibility. Thus, as the number of immigrants rose in the 1880s and economic conditions in some areas worsened, Congress began to pass immigration legislation.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Alien Contract Labor laws of 1885 and 1887 prohibited certain laborers from immigrating to the United States. The general Immigration Act of 1882 levied a head tax of fifty cents on each immigrant and blocked (or excluded) the entry of idiots, lunatics, convicts, and persons likely to become a public charge.
These national immigration laws created the need for new federal enforcement authorities. In the 1880s, state boards or commissions enforced immigration law with direction from U.S. Treasury Department officials. At the Federal level, U.S. Customs Collectors at each port of entry collected the head tax from immigrants while “Chinese Inspectors” enforced the Chinese Exclusion Act.” https://www.uscis.gov/history-and-genealogy/our-history/overview-ins-history/early-american-immigration-policies
“Origins of the Federal Immigration Service
Photo of Ellis Island as it appeared in the Early 20th Century.The federal government assumed direct control of inspecting, admitting, rejecting, and processing all immigrants seeking admission to the United States with the Immigration Act of 1891. The 1891 Act also expanded the list of excludable classes, barring the immigration of polygamists, persons convicted of crimes of moral turpitude, and those suffering loathsome or contagious diseases.
The national government’s new immigration obligations and its increasingly complex immigration laws required a dedicated federal enforcement agency to regulate immigration. Accordingly, the 1891 Immigration Act created the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration within the Treasury Department. The Superintendent oversaw a new corps of U.S. Immigrant Inspectors stationed at the country’s principal ports of entry.
Federal Immigration Stations
On January 2, 1892, the Immigration Service opened the U.S.’s best known immigration station on Ellis Island in New York Harbor. The enormous station housed inspection facilities, hearing and detention rooms, hospitals, cafeterias, administrative offices, railroad ticket offices, and representatives of many immigrant aid societies. America’s largest and busiest port of entry for decades, Ellis Island station employed 119 of the Immigration Service’s entire staff of 180 in 1893.
The Service built additional immigrant stations at other principal ports of entry through the early 20th century. At New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other traditional ports of entry, the Immigration Service hired many Immigrant Inspectors who previously worked for state agencies. At other ports, both old and new, the Service built an Inspector corps by hiring former Customs Inspectors and Chinese Inspectors, and training recruits.
Implementing A National Immigration Policy
During its first decade, the Immigration Service formalized basic immigration procedures and made its first attempts to enforce a national immigration policy. The Immigration Service began collecting arrival manifests (also frequently called passenger lists or immigration arrival records) from each incoming ship, a former duty of the U.S. Customs Service since 1820. Inspectors then questioned arrivals about their admissibility and noted their admission or rejection on the manifest records.
Beginning in 1893, Inspectors also served on Boards of Special Inquiry that closely reviewed each exclusion case. Inspectors often initially excluded aliens who were likely to become public charges because they lacked funds or had no friends or relatives nearby. In these cases, the Board of Special Inquiry usually admitted the alien if someone could post bond or one of the immigrant aid societies would accept responsibility for the alien.
Detention guards and matrons cared for detained persons pending decisions in their cases or, if the decision was negative, awaiting deportation. The Immigration Service deported aliens denied admission by the Board of Special Inquiry at the expense of the transportation company that brought them to the port.
Enhanced Responsibilities
Congress continued to exert Federal control over immigration with the Act of March 2, 1895, which promoted the Office of Immigration to the Bureau of Immigration and changed the agency head’s title from Superintendent to Commissioner-General of Immigration. The Act of June 6, 1900, consolidated immigration enforcement by assigning enforcement of both Alien Contract Labor laws and Chinese Exclusion laws to the Commissioner-General.
Because most immigration laws of the time sought to protect American workers and wages, an Act of February 14, 1903, transferred the Bureau of Immigration from the Treasury Department to the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor. An “immigrant fund” created from collection of immigrants’ head tax financed the Immigration Service until 1909, when Congress replaced the fund with an annual appropriation.” https://www.uscis.gov/history-and-genealogy/our-history/overview-ins-history/origins-federal-immigration-service
Personally, I would much rather live among my own people whom I know and understand and I do not have to be careful to watch every word I say in case it causes ‘offence’ to others.
“Melting pots” do not create societies of peace, harmony and appreciation of differences. What they do create are cauldrons of boiling mistrust, misunderstanding, resentment, a them-and-us attitude, anger, and hatred, — as we can see has been the case right across America and in every country of Western Europe which has been swamped by Middle East and African migrants — mostly Muslims who see it as against Islam to integrate, to live and let live without the religious duty to conquer or to become part of the host community. For Europe, at least, it has nothing short of a disastrous exercise in social engineering.