HarryShearer.com

As an American citizen, I’m amazed and repelled by the anti-immigration spectacle now going on, in which Stephen Miller shows off the depth of his talent for cruelty, Ir’s almost as if he had stamped “SM Was Here” on the foreheads of the children in detention centers, the veterans in countries they never knew, the citizens mistakenly jailed. It’s in no way a vote of approval for this carnival of cruelty to recall that, contrary to the well-intentioned proclamations that “this is not who we are”, we have been here and done this before.

We brought Chinese workers—”coolies”, we called them—to Northern California to help finish building the transcontinental railroad. Their work completed, California passed a law called the “Chinese Exclusion Act”. Two waves of European Jewish immigration were documented by a Harvard historian—the German Jews in mid-19th century, followed a few years later by an inflow of Russian Jews. Nobody opposed the latter more vehemently than the former. In Boston, “No Irish Need Apply” signs were commonplace for decades. And, in the runup to the American entrance into World War Two, steamships full of European Jews seeking to escape Hitler’s brand of extreme cruelty were turned away at Ellis Island, sent back to their eventual doom. California, once a Mexican territory, tried to keep Mexicans out, until the ag industry was able to persuade legislators to pass the “bracero program”, so that crops could actually be picked.

It is a tale so filled with darkness that Donald Trump would scrape it off the history books if only he could. There are many paradoxes in the story of America, but none stands out in such dramatic relief as the nation of immigrants that periodically hates immigration.

This is who we are.