Gates chinese immigration during the era 1882 1943, angel island, immigrate gateway to america and the making of asian america, history. At the Immigration History Research Center she has helped emerge immigration history with the digital humanities. She launched and oversees the National Endowment for the humanity immigration story project which works with recent immigrants and refugees to. Text, preserve and share the expenses. Her book, america for americans history of xena phobia in the United States is the subject of tonights talk. Please welcome erika lee. [applause] hi seattle, him so glad to be here. Im so glad to be back here at townhall, i was last here in 2010 before it was renovated. Am really happy to be back at a very glad that we begin this evening with the land acknowledgment i would like to repeat that land acknowledgment as i will discuss later xenophobia in xena global wheels and is tightly connected, native americans along with africanamericans were made into this countries first others in the racism and discrimination that continues to impact native americans has also been a driving force in xenophobia. I am glad that we started the evening that way. I am going to begin by reading from the book. Im going to take us back, it is winter time here, even worse in minneapolis but im going to take us back to a gorgeous summer day in july and i am in new jersey. Its a beautiful midsummer day in jersey city new jersey and i am on a boat heading to the statue of liberty in the Ellis Island Museum of immigration. How their greatgreatgrandfather came to the United States a century ago from austria. An africanamerican family recorded the video and everyone excited to see the statue of liberty, the mother asks, the kids jumped up and down and yelled yes. Im trying to share in the patriotic celebration of ellis island, place that serves as a symbol of americas welcomed immigrants but i keep thinking about another message i heard that day, the 2016 Republican National convention has just ended and the dop platform put forward by donald trump was one of pure xenophobia. Ever since launching his president ial Campaign Trump had pledged to beef up border security, being muslim immigrants, report 11 million undocumented People Living in the United States and build a massive wall along the countrys southern border with mexico. Now that he was the official republican president ial nominee, hes extreme views were repeated by a growing number of voters and politicians. Ripping on the Convention Opening scene, make America Great again, speaker after speaker had a terrifying portrait of america under siege by criminals, terrorists and gang members. Most of the statements made by trump and other Convention Speakers were either patently false or grossly misleading. But none of this seemed to matter, the crowding side the quicken loans arena went crazy for trumps message during his 75 minute speech in which he identified immigration as well as the greates greatest threatse United States and promised to restart americas immigration security he was repeatedly interrupted by cheers, plot and chance of build the wall. I cannot forget the angry tones and raise fists as a lion ellis island and walk through the museum exhibits. There we learn about earlier chapters in our antiimmigrant history but we are meant to understand them as just that. History that is over and done with. By the time visitors get to the museum gift shop, we are encouraged to banish this ugly pass from our minds and celebrate our immigrant instead. In true American Fashion we do this by buying something, there are team italy and team poland tshirts, there are no team china teachers by the way. There is no globes of the statue of liberty and the Leaning Tower of pisa. In the ellis island cafe however, they take a different inspiration offering menu items like the allamerican angus cheeseburger and the freedom burger, and tried to figure out the difference between the allamerican cheeseburger and the freedom burger, the freedom burger comes with two parties, the english cheeseburger with just one. If you live really love your freedom you must also really love your beef. Between the gift shop i ordered the vegan quinoa salad, clearly not american. Between the gift shop in the cafe it seems we can buy both immigrants and allamerican identities that coexist. But i know it is not that simp simple, i am struggling to figure out how the two americas sit together. So i did not know it then but that visit to ellis island marked one of the moments i began to write this book. Another one was the morning after the 2016 president ial election. I was teaching a class in immigration history at the university of minnesota and after a night of not so much sleeping, i throughout my lesson plan and i hunkered down with my students, many of whom are first generation refugees and immigrants. They shared with me their fears of being deported, being separated from their families, being victims of hate crimes. They had many questions for me, one was i think one that many of us were asking, how can this happen, how can voters elect an explosively racist xena phobic president ial candidate who openly called mexicans criminals and racist and who had called for complete and total shutdown of muslims to the United States another one was, how can this be happening in the United States, a socalled nation of immigrants. And in 2016 after the Civil Rights Movement, after two terms of our first africanamerican president. I had no answers for them. But i resolved myself and i started writing this book. So like any good scholar, went back to my office, went back to the library and pull down books off my shelves and made big piles. I started reading and rereading them in their common themes in the history on your feet of being xenophobia and the United States. One is that historians have been consistently explaining that antiimmigrant rises and falls with economic political and social crises with rapid demographic change with war. They say when americans feel confident we are welcoming and when we are anxious we are not. They have also treated xenophobia as an exception to americas immigrant tradition, we are told the antiimmigrant campaign had been unfortunate episodes promoted by a paranoid extremist and an otherwise welcoming nation. There is a consensus of xenophobia peaked in the 1920s, this is when we passed discriminatory National Origins quotas that closed the door to immigration to mostly southern and Eastern European immigrants, closed all the way from two immigrants from asia that lasted for 40 years. Yet with the Civil Rights Movement many scholars explained xenophobia, when it resurfaced in the last 30 years, it was a momentary blitz or an aberration in americas inevitable march towards immigrant inclusion and racial equality. This is what i taught my own students. I have written many books on immigration, and made a point of unearthing these dark and violent chapters in her immigration history but ive always ended on a positive note. I boys marked the progress that we are made in a realize the progress narrative that so many of the books that ive read and that i teach and that i havent turned hold no longer hold up. I knew that i needed to write a new history, soy started writing this book. This is what i found, this idea that the United States is a nation of immigrants, we recognize this in the wary wellknown illustration of immigrants on ships looking towards the statue of liberty, looking towards a new beginning and we know that most of her immigrant history focuses on how those immigrants did and were able to succeed and were welcome and were integrated. The idea that the nation is welcoming immigrants remains true in the last 200 years or than 80 Million People have been omitted into the country in the United States remains the Worlds Largest immigrant receiving nation even today but the United States is also a nation of xenophobia meaning that it has been ruled by an irrational fear and hatred of immigrants so that even if we have welcomed millions to our shores we have also deported more immigrants upwards of 55 million since 1882 than any other country. We have been wary of almost group of foreigners who have come to the United States from german immigrants in 18th century to irish and chinese, mexican, japanese, italians and muslims today. Across the century americans have argued that immigrants are threatening because they are poor. Because they practice a different faith, because they bring crime and disease, because they take away jobs from deserving americans because there are simply too many of them and that they dont assimilate. We have defined immigration not as a Natural Movement of people that has been happening since the beginning of Human History but rather as a crisis, the movement of people to an invasion of Hostile Forces that requires a military like response. This cartoon published in 1903, the title is the hike tied of immigration and national menace. The danger is a riffraff immigration from southern and Eastern Europe, we can tell that they are talking about southern and Eastern Europeans because he hopefully labeled on their hats like things like mafia or anarchist or criminal. We also know that this illustrator is referring to mexicans because the label there is outlawed and there is hopefully a chinese figure in their simply known or seen as a cooley hat. But these immigrants pose a threat to the United States as an end in dean waive or flood and invasion that will take over the United States, and destroy American Values like liberty and its institutions. So the u. S. Has passed discriminant quarterly immigration laws and incarcerated and expelled immigrants, it is exploited the foreignborn allowing them to be in the United States but not fully welcomed as equal americans. So why and how did this come to the, one of the answers is xenophobia is an american tradition, it dates back to our founding and has endured across the century. It is not an aberration, it does not rise and fall, it is deeply embedded in our society, our politics and our economy. It is actively promoted by special interest in pursuit of political power. Even as americans have recognized that the threats allegedly posed by immigrants were in hindsight unjustified, they have allowed xenophobia to endure, it has changed and adapted with her times targeting one threat after another, succeeding through repetition and justified as unnecessary defense of our nation. So lets go back to these roots, to do that we start with one of our Founding Fathers. In 1755 Benjamin Franklin was writing many letters to his friends and colleagues and in a series of them he warned the socalled swarthy immigrants were coming to the colonies that they were the most ignorant stupid sort of their own nation and they herded together and would soon outnumber us that her language and even our government will become precarious. Why should pennsylvania he asked become a colony of aliens. German immigrants he insisted needed to be regulated. So through the fears of one of our Founding Fathers america xenophobia became a tradition. Franklins antiimmigrant views were echoed by another great american, samuel morse known as the inventor of the telegraph, he learned that catholic immigrants were insidious invasion and an enemy to american democracy in 1841, new Technology Like his telegraph helped to spread anticatholic views across the country and this was not a simple prejudic prejudiced, this led to violence and bloodshed hitting a peak that would leave on election day for 1885 when 500 members of the antiimmigrant and anticatholic Political Party in new Political Party known as the American Party also known as the know nothing truth of the city attacking foreigners by nighttime the city sky glowed red with a flame of burning buildings in the city streets were stained with blood. From 22 100 people mostly german and Irish Catholic immigrants died as a blood he monday. Xenophobia in the mid19th century was not just about ant anticonsole us as a, a tradition that is deeply rooted in the United States as racism, it was also about political power, the new Political Party that i mentioned, the American Party spearheaded a new Political Movement using xenophobia to secure votes, antiimmigrant lawmakers and make antiimmigrant policy. Its goal was to shift the balance of power, political power in the United States, this is another reason why xena for beva indoors, as part of the american politics and part of our american democracy. The know Nothing Party argued as a cartoon from the 1850 shows that dangerous foreigners were unfit for u. S. Citizenship that they were drunk criminals, you can see the stereotypes of irish and germans, Irish Whiskey and german beer and they were literally stealing about boxing rigging elections. This is where this idea of immigrants and is deeply rooted in our political history the American Party reported 1 million members i started the talk about the importance of colonialism and xenophobia. The roots date back to this movement as well, this party, the American Party started calling themselves natives, small and native americans this was a strategy to not only distance and distinguish from the foreigners but also to distinguish themselves into rhetorically take away native roots from real native americans. So this term native american the other thing that they did, they would use symbols of what they believe to be native American Culture in terms of native American Culture and their own organizing processes and labels. So this term, id like us to think about, the next time you hear this term or use native american with a small in, i hope that you will remember both the xenophobia roots of that term as well of the ways it was used to continue to disposition native americans. The American Party was shortlived but its local policies including the dismal of irish born state workers in massachusetts, calling on the federal government to extend the resident terry the requirement of naturalization from 5 25 years, limiting Public Office to only usborn citizens or the native americans enforcing deportation in states like massachusetts help to make xenophobia and enduring part of American Democratic politics. So the other part of using this label native american is not to just denigrate others but to claim specific rights and privileges for example the only native born citizens can hold Public Office. These early examples reveal the deeper an early roots of american xenophobia tradition and bigotry in american politics. Another reason why xenophobia has endured and why is become so central in the United States is because its a form of racism. This has function alongside slavery, colonialism, conquest, segregation and White Supremacy. Africanamericans and native americans were made into this countrys first others and whenever we debated immigration, the immigrant group in question has always been measured in relationship to africanamericans and native americans. So this is how it works. Xenophobia defined certain population as racial and religious others who are inferior or dangerous or both and then it demonizes them as a group, not as individuals but as a group based on the presumptions. Again th xenophobia is not a mar under matter of prejudice or bigotry, and played a central role in americas definition of race, of citizenship, of what it means to be an american, it inspires and justifies discrimination and racial violence. And we see this as racism first being expressed in the idea that germans are swarthy or Irish Catholics are somehow not purely white and dangerous. But it is with chinese immigration that we see the first extent of zima phobic racism, chinese immigrants who first started coming in large numbers to california during the gold rush became considered a race apart, much more like africanamericans and native americans then like european immigrants. They were inferior, they took jobs away from deserving americans, you can see this in this cartoon of the 1880s called becoming man, this dehumanize characters sure of a chinese immigrant male who is monopolizing all of the work in San Francisco while white wor