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What Tomi Lahren Gets Wrong on Immigration
In a widely shared clip from a Fox News appearance over the weekend, Tomi Lahren showcased just how little she understands how this country was built:
.@TomiLahren: "You don't just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice. That's not what this country is based on." @WattersWorld pic.twitter.com/Dux0cABHar
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 13, 2018
My friend Brooke had exactly the right take:
https://twitter.com/bkerogers/status/995806378043367424
Lahren’s statement doesn’t just display an ignorance of American history, but also a total disregard for the work previous generations have done with genealogy. Thanks to the power of the Internet, it’s easier than ever before to do genealogical research. A subscription to Ancestry.com opens up a trove of documents from all over the world; painstakingly scanned and transcribed.
Over the years, I’ve delved into this world, and unfortunately find that I am the youngest person in the room at genealogy events by about two generations. As with many trades and skills, genealogy is one of those hobbies that millennials have no interest in taking up.
When I began researching my own family, I only knew my grandparents’ names on both sides of my family, and the name of one great-grandmother. Thanks to Ancestry and a few hundred dollars spent ordering death and marriage certificates from the archives in New York City, I’ve learned an incredible amount about my family’s origins.
The investigation has come with some fascinating discoveries: after a great aunt died, her widower married his sister-in-law. These second cousins saw their aunt turn into their step-mother overnight. Also uncovered was an infant brother of my grandmother’s, buried in the family plot without a headstone or marker of any kind. That discovery was made a few weeks after the birth of my second child, and we discovered this long-lost great uncle who never saw past his first week had the same name as our new son.
What has been most personally enriching is really understanding how much the history I already knew affected my family personally. It’s one thing to intellectually know that the graves and documents belonging to European Jewry was destroyed; it’s quite another to run into a brick wall because of it. While on my mother’s side I was able to easily reach back as far as eight generations thanks to the documents on Ancestry and the work done on the site by long-lost distant cousins; I was barely able to reach back two generations on my father’s. I was able to learn the names of the relatives who made it to America, and sometimes those of their parents if their names were listed on death certificates, but nothing else.
The most humbling part of doing this research has been seeing just how little my family had in terms of money, education, and expertise upon their arrival here. The first relative of mine to arrive here did so 12 years before he died, and managed to bring over all of his adult children before dying. What I know of him is from the 1900 census: he was a tailor from Austria, spoke no English, and could not read or write. His children would be able to learn how to read and write according to later censuses, but they too would work in menial jobs and live in rented homes, bouncing around New York City over the course of their lifetimes. It doesn’t seem as though my great-grandparents were even able to afford to be buried together in the same cemetery (I’ve been thus far unable to locate my great-grandmother, though I am reasonably certain she is buried in the same location as her husband).
Published in General
Yes. You could still fit the entire population of the world inside Texas and Oklahoma and not exceed the population density of England.
We have enormous amounts of room. And people are the most valuable resource in the world.
As somebody or other has been saying for years, “Borders, language, culture.”
Where are you going to get the water? There’s a reason the density is low.
And no one that came through it helped to build this country into what it is today right? They were all freeloading welfare seekers? Italian and Irish papists who worship Rome and will forever change the character and culture of this nation for the worse!
See these aren’t new arguments. They were wrong then. They’re wrong now.
I’ve posted this before, in another thread. It’s the naturalization petition for my grandfather-in-law. A native of Galicia, he departed Bremen on February 15, 1908, and arrived in Galveston, TX on March 9 of the same year, with his young pregnant wife and two-year old daughter in tow.
Note the birthplaces of his subsequent five children: Madrid, NM (it was still a Territory at the time), Jackson, CO, Coalport PA, Nanty Glo PA, Carolina WV, Coalport PA. He followed his livelihood in the coal mines wherever it took him, and it took him all over. Because the most important thing to him wasn’t his race, or even his Polish ethnicity and heritage. It was his little family, and he did whatever he had to do, for them. Dirty work. Menial work. Honest and honorable work.
I know it was a hard life. These were tough people, and I’m proud to have known some of them. I’m sure Carl’s adopted country didn’t “give” him much. Other than opportunity. And not the opportunity to “feel nice” about himself. It gave him the opportunity to “better” himself. (This was when people believed that such a thing was still possible, and was, even, encouraged.)
And he made the most of it. He never complained. He never bashed his new home. He never raised the Polish flag above the Stars and Stripes, and he taught his children to love it, work for it and fight for it. And though he never got to see his grandson become the first in his family to graduate from college, I like to think he’d have burst with pride on the day.
Different country, for the most part. Different sort of immigrant, for the most part.
I love the smell of burning straw men in the morning. Smells like victory!
Wasn’t Ellis Island on an island, or something?
This was the entire point to Ellis Island. It was set up to process immigrants in a way a desperate man couldn’t take off and get lost in the shuffle of NYC life.
It wasn’t some welcome wagon. If you were sick, you couldn’t board the ferry to the mainland.
No, they did indeed encounter affirmative action. Affirmative action has always followed the money, particularly where the Main Line Protestant churches were involved. In 1900, it was the sons of alumni and other contributors to the college’s finances who had the preference. Where football was involved, it was good players. Those were the days of the “gentleman’s C” in the Ivies when it was infra dig to be seen to work too hard. State and city universities were often different, and Catholics had Notre Dame, Fordham and the like.
Hot academic prospects were useful to private colleges if there weren’t too many of them; you needed a few of that sort around, but things got out of hand and the numerus clausus became commonplace and more overt:
Nowadays, affirmative action mostly means government money and regulations involved: favor the right group, there’s money in it; fail to accommodate the grievance du jour and there’s trouble in the streets and trouble from the regulators.
No, I don’t think liberty or the american way survived the mass immigration waves of the early 20th century, and what did survive is being mercy killed by the post 1965 waves.
They remade America in their image. Now, a poem is more indicative of our identity than the 150 years of history that preceded it. Our constitution applies to the world, and not just the progeny of the founders. We debate “progeny” as being people who are Americans by “ideas” rather than the descendants of our founders.
By and large, the biggest supporters of wide open immigration are the ones who have directly benefited from the loosening of those laws, with no nod at all to how the founders restricted immigration.
Y’all are giving Tomi Lahren way too much credit here. Yes, there is a way that her statement is perfectly defensible and makes a good point about the changing nature of immigration over the history of our country. Did she intend it that way? If so, she failed miserably and provided the left with ammunition in their efforts to portray conservatives as xenophobic racist idiots. You’re citing Victor Davis Hanson defending her. Do you know why the left doesn’t use VDH to attack conservatives? Because VDH doesn’t say stupid, lazy blather that can be misinterpreted! People like Lahren who get on TV because they look good and make provocative statements but only have a shallow understanding of what they’re talking about are a discredit to the conservative movement.
My pet examples involve 1965 Nobel Laureat in Physics, Richard Feynman who, in 2000, was named the top physicist of the post-WW2 era.
Since high school, Feynman was self-evidently one of the two top physics students in the country (his rival being Julian Schwinger with whom Feynman ultimately would share his Nobel Prize and who was Feynman’s age but had accelerated a couple of years ahead of Feynman academically).
First, Feynman went to MIT after failing to make the Jewish quota at Columbia.
Second, a passage in the book Genius deals with Feynman’s application to graduate school at Princeton in view of Princeton’s anti-Jewish quotas. The initial quote is from Princeton, the response from MIT:
On of my wife’s psychological practices involves dealing with court-ordered sex offenders. One of her ‘clients’ from Cambodia raped his 11 year-old daughter. Since you don’t need to speak English to rape your child, this guy needed a translator ( which doesn’t exactly enhance the therapeutic experience) so the state (translation: us taxpayers) pays the therapist and the overhead support for the agency, the probation officer, and the translator (!) – all being cheaper than incarceration.
I very strongly doubt that any of Bethany’s ancestors committed such acts and strains on our system.
For this statement to be true, one would have to show that there actually is this monolith called “the conservative movement”. Personally I don’t see it. And if it existed, I am not sure I could support it, certainly not in every instance. Lahren is a young woman whose job it is to pontificate and illustrate, often off the cuff in 30 second sound bites. Its not an easy job. From what I have seen, she’s coming from approximately the same area of the political spectrum as most of us here. But, of course, we always find a way to heap our harshest criticism on our own, or those nearest to us.
We know that at least 2 of my ancestors arrived in Virginia in the 1630’s from England. Their geographical move did not require a change in language or culture (other than to a frontier culture) or nationality, seeing as they had moved to an outpost of England. This was so long ago that it was more than 2 generations before England and Scotland were politically linked (the Acts of Union of 1707) and before John Locke had written texts that would lead to our separation from the mother country (a term almost never used anymore). There are books of ship manifests documenting the English subjects pouring into North America at the time by the thousands. So were they immigrants or settlers? I would say settlers. In a very real sense, many of our ancestors did not, in fact, immigrate here. They moved to western England.
Were subsequent newcomers to what would become America immigrants? I would say yes. Dutch, Germans then Irish then Eastern European Jews and Italians all had to change their language, culture and nationality to become Americans. And this was the goal and the common overarching instruction. Teddy Roosevelt wrote,
“…we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile…We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.“
Why do TR’s instructions not guide the present? Lack of civilisational confidence I think. Belief that everything America has was ill gotten and thus by rights should be made available unconditionally to any body in the rest of the world. And being nice with other peoples money feels so good.
But to Bethany Mandel, bear with some of us for lacking sufficient identification with immigrants…it’s been thirteen generations!
Indeed. VDH would have made a much more cogent argument.
Why does that matter? Is it okay that I immigrated because I’m of European ancestry but my wife’s parents aren’t ok because they are from Asia?
I’m don’t know how clearly articulated Lahren’s principles are, and she isn’t very well informed. She plays to her audience. She’s our version of leftists who get on TV because they look good and make provocative statements but only have a have a shallow understanding of what they’re talking about. They are the foot soldiers of the media wing of the Democrat Party, to which they are useful assets; unfortunately Lahren is now one as well. However, if it’s not Lahren it’ll be someone else. There’s an old Yiddish proverb that says “if you’re meaning to beat a dog, you’re sure to find a stick.”
Victor Hansen has come up on this thread; he’s the rare intellectual who pretty much sticks to what he really knows something about. The interesting thing is that in this case Lahren’s instincts (or maybe prejudices) on this issue were sounder than @bethanymandel‘s even though Mandel is a lot smarter and better educated than Lahren.
Minnesota has a shortage of immigrants from notorious countries. Just send them to us if you are tired of them. Thanks.
I think that most of the folks here have read at least a couple of books in the past year that have shaped their opinions. According to Tomi, that’s just not interesting to her.
That’s what they thought back in the largely mythical glory days of immigration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
This thread will have been useful if it can at least make a dent in the apparently-impossible-to-kill myth that America was once a land of unlimited, unregulated immigration.
She’s on record that she doesn’t read books. I sure as hell wouldn’t be running her career the way she is. She could have just read the news for a few years, read some books, and then did opinion.
That depends, doesn’t it? I’m not sure what you mean by “Asia” but going by sheer land mass, I’ll suppose your inlaws are Chinese. If they have Confucian sensibilities, they are likely to be assets to the USA. If they are Maoists, or sleeper agents for the Chinese government, not so much. That’s not such a theoretical statement for me: My maternal great grandmother immigrated from Belarus or Lithuania and was an avid follower of Emma Goldman. One of her daughters was a card carrying Communist; she was well traveled, particularly for her day. I have long wondered if she was a courier for the CPUSA or their Soviet handlers. If she was, she was an enemy of our country.
That doesn’t keep me from being grateful to have been born here.
I don’t think anyone claims it was.
This is an interesting subject. I think it’s legally very tricky to discriminate in immigration policy in this sense, but I’m not an expert. Of course, if true, this is nuts.
Yes VDH would have made a better argument, so what?
When will you guys realize that the advocates of open borders (left and right) will deliberately misinterpret anything they can anyway. And then you casually grant them license to do so!
On top of that, you grant them the premise that it takes only one person on ‘our’ side to misspeak or show faulty logic to impugn the entire movement! The left ( quite rightly) will not allow you to do that to them, but somehow you believe it’s a legitimate line of reasoning.
Another assumption you’re making is that there might be some mechanism to police these ideological ‘renegades’, or that ‘we’ should all ( another ridiculous notion) speak out and disavow any deviation from the agreed-upon argument (VDH’s, in this case) , and expect that these disavowels and denunciations won’t themselves be used, abused and misconstrued as further evidence that ‘we’ are wrong.
Morever, under this perspective of yours, they get to sit back and watch us argue fine points and attack each other over how to best convince these intransigent partisans of our case, as though they are rational and neutral parties.
This shows me y’all have no business guiding strategy or tactics on issues involving politics.
I dunno. We could certainly look at the social media profile of prospective immigrants and maybe demand access to emails. Of course, that wouldn’t keep out the really well prepared and dangerous ones, would it?
What I mean is, we obviously need to slow way, way down on countries with obviously crappy cultures.
Minnesota is notorious for one country. We also have a ton from a country right next to it. These fellows look the same. The ones from the second country are never in the news, and are all good citizens. From what I can tell, acting accordingly on this is illegal.
I know what you meant, but that was really funny to read. :-)