America The Paranoid

I was checking out the news, looking for something interesting -- like scientists discover flying gene or x-ray vision gene -- and noticed a bar in Google news that allowed me to look at news archives. It is very rare that news is ever, "new," the same topics are always rehashed, replayed or recycled. In spite of wanting to be original, I searched immigration (I like to recycle), no surprise -- up popped an article from The New York Times analyzing the threat of increased immigration from Central Europe. We all know Nativism (see Gangs of New York) has been alive and well in America since Dutch settlers began scalping Native Indians, but check out a line below from the Times article titled, "The Main Immigration Question."

"Already we are in a period of widespread unemployment and of drastic wage cuts; already the lack of efficient Americanization presents problems and dangers beyond anything we have ever known. Yet by the Inter-racial Council's own showing we are confronted by a volume of immigration which is approaching the maximum."

This sounds very familiar. It's been more than 80 years, and we are still with the same weak argument; however it is a new America and the maximum is always changing.

If you want to read the article, check it out.