News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. June 12, 2015: In National Immigrant Heritage Month and National Caribbean American Heritage Month in the United States, it was shocking to hear the rampage against immigrants by Ann Coulter on Fox’s Sean Hannity recently.
From her tirade, one would have assumed Coulter’s roots ran so deep in this country she was here first and therefore of Native American ancestry.
Yet, Coulter’s heritage is definitively immigrant, running to Ireland, and Germany. Irish immigrants history tells us here in the United States, were widely seen as “white negroes” in Britain and less than in America while German immigrants were known as the “Greens.”
Still in promoting her book, “¡Adios, America! — The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole,” this right winger who undoubtedly knows controversy sells, went off on a tirade against immigrants.
All of course staged wisely to sell her book to right wing Americans who fall for the racist rant any time.
Forget history and her heritage. Coulter was serving up the same rhetoric her forebears has been forced to deal with in the 1800s and early 1900s.
“We need immediate action,” she said. “We need an absolute immigration moratorium mostly just to shut these immigration groups down, because as I go through toward the end, coming up with solutions, I mean, you would think you could just pass a law saying if you’re a criminal, you go home and we will prosecute marriage frauds, and we will prosecute people who lie about meeting refugee status.”
And oh on, it did not end there.
Here’s more from the nonsensical diatribe against immigrants: “We need to end the insane policy of anchor babies, illegal aliens running across the border or arriving, flying in from China, and staying in immigration hotels, giving birth specifically to get American citizenship. By the way, those kids, when they commit crimes and go to prison, they are not counted as immigrants in prison,” said Coulter.
Yet in National Immigrant Heritage Month perhaps Coulter could use a history lesson.
Somehow she must have skipped that one in school – you know the one where many of her Irish forebears fled to America after the potato famine and once here faced many negative stereotyping that was very similar to that of enslaved blacks.
The comic Irishman – happy, lazy, stupid, with a gift for music and dance – was a stock character in American theater and Simian, or a ape-like caricature of the Irish immigrant was also a common one among the mainstream news publications of the day, history tells us.
And her maternal forebears did not fare well either. They were subject to similar negative rhetoric from the “Coulter’s” of their day.
Again as history shows, the Germans arriving in the U.S. often faced prejudice and mistrust just like many immigrants today.
They too also had to overcome language barriers even as their skills came to be resented by Americans at the time, who felt the German craftsmen, merchants and tradesmen were creating too much competition. Many became known as the “Greens” and became the target of anti-immigration groups who accused them of being anarchists.
Yet, here was Coulter, a descendant of Irish and German immigrants, doing to new immigrants exactly what was done to her forebears. Stereotyping!
Forget the fact only Native Americans have any right to spill such Nativist rhetoric.
In this second National Immigrant Heritage Month, it would be wise for those who are quick to denounce immigrants, immigration and immigration reform to take a look back into the bias their own ancestors faced.
Perhaps then they won’t be so quick to dole out the same bias to new immigrants today, especially since as history shows us, we are all immigrants in this great country.
Happy National Immigrant Heritage Month everyone.
