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Showing posts from April 25, 2006

Russians, Italians, Poles...

Peter Schrag in an April 2, 2006 Sacramento Bee article about his new book, California: America's High-Stakes Experiment , quotes a once major political figure as saying: "...races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes ... and do not promise well for the standard of civilization in the United States. ... That kind of immigrants \ reduce the rate of wages by ruinous competition, and then take their savings out of the country, are not desirable. They are mere birds of passage. They form an element in the population which regards home as a foreign country, instead of that in which they live and earn money. They have no interest or stake in the country, and they never become American citizens." It was a quote by Rep. (later Sen.) Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts about Russians, Italians, Poles and Hungarians then immigrating by the millions a century ago. Similar fears were also being bandied about by other major pol