Krugman on the Nativist wave

Know-Nothings for the 21st Century

These days calling someone a “know-nothing” could mean one of two things.

If you’re a student of history, you might be comparing that person to a member of the Know Nothing party of the 1850s, a bigoted, xenophobic, anti-immigrant group that at its peak included more than a hundred members of Congress and eight governors.

More likely, however, you’re suggesting that said person is willfully ignorant, someone who rejects facts that might conflict with his or her prejudices.

The sad thing is that America is currently ruled by people who fit both definitions.

And the know-nothings in power are doing all they can to undermine the very foundations of American greatness.

The parallels between anti-immigrant agitation in the mid-19th century and Trumpism are obvious.

Only the identities of the maligned nationalities have changed.

After all, Ireland and Germany, the main sources of that era’s immigration wave, were the shithole countries of the day.

Half of Ireland’s population emigrated in the face of famine, while Germans were fleeing both economic and political turmoil.

Immigrants from both countries, but the Irish in particular, were portrayed as drunken criminals if not subhuman.

They were also seen as subversives: Catholics whose first loyalty was to the pope.

A few decades later, the next great immigration wave — of Italians, Jews and many other peoples — inspired similar prejudice.

Read the whole piece in the Times.

By the way, the waves of immigrants greeted by The Statue of Liberty were pretty heavily low wage types, many of whom did not speak English.

And criminals were more common among them than in the native population.

Immigrants from Italy, for example, brought us the Mafia.