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historical African-American views on immigration

Submitted July 10, 2007 - 8:32 am by Jonathan Mills
Hi everyone,

This article, entitled "Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are: Black Americans on Immigration" is something I actually remember reading a couple years back and thinking it was interesting -- it's basically an exposition of historical African-American (late-19th to early-20th century) views on immigration. It describes how 'such dissimilar figures as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey' were united in their view that immigration harmed Blacks.

I'm not trying to prove anything here -- this article doesn't prove anything per se, in any case -- but I thought it was interesting and somewhat relevant to the discussion we're having.

(Here's the intro)

'On the issue of immigration, contemporary Americans, and especially African Americans, need to be guided by two lessons from history. The first, from the New Testament, says that "without vision, the people perish." The second warns that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

'Unfortunately, many African American political leaders and intellectuals do not heed these lessons with regard to immigration. They either are ignorant of the insights of their forerunners or they fail to understand how similar today's conditions are to those during the previous wave of mass immigration.'

http://www.cis.org/articles/1996/paper10.html

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