Governor Rick Perry’s gaffes and the heart and soul of immigration in the US
By: Tom Deignan | Published Tuesday, November 1, 2011, 7:15 PM | Updated Tuesday, November 1, 2011, 7:15 PM
 |
| Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry (AP Photo/Joe Burbank, Pool) |
So Texas Governor Rick Perry went ahead and voiced support for the radial notion that the children of illegal immigrants should be able to pay in-state tuition costs when they attend college.
Furthermore, Perry, running for the GOP nod for the presidency in 2012, suggested that since immigrants tend not to hail from the elite classes, making sure they have access to college might actually pay off for America in the long run.
You know what this means. It may be time to serve up the Perry toast. He may well be done.
Ever since Perry made these comments at a GOP debate late last week, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and other Republicans desperate to make their anti-immigration sentiments clear have been bashing Perry as “soft on immigration” (Rick Santorum’s actual words).
Can Perry survive his admission that, sometimes, you have to “have a heart” when it comes to certain vulnerable citizens? It is amazing, in a race filled with so-called Christians, that this comment would actually cause a stir.
It is also interesting that this immigration scuffle came the same week that venerable, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Oscar Handlin passed away, at the age of 95.
----------------------
READ MORE:Joe Biden: Booing of Iraq gay soldier was 'reprehensible' Chris Christie will only help elect Rick Perry as GOP prez candidate if he runsGOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain is an inspiration for our country Wins Fla. Straw Poll----------------------
Handlin’s most famous work was written way back in the early 1950s. Entitled The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that made the American People, Handlin changed the way we think about immigrants and immigration. He did so at a time of hyper-American patriotism, and, hence, disinterest in all things “ethnic.”
Handlin himself was a wise college investment. He was one of four sons of an immigrant grocer from Russia. And yet he went on to become a Harvard professor, and turned to the Irish for his first book about Boston’s immigrants.
But it was in The Uprooted that he did something quite radical. He looked at the Irish as well as the other major American immigrant groups and argued that, as The New York Times put it, “Immigration -- more than the frontier experience, or any other episode in its past -- was the continuing, defining event of American history.”
Imagine saying this in 1950s America. There had not yet been a Catholic in the White house. World War II had (supposedly) erased so many ethnic differences and immigration quotas from the 1920s had drastically reduced the number of foreign-born Americans.
In fact, in the early 1950s, venerable Ellis Island was shuttered with very little fanfare, and many of its buildings were left to rot.
Handlin, though, captured the misery as well as the drama and triumph of the Irish and Germans and Italians and Slavs who emigrated to the U.S. By implying that the journeys of these humble immigrants -- and not the struggles of the founding fathers or the cowboys in the west – is what “made the American people,” Handlin was doing quite a bold thing in early 1950s America.
This, after all, was an era when adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance passed for social reform.
Since the 1920s, Americans had proven themselves fed up with immigrants. If you want proof of this, check out Ken Burns’ new documentary of the Prohibition-era, set to air on PBS stations Sunday, October 2.
It is no accident that immigration restrictions and the prohibition of alcohol were passed within a few years of each other. The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan also rode to prominence once again in the twenties.
Middle American Protestants were fed up with what they viewed as the corrupt ethnic cities, with their exotic religions and old world vices. Irish pubs and political machines, German radicals, Italian gangsters, all of these flamed fear of the big bad city.
It took 25 years for Oscar Handlin to weed through such stereotypes to find the poetry, the sadness, and the epic heroism, in the immigrant story.
And yet, the likes of Bachmann and Santorum believe that the way to the White House is to blast Perry (of all people) for charging in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants.
The sad part is, such comments have consistently been met with lusty applause at Republican debates, with Bachmann calling for fences "on every mile, on every yard, on every foot" of the Texas-Mexico border.
Almost makes you glad you can still have drink.
Then again, that may change if any of these folks actually get into the Oval Office.
----------------------
READ MORE:Joe Biden: Booing of Iraq gay soldier was 'reprehensible' Chris Christie will only help elect Rick Perry as GOP prez candidate if he runsGOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain is an inspiration for our country Wins Fla. Straw Poll----------------------
9 Comments
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Switch to the desktop site to post a comment.michaelidaho | Oct 04, 2011, 01:34 PM EDT
Well said simplesandy!
gleason | Oct 01, 2011, 01:56 PM EDT
Your article refers to "vulnerable citizens" let me remind you ,they are not citizens,they are illegal!!! The mass of immigrants you refer to later in your piece[of crap] were LEGAL and welcome.
simplesandy | Sep 30, 2011, 01:59 PM EDT
Illegal is Illegal is illegal. WHAT PART OF THAT WORD IS EVERYONE GETTING so CONFUSED ABOUT? I am sick and tired of those saying yes but if. Why have laws if you are going to tiptoe around THEM? So no one's feelings get hurt? I am sorry your child was put here because of your ignorance. What are you teaching them? Go back to the country you came from and do it legally. What really gets me is that they come in not just from Mexico and think they are entitled. WTF!!
allentown | Sep 29, 2011, 04:42 PM EDT
The writer has not researched the Republican candidates backgrounds on illegal immigration. In his 2007 campaign for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney separated himself from John McCains Amnesty plan by declaring that the illegal aliens must go home. In the 2011 Republican campaign the anti-illegal alien feelings of the voters have multiplied so much that Perry's in-State Tuition aid to children of illegal aliens stood out like a sore thumb.
Nicomax | Sep 29, 2011, 12:59 PM EDT
The anti-immigration laws we are seeing in some states even without large immigration populations indicate a concern about not just illegal immigration, but those immigrants who are here legally. Let's face it, "It's them, not their papers". Texas has always had a more progressive view on this topic driven primarily by the demand from employers to not cut off their lucrative, low-wage, low-benefit work force.
DLW12183 | Sep 29, 2011, 11:54 AM EDT
Can I become an Irish Citizen without following laws that Ireland has passed to control emmigration? Look at the duel citizenship requirements that are imposed. My paternal grandfather came from Sligo, I have an official copy of his birth certificate. Because I don't know where my parents were married to get a marriage certificate I can't complete and make application for dual citizenship. Yet the US is being chastized by suggesting that illegal immigrants not be given the same right as a US Citizen. What sense does all this make?
jamieLM | Sep 29, 2011, 10:46 AM EDT
The early immigrants came into the U.S. legally through designated ports of entry. They were legal documented immigrants. The U.S. knew their names & birthdates, their nationalities, their former occupations, and their health status, etc. Also, take a look at the Passenger Lists. With illegal immigration, the U.S. knows nothing about the people who sneak across its borders. Are they terrorists, criminals, or just poor people looking for a job? How many of you have gone to Texas and Arizona and have talked to the people who live there and to those who live along the borders? How can the U.S. hold some people to the standards of legal immigration and not others? Is America going to have legal immigration with requirements to be met to become a citizen of the U.S., or is it just going to throw open its borders and allow everyone in and make them citizens with all the rights and perks that come with U.S. citizenship? It's not fair to demand some people follow the path of legal immigration and allow others to bypass it and then reward them for doing so. Btw: the story of the lives of early immigrants who lived in the big cities in the East is NOT the same story as immigrants who lived in the small towns and cities in the heartland.
joan1954 | Sep 29, 2011, 10:15 AM EDT
As a Texan I agree with wjb1tex to a point. Children of illegal immigrants are victims here as their parents brought them over so they didn't know but if they spent elementary and high school here and were good student why not give them a break and give them in state tuition. One candidate wants to put fences all around Texas then she better look at doing so from Florida all the way across to California.
wjb1tex | Sep 29, 2011, 09:23 AM EDT
Why do you, and others, continue to imply that legal immigration is the same as open borders where anyone can just enter the country at will ? No one that I know is against immigration. Virtually everyone, here in Texas at least, is against illegal immigration. The problems are too numerous to say here. Children who entered many years ago as illegal are a different story and many of us have a more liberal attitude toward them. But don't confuse that with acceptance of allowing illegal immigration.