Why Shouldn’t Trump Hate Immigrants?

I knew we were in trouble when I called Nynex to get a phone installed in my apartment after I moved from New York to Massachusetts in 1993 and the electronic voice told me to ‘toca numero dos.’ And right away I knew that the use of a foreign language, particularly Spanish, would ultimately create a social and political issue that could tear this country apart.

What I couldn’t predict then but it’s happening now, was the daily influx of foreign-born folks treading across the Rio Grande, and a political campaigner who happens to be a former President and has made racism directed at immigration to be the central focus of his campaign.

My mother and her parents emigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1923. They got here just before a GOP-sponsored law that went into effect and would have kept them out. At that time, the foreign-born part of the population was 13.2%.

As of 2022, the number of foreign-born U.S. residents has climbed from 13.9 million to 46.1 million, but the percentage of foreign-born in the entire population is still slightly under 14%.

The difference, of course, is that the immigrants who came here between 1870 and 1923 were white, and they didn’t have any opportunity to continue speaking their native tongues, except when they communicated between themselves. They also couldn’t apply…