When I teach about the Holocaust, one of the first questions students ask is: why didn’t the Jews leave? The answer is complicated, but one part isn’t: where would they go? Countries like the US had such restrictive immigration quotas for the parts of Europe from which the Jews were likely to come that we infamously turned back ships. And, so, students ask, why did we do that?
We did it because of that era’s version of the peanut argument.
The peanut argument (more recently presented with a candy brand name attached to it, but among neo-Nazis the analogy used is a bowl of peanuts) has been shared by many, including by members of our administration, as a mic-drop strong defense of a travel ban on people from regions and of religions considered dangerous because, as the analogy goes, would you eat from a bowl of peanuts if you knew that one was poisoned?
People who make that argument insist that they are not being racist, because their objection is, they say, not based in an irrational stereotype about this group. They say it is a rational reaction to what members of this group have really done. And, they say, for the same reason, that they are not being hypocritical: as descendants of immigrants, they are open to safe immigrant groups. These immigrants, unlike their forbears, have dangerous elements.
What they don’t know is that every ethnicity and religion that has come to America has had members that struck large numbers of existing citizens as dangerous—the peanut argument has always been around. And it’s exactly the argument that was used for sending Jews back to death. The tragedies of the US immigration policy during Nazi extermination were the consequence of the 1924 Immigration Act, a bill that set race-based immigration quotas grounded in arguments that this set of immigrants (at that point, Italians and eastern and central Europeans) was too fundamentally and dangerously antagonistic to American traditions and institutions to admit. Architects of that act (and defenders of maintaining the quotas, in the face of people escaping genocide) insisted that they weren’t opposed to immigration, just this set of immigrants.
At least since Letters from an American Farmer (first published in 1782), Americans have taken pride in being a nation of immigrants. And, since around the same time, large numbers of Americans who took pride in being descended from immigrants have stoked fear about this set of immigrants.
Arguments about whether Catholics were a threat to democracy raged throughout the nineteenth century, for instance. Samuel Morse (of the Morse code) wrote a tremendously popular book arguing that German and Irish Catholics were conspiring to overthrow American democracy, which appealed to popular notions about Catholics’ religion being essentially incompatible with democracy. Hostility towards the Japanese and Chinese (grounded in stereotypes that their political and religious beliefs necessarily made them dangerous citizens) resulted in laws prohibiting their naturalization, owning property, repatriation, and, ultimately, their immigration (and, in the case of the Japanese, it led to race-based imprisonment). After the revolutions of 1848, and especially with the rise of violent political movements in the late nineteenth century (anarchism, Sinn Fein, various anti-colonial and independence movements), large numbers of politicians began to focus on the possibility that allowing this group would mean that we were allowing violent terrorists bent on overthrowing our government.
And that’s exactly what it did mean. Every one of those groups did have individuals who advocated violent change.
A large number of the defendants in the Haymarket Trial (concerning a fatal bomb-throwing incident at a rally of anarchists–photo left) were immigrants or children of immigrants; by the early 20th century, people arguing that this group had dangerous individuals could (and did) cite examples like Emma Goldman (a Jewish anarchist imprisoned for inciting to riot), Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Italian anarchists executed murder committed during a robbery), Jacob Abrams and Charles Schenck (Jews convicted of sedition), and Leon Czolgosz (the son of Polish immigrants, who shot McKinley). Even an expert like Harry Laughlin, of the Eugenics Record Office, would testify that the more recent set of immigrants were genetically dangerous (they weren’t—his math was bad).
History has shown that the fear mongerers were wrong. While those groups did all have advocates of violence, and individuals who advocated or committed terrorism, the peanut analogy was fallacious, unjust, and unwise. Those groups also contributed to America, and they were not inherently or essentially un-American.
Looking back, we should have let the people on those ships disembark. Looking forward, we should do the same.
[image: By Internet Archive Book Images – https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14782377875/Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/christianheralds09unse/christianheralds09unse#page/n328/mode/1up, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42730228]