IMMIGRATION, DISCRIMINATION... RACE.

Obama’s Speech on Race
Interactive video and transcript of Senator Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia on March 18.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/03/18/us/politics/20080318_OBAMA_GRAPHIC.html#

MELTING POT OR A BOWL OF MIXED SALAD?

Bites of life
The history professor and food specialist Panikos Panayi tells Harriet Swain that dishes don't have a specific nationality Interview by Harriet Swain


Soon after starting research for his book on the multicultural history of food, Panikos Panayi found his name on a rightwing website, under the heading "Know your enemy". A serious, slightly diffident professor of European history at De Montfort University, he had committed a supposedly hostile act by raising the possibility that fish and chips may not be entirely British. Frying was a typically Jewish way of eating fish, he had suggested, while chips were probably pre-dated by French pommes frites. The idea proved so controversial that it prompted newspaper headlines. Some interpreted the attempt to deconstruct a British national dish as akin to attacking the nation itself.

It was a clear demonstration of how intimately connected people perceive food and national identity to be. But according to Panayi, this perception is wrong. He argues that dishes don't have a nationality. Examine any one of them closely and you are likely to find influences from all over the world, not only in the ingredients but in the way they are served and eaten. Rather than being a symbol of nationality, he says, "what people eat is a really important symbol of the integration and assimilation process". In his view, it is impossible to understand what British food, and especially eating out in Britain, is about without also studying immigration.

Taken from: The Guardian, Tuesday April 15, 2008

THE DOOR TO AMERICA...

Coming to America: Ellis Island and New York City

by Vincent CannatoProfessor of History, University of Massachusetts

New York City is a kind of archipelago, a Philippines on the Hudson River. Only one borough – the Bronx – is actually attached to the American mainland. There are some forty islands in the city beyond Manhattan, Staten Island and Long Island. These minor islands are nestled in the bays, rivers, harbor, and other waterways that encase the city. Many of the city’s islands once served important social functions and some still do. As the city grew in population northward up the island of Manhattan, along with it came the pesky social problems that tend to afflict any budding metropolis. Under such circumstances, these islands became “cordon sanitaires” in the words of writer Phillip Lopate, “where the criminal, the insane, the syphilitic, the tubercular, the orphaned, the destitute . . . were quarantined.”

The most famous of these small islands is Ellis Island, originally little more than a three-acre bank of sand and mud that barely kept its head above high tide. By 1891, it would become the site of the federal government’s new immigration inspection station. Immigration inspection had become recently federalized, taking the power away from state governments.Americans had recently become concerned with the “quality” of immigrants arriving in the country. This coincided with a dramatic shift in immigration away from Northern and Western Europeans toward Southern and Eastern Europeans. “Lunatics and Idiots Shipped from Europe” and “The World’s Dumping Ground,” screamed newspaper headlines.

The 1891 Immigration Act would set the course of American immigration policy for the next thirty years. It expanded the types of “undesirable” immigrants, so that Ellis Island officials would be on the lookout for “idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become public charges, persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous disease, persons who have been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, polygamists. . .” In the coming decades, the list would grow longer.The system of immigration inspection and regulation at Ellis Island was designed to provide the nation with a “proper sieve” that would separate “desirable” from “undesirable” immigrants. This was a bit of a compromise, a middle ground position between those who upheld the laissez-faire notion that the country should be open to all immigrants (at least white European ones) and those who argued for tighter restrictions.The sifting process at Ellis Island, improved throughout the years, meant strict scrutiny of new arrivals. Inspectors and doctors were looking for physical problems such as poor eyesight, bad backs, trachoma, or other potentially contagious diseases. Inspectors kept an eye open for suspected prostitutes, anarchists, and those “likely to become a public charge.”

To enforce the nation’s expanding immigration laws, a fairly sophisticated bureaucratic system was created at Ellis Island to interpret and execute those laws.Roughly twenty percent of immigrants passing through Ellis Island were set aside for further inspection, while the rest passed through Ellis Island without incident. Yet overall, only about two percent of immigrants were excluded from entering the country and sent back to Europe. Part of the reason for such a low figure was that steamship companies had an economic incentive not to bring immigrants who might run afoul of immigration laws, since the steamships were forced to pay the costs of returning these rejected migrants back to Europe. In 1905 alone, it was estimated that steamship companies at Bremen had refused to sell tickets to some 8,000 potential Americans.

Ellis Island’s connection with New York City was natural. Some three-quarters of all immigrants to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came through the Port of New York, and many of them ended up staying in the city’s crowded tenement districts. Such conditions provided fodder for immigration restrictionists such as Ellis Island Commissioner William Williams. Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Williams wrote in one of his annual reports, “have very low standards of living, possess filthy habits, and are of an ignorance which passes belief. Types of the classes referred to representing various alien races and nationalities may be observed in some of the tenement districts of Elizabeth, Orchard, Rivington, and East Houston Streets.”

Yet those same New York neighborhoods also produced numerous immigrant aid associations designed to help immigrants with their transition into their new homeland. In addition, these organizations provided help in challenging restrictive interpretations of the law at Ellis Island, as well as decisions to exclude individual immigrants.

One New Yorker best embodied the conflicting attitude toward immigrants: the patrician Theodore Roosevelt. Early in his public career, Roosevelt complained about the “evil effects of unrestricted immigration” and supported a literacy test for newcomers. One of his closest friends, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, was the nation’s leading restrictionist. Yet because of his New York City roots, Roosevelt kept in steady contact with the city’s ethnic and religious leaders, always solicitous of their opinions. As President, Roosevelt’s motto on the subject was: “We can not have too much immigration of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the wrong kind.”

Eventually, the regulation of immigration at stations like Ellis Island gave way to stricter measures. The quotas of the 1920s not only severely restricted immigration both in number, especially for those from Southern and Eastern Europe, but it also moved the primary responsibility for immigration inspection to American consulates abroad. Ellis Island found its role in processing immigrants gradually lessened. Increasingly, it served as a detention center, housing suspected Nazi and fascist sympathizers during World War II and suspected Communists and other radicals awaiting deportation in the early Cold War years.

By 1954, an increasingly irrelevant Ellis Island closed its doors.The decline and abandonment of Ellis Island paralleled the post-war prosperity that led many second and third-generation Americans to shed much of their ethnic baggage as they assimilated into society, rose into the middle class, and moved to the suburbs. Thanks to quota restrictions, immigration was at historic lows. By 1960, only 5.4 percent of Americans were foreign-born. The deterioration and neglect of Ellis Island in the 1960s and 1970s also mirrored the declining fortunes of New York City and other urban centers as the process of suburbanization continued to drain the city of people and resources.

Immigration is once again a hot button issue and New York City has re-emerged as a major immigrant center. Nearly forty percent of city residents are foreign-born. Today’s immigrants do not have an Ellis Island experience, but instead enter the country through airports and across the nation’s land borders. Yet Americans are still confronting issues such as how many immigrants we should receive and what kinds of restrictions, if any, there should be.

Ellis Island still looms in the American imagination. The once-dreary bureaucratic outpost has been transformed into a popular tourist attraction and replaced Plymouth Rock in the American iconography as the site of the nation’s mythic founding. It has been estimated that some forty percent of Americans have at least one ancestor who passed through Ellis Island.

But even the rehabilitation of Ellis Island has not been without controversy. Some worry that the idea of America as a “nation of immigrants,” embodied by the rebirth of Ellis Island and its newfound role as a national shrine, leaves out Americans who did not come to America voluntarily or who were already here before European settlement. Other critics of the “shrinification” of Ellis Island worry that the celebration of Ellis Island and those immigrants who passed through it can end up glorifying older immigrants and unfairly comparing them to newer immigrants.

As America deals with the challenges of our latest wave of mass immigration, it will do so without Ellis Island, the immigrant processing center. But Ellis Island as myth, as a memory place, still has an important hold on the American imagination, and future generations will grapple with both its historical meaning and its relevance to contemporary, multicultural America.

Adapted from http://www.historynow.org/03_2007/historian2.html

THE GREAT POTATO FAMINE

Ireland is in your hands, in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself. I solemnly call upon you to recollect that I predict with the sincerest conviction that a quarter of her population will perish unless you come to her relief.

Daniel O'Connell to the British House of Commons, 1847.

The Great Hunger

Nicholas Cummins, the magistrate of Cork, visited the hard-hit coastal district of Skibbereen. "I entered some of the hovels," he wrote, "and the scenes which presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive -- they were in fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail. Suffice it to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe, [suffering] either from famine or from fever. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain."

Coffin Ships
During the Famine period, an estimated half-million Irish were evicted from their cottages. Unscrupulous landlords used two methods to remove their penniless tenants. The first involved applying for a legal judgment against the male head of a family owing back-rent. After the local barrister pronounced judgment, the man would be thrown in jail and his wife and children dumped out on the streets. A 'notice to appear' was usually enough to cause most pauper families to flee and they were handed out by the hundreds. The second method was for the landlord to simply pay to send pauper families overseas to British North America. Landlords would first make phony promises of money, food and clothing, then pack the half-naked people in overcrowded British sailing ships, poorly built and often unseaworthy, that became known as coffin ships.

The first coffin ships headed for Quebec, Canada. The three thousand mile journey, depending on winds and the captain's skill, could take from 40 days to three months. Upon arrival in the Saint Lawrence River, the ships were supposed to be inspected for disease and any sick passengers removed to quarantine facilities on Grosse Isle, a small island thirty miles downstream from Quebec City.

But in the spring of 1847, shipload after shipload of fevered Irish arrived, quickly overwhelming the small medical inspection facility, which only had 150 beds. By June, 40 vessels containing 14,000 Irish immigrants waited in a line extending two miles down the St. Lawrence. It took up to five days to see a doctor, many of whom were becoming ill from contact with the typhus-infected passengers. By the summer, the line of ships had grown several miles long. A fifteen-day general quarantine was then imposed for all of the waiting ships. Many healthy Irish thus succumbed to typhus as they were forced to remain in their lice-infested holds. With so many dead on board the waiting ships, hundreds of bodies were simply dumped overboard into the St. Lawrence.

Others, half-alive, were placed in small boats and then deposited on the beach at Grosse Isle, left to crawl to the hospital on their hands and knees if they could manage. Thousands of Irish, ill with typhus and dysentery, eventually wound up in hastily constructed wooden fever sheds. These makeshift hospitals, badly understaffed and unsanitary, simply became places to die, with corpses piled "like cordwood" in nearby mass graves. Those who couldn't get into the hospital died along the roadsides. In one case, an orphaned Irish boy walking along the road with other boys sat down for a moment under a tree to rest and promptly died on the spot.

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/index.html