Bloggings: Thanksgiving: The Anti-Immigration Holiday by Jason Dzubow

[ImmigrationDaily]

Bloggings On Political Asylum

by

Jason Dzubow

Nov 26, 2012

Thanksgiving: The Anti-Immigration Holiday

Last week, I posted about how Thanksgiving is the quintessential refugee holiday.* I didn’t want to say anything negative about Thanksgiving before the holiday, as that would be a bit of a humbug.* But now, enough time has passed that most of the leftover Turkey is gone, and now I want to write about the more challenging side of the holiday for immigration advocates.* Of course, I speak about the fact that the immigrants in the Thanksgiving scenario (the Europeans) essentially eradicated the original inhabitants of their new country (the Native Americans).

*

Europeans were generally not known for being cordial to the Native Americans.

It has always surprised me that more anti-immigration folks don’t use Thanksgiving as an example of what happens when immigration runs amok.* Fifty years after the first Thanksgiving, most of the Wampanoag tribe (the Native Americans who dined with the Pilgrims in 1621) were either dead or sold into slavery.* From an estimated population of 6,600 in 1610, the Wampanoag were reduced to only about 400 individuals by 1677 (they have since recovered somewhat – in 2000, the estimated population was 2,336).* In short, while the first Thanksgiving was lovey-dovey, things didn’t end too well for the native peoples who received the new immigrants.* But this is something we rarely hear about from immigration restrictionists.

I suppose one reason that Thanksgiving is not used by immigration opponents is that it’s not easy to be anti-Thanksgiving.* Thanksgiving is probably the most popular non-religious holiday in the U.S., and to oppose Thanksgiving might seem un-American (in fact, to oppose Thanksgiving is un-American).* Since immigration opponents always seem to be uber patriots, I guess they do not want to be seen opposing the holiday.

Another reason that the holiday is not used against immigrants is that the analogy between European settlers/colonialists and modern-day immigrants really does not stand up.* The settlers of old were not trying to integrate into the indigenous culture; they were trying to conquer it.* Even if–as some restrictionists might argue–modern day immigrants do not integrate into mainstream society, they are clearly not in the same position to conquer our country as the settlers who conquered the New World.* We are much larger and more unified than the pre-Colombian indigenous peoples.* The number of immigrants coming to the U.S. these days is much smaller proportionately than the number of Europeans coming here in the colonial period.* Finally, most Native Americans died from diseases, and–Lou Dobbs notwithstanding–that is not a real threat to us today (at least not because of immigration).* So even if restrictionists wanted to use Thanksgiving as a cautionary tale about too much immigration, the analogy is weak.

Thanksgiving is frequently cited by pro-immigration types (and pro-asylum types like me).* I do think the holiday could be used to raise questions about immigration: How much immigration is good for our country, whether immigrants appropriately integrate into our society, how best to handle people who are here illegally.* But for restrictionists, maybe it is safer and more effective to raise those issues separately from the Thanksgiving holiday.* That’s fine with me, as I am a fan of Thanksgiving.* Now if you’ll excuse me, I know we have some leftover cranberry sauce around here somewhere…

Originally posted on the Asylumist: www.Asylumist.com.

---

About The Author

Jason Dzubow's practice focuses on immigration law, asylum, and appellate litigation. Mr. Dzubow is admitted to practice law in the federal and state courts of Washington, DC and Maryland, the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Fourth, Eleventh, and DC Circuits, all Immigration Courts in the United States, and the Board of Immigration Appeals. He is a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) and the Capital Area Immigrant Rights (CAIR) Coalition. In June 2009, CAIR Coalition honored Mr. Dzubow for his Outstanding Commitment to Defending the Rights and Dignity of Detained Immigrants.In December 2011, Washingtonian magazine recognized Dr. Dzubow as one of the best immigration lawyers in the Washington, DC area; in March 2011, he was listed as one of the top 25 legal minds in the country in the area of immigration law. Mr. Dzubow is also an adjunct professor of law at George Mason University in Virginia.

---

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) alone and should not be imputed to ILW.COM.

[Don Miller]

The same argument can more effectively be used to counter all the "open-border" types on this site. Do you not see any similarity between the fate of the native inhabitants in the Americas as ever-increasing numbers of Europeans arrived and settled in the country and the present situation in the U.S.?
We are experiencing the very same phenomenon right now in the United States with the migrating hordes of illiterate and unskilled Spanish-speaking peoples from Mexico, Central America, et al, pouring into the country legally and illegally. Anthropologists and demographers recognize that there are demographic "tipping-points"...that line which, when crossed, flips the receiving society in favor of the arriving immigrants. We know empirically that this is true, whether or not Americans want to recognize it and it can happen (and will happen) here. Even now, there are large areas of some states and cities, and some entire towns, that have become, through immigration alone, not military conquest, de facto extensions of northern Mexico. Many of these places as recently as ten years ago had never seen a Mexican; I cite for you Siler City here in North Carolina, Liberty, IA, Sanford NC, and countless others: including all of south Texas, most of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of New England and the Midwest. There can be no doubt that Spanish is presently the de facto second official language in the country and we now have, in Greensboro NC, magnet schools in which American children may go from k-9 all in Spanish.
That this is resented and rejected by large numbers of Americans is perfectably understandable except to the writers on this site. There is not a nation or people on this earth which would willingly welcome their country being transformed by an immigrant alien horde. The American native peoples did not, and we praise and admire them for their brave albeit futile resistance while at the same time white Americans who do the same thing vis-a-vis the Latin American invasion are excoriated! Smacks greatly of hypocrisy to me. If the American native inhabitants had a right to their languages and cultures, so do Euro-Americans. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, et al, have their own countries, their cultures, their traditions. No one is trying to usurp their rights to their own heritage, yet we Americans are somehow "wrong" for wanting to retain our own culture in our own country.
I and many millions of Americans do not want to live in northern Mexico, we do not want to "press two for English", we do not want to have to speak Spanish in order to function in our stores and businesses, and we do not want all the cultural baggage of Latin American bottom-feeders inflicted on our country (MS 13, anyone?).
Demography is destiny, as proven by the fact that we are not communicating in some form of Welsh or Old English.