Build that wall

The Europeans kept coming in by the shiploads.  And the original inhabitants of the land were systematically ousted from their homes and lands.

Jill Lepore writes:

Many parts of the country, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, recruited immigrants by advertising in European newspapers.  Immigrants encouraged more immigrants, in the letters they wrote home to family and friends.  "This is a free country," a Swedish immigrant wrote home from Illinois in 1850. ... A Norwegian wrote from Minnesota, "The principle of equality has been universally accepted and adopted."

Maybe the Swede and the Norwegian did not know about the conditions of blacks and the original inhabitants.  Or, maybe they didn't care, and what mattered to them was how the whites were "free" and could enjoy the "principle of equality."

How huge was this white immigration?

European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent [of the U.S. population] in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. ... By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic.

The Catholicism of the new white folk bothered the older white folk who were Protestants.  "By 1850, one in every four people in Boston was Irish.  Signs at shops began to read, "No Irish Need Apply."

To think that America needs to keep immigrants out is a remarkable denial of the country's history.  The current President, who was elected by 63 million racists, openly declares that he would welcome immigrants from Norway but not from "shitholes."

We are yet to reach the critical time of the Civil War.   But, even at this stage of Jill Lepore's history of the US, think again about Frederick Douglass' speech from 1852, in which he thunders:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

When we sing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave," I am not sure who we refer to.