Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ statement about 800,000 DACA (Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals) kids taking jobs from Americans is myth perpetrated on Americans by a cabal of modern day immigrant restrictionists – the “Know Nothings” of 2017.
For those who are ignorant of American history, a 140-years or so ago, American Anglo-Protestants objected furiously to a tsunami of Irish Catholics fleeing British Protestant-occupied Ireland to America, the America that had humiliated the Irish-hating British in 1783.
As the Irish waves landed in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, secret anti-Irish Catholic societies emerged among Anglo-Protestants. They were so secret that when anyone was asked if they belonged to it, they would reply, “I know nothing.” They became a political party with the name “The Know Nothing Party.” It was 100 percent against immigration by anyone not of British and/or Protestant origin. Their specific target was Irish and Catholic; late in the 19th Century, Know Nothings added Italian Catholics, Russian and Polish Jews and Polish Catholics as targets.
That American epoch is best known by signs throughout America, “No Irish need apply.” (NINA). Politically, their strength lay in the upper Midwest and in Massachusetts, where they controlled the state legislature.
Coincidently, they were also the political heart and soul of the “Manifest Destiny” emotion that swept the country in the 1840s. “Manifest Destiny” meant an America from “sea to shining sea” and was characterized by anti-Catholic and anti-Mexican bias. To steal California, President James Polk secretly sent an operator to California to organize a “5th Column” of expatriate Americans to rebel and take over California militarily from Mexico.
Polk’s covert operator was U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie; he delivered secret instructions from President Polk to the American Consul in California and to U.S. Army officer — John C. Fremont, long before American troops sparked the Mexican War in Texas 1500 miles away from California.
The Know Nothings provided President Polk with a built-in core of support for the theft of California and what is now Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Oklahoma and Kansas as well as seeding the coming Civil War of 1861.
Today’s Know Nothings are trying to con the country into reverting immigration policy to what it was between 1924 and 1965 when immigration was essentially limited to Northern European Protestants. They con with myths and outright lies.
Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (named after Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate General J. T. Beauregard) told the country “that the beneficiaries of the DACA) program ended up denying jobs ‘to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs." Making unproven statements regarding immigrants is as prevalent today as it was with the Know Nothings in the 1800s.
The other main con job by today’s Know Nothings is about immigrant crime. For example, they try to rattle people by declaring that 35 percent or more of federal prison inmates are illegal aliens. That is not true.
First, of the 2.2 million prison inmates in the U.S. less than ten percent are in federal prison —200,000. Of those, 147,300 (78.8 percent) are American citizens; 25,660 (13.7 percent) are Mexican citizens. Others total 7.5 percent. One cannot be a U.S. citizen and an illegal alien. But one can be an ethnic Hispanic and be a U.S. citizen.
It seems the only people on the planet that don’t know the difference between an illegal alien from Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, etc. and a legal Hispanic American is today’s Know-Nothing. They claim that 35 percent of federal prison inmates that are Hispanic by ethnicity are also illegal aliens; but they aren’t. The federal Bureau of Prisons knows the difference. Only 25,660 – 13.7 percent – of federal prisoners are Mexicans citizens, thus illegal aliens number fewer than 13.7 percent, not 35 percent like the Know-Nothings preach. The same statistics show us the despite the attempt by Know-Nothings to frighten America, drug offenders are 46.3 percent of the inmates and 7.9% are in for immigration violations. Violent prisoners are 3.2 percent of the total.
We can conclude the opposite of what Know-Nothings try to convince us of, Illegal aliens from Mexico are mostly in jail for drug offenses including smuggling and for violations of immigration laws – not for violent crimes unless every one of the 3.2 percent violent inmates is an illegal alien from Mexico, or Guatemala, or Colombia, etc.
Back to jobs being stolen by work-permitted DACA people as charged by the United States Attorney General — that is another myth.
In a huge national study by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine in 2016, we find words that contradict Attorney General Sessions: “There is little evidence that immigration significantly affects the overall employment levels of native-born workers.”
The Attorney General, his administration and today’s Know Nothings are wrong about immigrant crime and comical in their insistence that Americans are losing job competition to English-as-a-second-Language (ESL) people brought here as kids. Americans should know that – for the truth shall make them free.
Contreras is the author of “The Armenian Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” (Berkeley Press, 2017) and “The Mexican Border: Immigration, War and a Trillion Dollars in Trade” (Floricanto Press, 2016). He formerly wrote for the New York Times’ New America News Service.
