America’s Immigrants

Donald Trump has made immigration a hot-button issue in the two years that he has been politically relevant. From starting off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers to enacting a travel ban that functions to discriminate against Muslim people only 8 days into his presidency, Trump displays some of the same xenophobic rhetoric that was directed at Jews and Italians a hundred years ago. 20th century immigrants and refugees were stereotyped as being filthy, greedy, and crime-prone. Similarly, modern American newcomers are viewed as economic and security threats who will steal American jobs, threaten American lives, and infringe upon American ideals and values. Xenophobia has been around for a long time and as long as people have espoused nationalistic or isolationist ideologies, there have been more liberal or cosmopolitan counterbalances that seek to help out or tell the plight of the oppressed and discriminated against. Jacob Riis was one of these Progressive muckrakers who sought to tell the story of the Lower East Side Jews and their squalid conditions. However, in doing this, Riis also succeeds in defining the Jewish community by their stereotypes and ends up perpetuating these harmful racial and ethnic stereotypes. By characterizing the Lower East Side Jews solely by their struggle and their challenges, Riis creates a one-dimensional impression of the group of people. By only highlighting their filthy conditions and their economic ambition, he makes those the defining features of an entire community. We see similar patterns of behavior in the modern day, but on a much larger scale. Social media makes it easy for sympathetic people to share heart-wrenching stories about immigrant or refugee people on Facebook and have them reach a wide audience and elicit widespread emotional responses. While being aware of humanitarian crises and issues is important and essential to the progress, it also makes it so that the struggle of marginalized people is reduced to a facebook post as opposed to a complex issue. As immigrants and refugees face greater harm under the Trump regime, it is essential to understand these people and these issues as greater and more complex than a social media post.