Almost four hundred years ago the first immigrants arrived off the shore of Massachusetts to settle in America.
They were a shipload of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants on board the ship, Mayflower.
They remained on board the ship throughout the first winter and by spring, half of the one-hundred and two aboard had died from exposure, scurvy and other contagious diseases.
During the year 1621 the surviving passengers were saved by members of the Native American tribes living in the area, including one who had been kidnapped by a British sea captain and sold into slavery but had escaped and managed to return.
The Pilgrims, as they have come to be called, were taught by the Native-Americans how to grow corn, fish in the streams and draw sap from the maple trees.
In November 1621 their survival was celebrated by a joint feast with the Native American tribal members who had saved them and was the first Thanksgiving.
In the next four centuries scores of immigrants would come to America both voluntarily and involuntarily.
During the two decades following the first Thanksgiving, 20,000 more Puritans arrived from England establishing colonies in New England and upstate New York.
During this period, New York was colonized by the Dutch and the middle colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware were populated by immigrants of Scotch-Irish, German and Swedish descent.
The South saw the emergence of large plantations owned by British settlers who imported African-American slaves who comprised thirty-eight percent of the population while the British and Germans comprised sixty-two percent.
The Irish began arriving in the latter part of that century and into the 1700’s often as indentured servants bound to the masters as another form of economic slavery.
Never missing an opportunity to exploit, Britain exiled sixty-thousand convicts its colony in Georgia.
By 1790 eighty-percent of the population was of British ancestry.
Our first experience with anti-immigration Nativism was embodied in the Know-Nothing Party whose anti-Irish and anti-German platform was their principal ideology. The pary’s efforts were thwarted by the influx of Irish immigrants forced to leave Ireland during the potato famine along with other European immigrants fleeing the various failed revolutions in 1848.
The end of the Mexican war saw instant citizenship conferred on the people living in the territories of New Mexico and California.
Immigrants from all over the world flocked to California during the Gold Rush commencing the following year.
The end of the Civil War brought about the emancipation of the slaves forcibly brought here, although it did not grant them equality or comparable legal status. Despite this hypocrisy, the Government of France bestowed the gift of the Statute of Liberty rising in New York Harbor with a plaque on which is inscribed the sonnet New Colossus by Emma Lazarus and its verse, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”
This was the sight that future immigrants, Italians, Poles, Lebanese, Syrians and Jews fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire first saw as the ships bringing them docked at Ellis Island in the harbor.
Ultimately, Congress began to pass quota laws which favored Europeans. The laws were vigorously enforced even preventing a shipload of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution from entering the United States and forcing it to return to Germany resulting in all aboard it perishing in the Holocaust.
During the same period, American citizens of Japanese descent were interned and their homes and businesses forfeited throughout the duration of World War II.
We have now just completed the most divisive Presidential campaign in my lifetime.
We have a President-Elect who campaigned on deporting undocumented immigrants, some of whom were brought here as infants and know no other home.
He has vowed to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep people fleeing violence in Central America and drug cartels in Mexico from entering.
He campaigned on the promise of banning all Muslims seeking to enter the United States and now proposes a registry for them.
We now have a Chief White House strategist from the alt-right world. A world that celebrates white supremacy and counts among its members Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members.
I have to wonder how we got to this place.
At this writing, the members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota have had water cannons, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, pepper spray and tear gas used on them as the protest the construction of an oil pipeline that endangers their water supply and burial grounds.
The CEO of the company Energy Transfers Partners, that is building the pipeline, Kelcey Warren, has donated over $ 100,000 to Donald Trump’s campaign.
I’m sure he doesn’t expect anything in return.
I also wonder, if the Native-Americans who saved the first immigrants in 1620 knew then, what we all know now, would they have saved them?
Happy Thanksgiving.