JD Vance's Sickening Nostalgia for One of America's Most Hateful Eras

The vice president speaks fondly of the 1920s, a period when the Ku Klux Klan was resurgent and many groups of people—including Catholics—were deemed to be un-American invaders.

https://newrepublic.com/article/202625/jd-vance-1920s-immigration-nostalgia-ku-klux-klan-catholics

https://archive.ph/f6NSr


Vance spoke at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi on October 29.

At a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi last week, JD Vance managed—in about a two-minute span, no less—to express disappointment in his wife, Usha, for not converting to Christianity and to call for “far less” immigration in the future. The former comments received the lion’s share of media attention, as Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, said of Usha, who grew up in a Hindu household, “Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church? Yeah, I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.” But the latter comments are undoubtedly more consequential for millions of people living in the United States—and many millions more who wish to do so one day.

It should surprise no one that the Trump administration has sought to reduce not just the number of undocumented immigrants coming to the United States but all types of immigration; the president and his running mate had promised as much on the campaign trail. Yet Vance’s comments at the event were remarkable not just in their nativist extremism but for the unusual historical justification he gave for his immigration position: a notably dark period in America, a full century ago, when racism and bigotry were especially rampant. “If you go back to the 1920s,” Vance told the crowd, “the United States passed an immigration reform act that effectively cut down immigration to close to zero for 40 years in this country. And what happened over those 40 years? Many, many people who had come from many different foreign countries and different foreign cultures, they assimilated into American culture, and there was an expectation that they would assimilate into American culture.”

He went on to note that a friend from a right-wing think tank had once told him that immigration was good because diversity led to mistrust, which would prevent people from joining labor unions, the bane of corporate-friendly conservatives. Pairing the friend’s claim with his own assertion that liberals want to “flood” the country with immigrants (both legal and undocumented, one can presume), and employing the troll’s logic for which he has become known, the vice president concluded that liberals are therefore “destroying the very social trust on which American freedom and prosperity was built.” The appropriate number of immigrants to accept in the future should be “far less” than we have accepted in the past several decades, he argued, because more immigrants prevent us from becoming a “common community.”

The 1920s laws that Vance touted as a boon to American society imposed strict immigration quotas based on national origin. They targeted Southern and Eastern Europeans and Jews in particular for exclusion, since they were seen as inferior by the still-popular eugenicist movement, which perceived Italians as lazy and unhygienic and Jews as naturally conniving. Asians were already barred by previous laws, and the 1920s acts made it clear that they were still not welcome—a policy that would not change until the Johnson administration in the 1960s. Mexicans, however, still needed for labor purposes, were classified by the federal government as “white,” even if they remained second-class citizens for all other purposes, allowing them to come in and work in factories and on farms.

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