James' World 2

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In backing a Senate proposal to slash legal immigration, President Trump said he aimed to help Americans “competing for jobs against brand-new arrivals.”  The looser immigration rules in place for half a century, he said, have “not been fair to our people, our citizens and our workers.”

Trump was careful to add that minority workers have been among those “hit hardest” by unfettered immigration. But there is a racially charged history to the idea that immigrant workers depress American wages, an argument that led to the country’s first immigration restriction law: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Chinese workers first came to North America in significant numbers during the California Gold Rush of 1848-1855. Later arrivals helped build the First Transcontinental Railroad. When gold was plentiful and labor was in short supply, the Chinese were tolerated. But when the economy struggled in the 1870s, animosity against Asians grew.

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A lily vendor in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1896. (Arnold Genthe/Library of Congress)

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Click link below for article:

‘Cheap slaves’: Trump, immigration and the ugly history of the Chinese Exclusion Act

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More than 150 years after the Civil War, Confederate memorialization — Southerners’ attempt to rationalize slavery, secession and the Civil War — continues to dominate Southern cities. And yet, from Richmond to New Orleans, protesters and elected officials have recently challenged this public commemoration of the South’s “Lost Cause” by demanding the removal of Confederate flags and public statues of Confederate leaders.

The removal (and re-contextualization) of Confederate monuments is not just about correcting a “false narrative” of Southern history. Rather, it is about exposing and confronting the history of segregation that “lost causism” perpetuated over the last century.

The United States built a sizable portion of its roughly 1,500 Confederate-related sites during the early 20th century, the nadir of American race relations. Over the course of that century, memorialization of the Confederacy became a referendum on what white Southerners thought of the present and hoped for the future.

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Symbols of the Confederacy are about the politics of the present, not the past. (Steve Helber/AP)

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Click link below for article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/07/27/confederate-monuments-are-about-maintaining-white-supremacy/?utm_term=.192311ef43d8

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