Herewith, a fresh reminder of how immigration -frenzy can and did go awry. Ken Ringle is an author and journalist.
THE PROFOUND TRUTH ABOUT IMMIGRANTS
By Ken Ringle
The greatest prejudice against immigrants before the present MAGA-fueled hysteria was the West Coast panic against Japanese-Americans resulting in the internment of more than 110,000 behind barbed wire during World War II. Most of those confined were American citizens. No matter. Because of their race and ethnicity they were suspect as potential traitors in our war with Japan.
My father, a Naval intelligence officer, fought earnestly, if futily, against that internment. His years in Japan and his fluency in Japanese language and culture, convinced him of the absolute loyalty to the United States of Japanese Americans. His “Ringle Reports” to his Naval superiors—and ultimately to President Franklin D. Roosevelt—are prized and regularly cited by historians as evidence of one of the greatest government injustices of the 20th Century. They are available on line.
But Kenneth D. Ringle was no starry-eyed liberal. After Pearl Harbor he worked with the FBI to round up some 3,500 legitimately suspect Japanese-Americans for whom he had uncovered unquestioned evidence of espionage. But the entire question of Japanese-American loyalty, he insisted, could and should be determined on an individual basis and not on the basis of race or immigrant prejudice. The Nisei—American-born Japanese-Americans—were better citizens than most of the rest of us, he said.
Though as a career Naval officer he was insistently apolitical (he and his classmates considered their profession a higher calling to national service than that of any party politician), his basic philosophical and governmental instincts were conservative. In retirement during the 1960s he quietly voiced support for Sen. Barry Goldwater. But his reverence for the nation’s immigrant tradition was always unquestioned. His own German and French ancestors had been suspect in the 1700s as insufficiently grounded in British language and culture, he told me, but they and every subsequent wave of arrivals to this land—Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, Latino, Chinese— had enriched and enlivened the promise of America, both economically and spiritually.
“The thing you must always remember about immigrants,” he told me as a child, “is that the best and truest Americans aren’t even here yet. They are somewhere else clinging passionately to the hope and promise they see in this country and our Constitution. Why do you think we have to regulate our borders? It’s all those people from everywhere in the world who want to come here for a better life. They understand it won’t be easy. They know there will be painful difficulties getting here and no guarantee of success when they arrive. We have to regulate their numbers and help them assimilate. But the energy they give us as a nation is what makes our diversity succeed. Those of us born here too often take our freedoms and opportunities for granted. Immigrants never do. They understand this nation better than we do ourselves.”
Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, understands this truth instinctively. But she appears reluctant to praise the immigrants Donald Trump condemns. That should change. She needs to remind us that the virtue of immigrants is not just that they don’t commit crimes or eat pets, but that though their hope and optimism and hard work they remind us how much better citizens we can each become.
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