Immigrant Demonization Continued
“Latino immigrants are victims of [calumny and exaggerated generalizations, while they admittedly do the most thankless] labor, which is still mistakenly looked down upon. They clean toilets, handle trash, and work ten-hour days or longer in one-hundred-degree weather, picking produce or building American homes, offices, and roads. In other words, they do all the menial labor most Americans do not desire to do, and they are not well paid for it. This is the typical position of an immigrant. Latino immigrants are not different from the immigrants in the nineteenth century, from whom many Americans are descended.
“Past immigrants [from Ireland, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe], from whom many contemporary American immigration reform opponents are descended were called dirty, stupid, disease-ridden, prone to criminality, and uneducated, and they were told to go back home where they belonged. Indeed, many of them committed crimes and brought organized crime into the country. Some exhibited vices such as alcoholism or wife-beating, and possessed little knowledge of or capacity for the English language. These immigrants bore children at rates higher than the American citizen population, and they often lived in slum-like areas that were eyesores and safety hazards. Yet the majority of them were of goodwill. They worked the most menial jobs that other Americans would not work, and through their hard work and discipline they became increasingly stable over several generations.”