I’ve just finished watching PBS’s The American Experience “The Chinese Exclusion Act”. It goes over the history of Chinese immigrants in the US. Their story is not that much different from the Africans, the Mexicans, the Eastern and Southern Europeans, the Jews or the Irish, only more so. They brought them here to work because Americans wouldn’t do the work, or had the audacity to demand a decent salary for it.

It could have been worse, I suppose. The Indians were exterminated and forced into reservations. An almost perfect and total ethnic cleansing, or even a genocide. The Mexicans were conquered, the lands they stole from the Indians were conquered by the gringos and they found themselves “foreigners” in a country they had settled a century before the Mayflower arrived. The blacks were brought over in chains, and whole nations and religions were imported from the darker, poorer parts of Europe as fuel for the Satanic mills of the Gilded Age. And now we have a whole new generation of Mexicans to pick our fruit, build our cities and buss our tables.

But so what? We had nothing to do with that. Nobody we know had anything to do with that. Either as victims or villains. Even my own family, immigrants a century ago, came as highly skilled workers, “the aristocracy of labor”. My grandparents may have been called “Cuban Niggers” when they arrived, but nobody called ME that. Nobody burned a cross in MY yard. Yo pasaba como blanco as we used to joke amongst ourselves; you couldn’t tell by looking at us or by our accent that we weren’t white.

Its all ancient history. I never knew anyone who owned slaves, and I never met anyone who knew anyone who was a slave. If any of my ancestors owned slaves, or were slaves, it might as well have been in Roman times because I don’t know who they are. Its all in the past, the back time. Its all in the parts of the history book we cluck as we read, saying, “Man, that’s terrible, I’m so glad those days are all behind us.”. It doesn’t matter any more, right? Those days are long gone, right?

But watching that show brought it all back. Its all part of a pattern that keeps repeating, with variations. The Exclusion Act wasn’t fully repealed til after World War II, and the sorry history of Immigration Quotas was still in force when I was old enough to understand what was happening. But the TV show digs up the old newspapers, the debates in Congress, the court cases, the riots, the pogroms, the ghettos, the deliberate and defacto segregations, the deportations, the hypocrisy, the lynchings.

They needed them to build the railroads and work the mines, because there weren’t enough people in the West, so they forced treaties on the Chinese to make it easy for them to come over, and then we brought them over and worked them to death. And when the railroads were finished and the mines were worked out, we made it difficult for them to own property, run businesses, become citizens, or even bring their wives so they could raise families. We did everything we could to get them to leave, after we had invited them to come here and work because they were desperate for jobs. Sound familiar?

Of course its familiar, its how the system works, its how its always worked. We were all nice middle class kids from nice suburban families, we have good liberal educations and solid liberal ideals. All that immigrant bashing and exploitation is shameful and un-American to us, and those working class types who have been bamboozled into forgetting their own history have been manipulated into essentially waging war on people just like their grandparents, and for the same reason. Listen up, assholes. Those people didn’t sneak in here to steal your jobs, they were invited here to take your jobs.

Watch the show, it’ll be on PBS again. You’ll be amazed how similar the rhetoric is, 1870 is not that remote from the 2010s, it will all sound hauntingly familiar. It will look the same for the very same reasons then than are those that matter now. Our blood and soil populism is nothing new, its a cancer that gets deliberately resurrected periodically whenever required or convenient or profitable. Whenever we decide we don’t feel like paying our bills.

There’s nothing new about Trump and Trumpism. He’s as American as cherry pie.