Immigration Obfuscation

Armenian refugees in Syria (1915-1916) (Photo: Public Domain/Near East Foundation)

I read with interest the article titled “Where do Descendants of Immigrants Stand on Modern Immigration?” written by Brent Currie and published in the Armenian Weekly on September 11, 2019. For years now I and, I would guess, many other Armenians have read interviews with Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, and pondered how a grandson of Genocide survivors could possibly voice such anti-immigration views as “If You Want Less Income Inequality, Then Enforce Immigration Laws” [@MarkSKrikorian September 13, 2019].

Krikorian thinks immigration encourages nationalism. He has attended workshops by John Tanton and termed a racist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was against the Dream Act, which would have granted permanent residency to immigrants who entered the country as children. Actually, he would like to stop most immigration, admitting only Einsteins and perhaps those married to citizens. He supports Trump’s policy of deporting any “illegal aliens” found in the US (”so they don’t put down roots in America” (New Republic, June 19, 2019). This includes asylum seekers who are running from violent spouses or violent criminals. (One victim of domestic violence was murdered by her spouse as soon as she was removed from the United States.) The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated his organization (CIS) an anti-immigrant hate group “for its repeated circulation of white nationalist and antisemitic writers in its weekly newsletter and the commissioning of a policy analyst who had previously been pushed out of the conservative Heritage Foundation for his embrace of racist pseudoscience.” [medium.com] 

Krikorian argues that today’s immigrants should be rejected because while the supplicants trying to enter may be the same, our country is now different. His argument: immigration weakens our national identity (although it’s unclear what he thinks that is) and limits opportunities for our upward mobility. But, of course, he neglects the fact that immigrants are not generally competing with citizens for jobs; they often tackle jobs that most Americans don’t want. Without immigrant help, strawberries rot in the ground, summer resorts cannot open, nail salons close, sewing machines are unmanned, taxi drivers are harder to find, the list goes on. Nor are immigrants overrunning our country. According to bushcenter.org (yes, that Bush), immigrants only account for 13.5 percent of the total population. Almost 12 million workers are employed by Fortune 500 companies started by immigrants, and they are more likely to have college degrees than native-born Americans. Those who don’t are willing to start at the bottom—witness Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, at one time an undocumented immigrant who started by picking tomatoes, corn and broccoli and is now a brain surgeon at Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital. Armenians should recognize this trajectory: it was followed by some of our grandparents and great grandparents when they first came to the US. 

So what is that about—this hatred, perhaps fear, of immigrants? It is certainly not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the same kind of behavior was evident after the Armenian Genocide. The fact that Krikorian’s family immigrated here safely is more a fluke of history than evidence of a nation’s humanistic immigration policies. As we are fond of saying, America is a land of immigrants—having made short work of the indigenous people who got here first. Our doors were relatively open to immigrants, especially those of European heritage, for many years. Between 1880 and 1920, Americans took in more than 20 million immigrants. However, xenophobia boiled over by 1917 as America entered the war, and the US passed the Immigration Act of 1917 that established a literacy requirement for immigrants and stopped immigration from most Asian countries. Between the late 1880s to 1914, over 50,000 Armenians immigrated to the US through Ellis Island, but once the war started, immigration became virtually impossible.

It is not an accident that the Armenians were abandoned by the west during and after the Genocide. Once the war was over, the US lost no time is cozying up to Turkey who controlled access to Mosul oil. Indeed, an early and infamous example of “fake news” titled “Turkey Reinterpreted” was written by US Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester and published in the New York Times September issue of Current Affairs to mute stories of the desperate fate of the Armenians during the Genocide so the United States would not turn against the Turkish government:  

The Armenians in 1915 were moved from the inhospitable regions where they were not welcome and could not actually prosper to the most delightful and fertile part of Syria…where the climate is as benign as in Florida and California whither New York millionaires journey every year for health and recreation. This was done at great expense of money and effort. 

Colby was the admiral who controlled the fleet in the waters off Smyrna in 1922 and under whose direct orders US naval personnel were prevented from saving the desperate Armenians and Greeks who had thrown themselves into the sea to escape the fires that the Turks had set in the city. This admiral knew the truth. It was simply inconvenient when getting rich is the goal. In October 1922 Albert MacKenzie in the New York Times Current History refuted Chester’s comments, calling them “pernicious,” which of course they were. MacKenzie does not pull a punch: he attacks Chester’s assertions with the clarity and power of one who spent eight months traveling the interior of Turkey after the Genocide, pleading with the authorities to allow the “spectres that have survived” to be taken to the American hospital. “Oftentimes permission was refused.” The Turkish Inspector “begrudged them their lives.” One by one MacKenzie obliterated Chester’s assertions with his own direct experience. This is no “benign” climate, for example; this is the killing fields. Chester’s lies were a deliberate scheme to change the narrative in order to curry favor with the Turks, and he and others got away with it, so much so that when news started leaking out a decade or more later from Germany that Jews were being attacked, the press was hesitant to report it on the front pages at first because they did not want to be “fooled” again. In 1915 we were the “starving Armenians” in newspaper headlines about the Genocide. While that did not affect US policy, it did produce some action in the nonprofit sector as Americans donated money to save Armenian children from the “ravages of the Turkish sword” as the posters demonstrated. However, once the war was over, those stories stopped, and the deserts of Der Zor became Florida beach sand. Suddenly the Turks were our nation’s friends, and Armenians trying to escape were ignored. We have been fighting this “fake news”—various forms of genocide denial—for over a century.

Until 1921 US immigration law was relatively generous. While being “oriental” was a distinct disadvantage, as seen in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (which affected Armenians at one point until they “proved” in court that they were Caucasian), the country did not have a quota system—until 1921. In that year an immigration law was passed that set numerical limits on who could enter the US: immigration was restricted to three percent per year of US residents from their country of origin as of the census of 1910. In 1924 when the act was revised, those figures were changed to two percent based on the census of 1890, making immigration even more difficult. On December 20, 1921 the Associated Press in Washington published a story that demonstrated the tragic results of this restrictive immigration policy: 17 Armenians, women and children, were murdered in Constantinople. They had come to the United States to seek safety but were deported back to Turkey as being in excess of the quota. Among them were the mother and sister of a young Armenian student who was studying in Boston. 

Why go over this painful ground one more time: because Mr. Krikorian wants to make distinctions between people then and people now. He thinks that we are different, that we cannot accept large numbers of immigrants, that our economy cannot absorb such people. He should talk to the hotel owners on the east coast, the farmers in California, the lawn care personnel in American suburbs. I am singling out Krikorian because he makes himself quite the target, but I have heard other Armenians voice such opinions, and I find this shocking. Far more important than jobs or racial tensions or nationalistic fervor is what many of us just cannot accept: caging small children, allowing people to die in our custody and sending innocent people back to their home countries to die whose only “crime” is trying to save their lives and those of their family members. If being genocide survivors confers anything upon us, it should be empathy. Without that no important lessons have been learned—by anyone.

Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy

Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy

Dr. Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy is a retired professor and chair of the Department of Writing at Ithaca College. She is currently a visiting English professor at UMass Amherst and a recent fellow at the University of Massachusetts Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Humanities from Syracuse University and studied under Jacqueline Rose in Cornell’s School for Criticism and Theory. She has published scholarly articles as well as personal essays and poetry in such journals as Raft, edited by Vahe Oshagan, the Journal of Poetry Therapy, and Ararat, edited by her mentor Leo Hamalian. She has published scholarly articles, personal essays, poetry and three books: Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice, co-edited with Charles Anderson, The Mind’s Eye: Image and Memory in Writing About Trauma, and Sacred Justice: The Voices and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis. She has given many talks on Operation Nemesis and inter-generational trauma for Armenian communities and colleges and universities.
Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy

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12 Comments

  1. You skew what he is saying to what you believe he is saying in your echo chamber. Illegal economic migrants are no where near comparable to Armenian refugees. Did USA make mistakes in the past? Yes! So did every country in WWI, then they repeated that mistake again in WWII. I was a refugee. I didn’t flee Azerbaijan because the economy wasn’t doing good. I was fleeing because they were going to murder my family and me. So to compare my family to some Salvadorans that want to make a quick buck is like spitting in my face. We were in a basement for 2 years waiting for our paperwork while Jose and Yolanda and their 1 year old dreamer kid can jump the border and its OK with you, they become immigrants(legal) and their kids are dreamers! They get health care on the tax payer dime? Free college, don’t have to pay taxes…etc..etc.. To be blunt, no one is trying to kill Jose and Yolanda because they are hispanic. There isn’t a genocide in Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, El Salvador, etc. etc. However, I am all open to opening quotas for the United States for Legal Refugees and Legal Immigrants. But you better put a limit on it, if you don’t, how many? 1000, 100000, 1000000 per year? Because in the end, this will change America you Love. It will morph into something else, it will lose what America is. Suppose Armenia opened its borders and let in a bunch of Kurds from Syria to resettle throughout Armenia. Would it still be Armenia? Would it still be your homeland or something else? I’m asking you sincerely.

    • I look forward to comments because because I know this issue strikes at the heart of many of us. Clearly, you have personal experience that informs your opinions. However, let’s not make assumptions. I am not saying refugees should pour in unfettered and not have to pay taxes. What I am saying is when human beings find themselves under permanent existential threat, when their children are being murdered–wherever they are–when families are being destroyed, whether by violent criminal gangs or genocidal mobs, the rest of us must take notice. I am not arguing that such refugees deserve free college; I am saying they deserve to live.

    • Also I don’t believe that anyone deserves free college. I also didn’t say refugees, please don’t mix illegal immigrants and refugees in the same context that’s just disingenuous of you. Asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are no way near comparable to a refugee is my point. Also I forgot to ask, how many immigrants in your mind or asylum seekers or refugees since you pile them all into one category. How many per year is enough, you know 2 million, 3 million, what number is good enough for you?

  2. Well said!
    I’m often dismayed by Armenians who show so little compassion for the ‘other’.
    May our nation’s tragedy teach us compassion – let it make us better humans.
    It’s all too easy to fall into the traps of hatred, fear and xenophobia.

    • But show me your actions poppy, actions are what defines us. I can say all day long that I am a better person and virtue signal all my little virtues I’ve assigned to myself. Thoughts and Feelings don’t equate to actual hard evidence of helping people. I don’t see the upper middle class San Francisco Americans opening their homes to Juan and Julia from “name a country”. No the poor have to give up their homes for these illegals. But the leftists say they are fleeing some fake conflict that was fed to them by leftist lawyers that support illegal immigration. In the end the leftists can get more bottles of wine for a lot cheaper than if the winery had to pay an American to do it. So in the end the middle class suffers, in the end you are only as good as your actions versus your feelings of dismay.

  3. America should let in any Turk who wants to flee Turkey because of Erdogan’s repression and the poverty in “eastern Turkey”.

    Yes, let’s invite in a few million poor, repressed Turks (and Azeris who are repressed by Aliyev) in order to be compassionate and tolerant.

    Armenians should be in favor of that since we had to leave Turkey too.

    In fact, Armenia, which is losing people, should take in a million or two Turks and Azeris.

    They can contribute to the Armenian economy and bring about reconciliation with Armenia’s neighbors when these Turks and Azeris come to outnumber Armenians in Armenia.

    I have nice tolerant ideas towards immigration, don’t I? I think so. I’m a liberal Armenian American and proud of my ideas.

    I think American ideas should apply to Armenia.

    • After a few years Armenia can switch its name from Republic of Armenia to Republic of Eastern Turkey. Sounds festive. I love your sarcasm.

  4. Wow. Right-wingers call other people “snowflakes” yet look how triggered they get at the mere mention of immigration.

    One does not have to be fleeing genocide in order to qualify for asylum or refugee status. Judges have adjudicated that some of these Central Americans qualify for asylum, therefore, they have the right to be here. Those who do not qualify are deported.

    As for all the slippery slope arguments (“why doesn’t the U.S. let in millions?” “why doesn’t Armenia let in millions of Turks?”), drawing the line on a given spectrum is precisely the role of adults in government. Otherwise no argument could survive because it could always be reduced ad absurdum using a “slippery slope” rebuttal. For example, to those right wingers who advocate for lower taxes (on the rich): Why don’t we just cut taxes to zero? Wait that would not work because then we couldn’t fund the army, fire department, police, etc. Well, I guess that means your argument for lower taxes is wrong. See how easy such disingenuous argumentation is?

    • My argument wasn’t slippery slope. My argument was a question. How many is enough? How many is enough until the very notion of nationalism in the American sense changes to another? The identity of this country will change, it will no longer be USA but something else and I don’t want to live in Something else. Leftists always want to help until they are drowning in problems but no solutions.

  5. Sorry- typo in my previous submission. Resending.

    Sireli Alex: Covert entry into N. America by inverted aliens and visitors who marry Green Card holders in order to stay in the US are both out of control so I would not say that our adults in government have this situation under control.

  6. Professor Emerita MacCurdy tells us quite a bit about why she thinks Mark Krikorian is a bad man, but she does not tell us anything about why his ideas are wrong. In fact, she skips telling us what his ideas actually are or why she objects to them.

    As to the claim that he is a bad man, the Professor relies on the fact, primarily, that SPLC has classified his group as a “hate group,” chiefly because its founder was a supposed white supremacist. This surely proves too much about too little – the founder of Planned Parenthood was a vicious class- and racist, but that does not blind most of us from the good it performs today irrespective of what Ms. Sanger asserted about people like us (She hated immigrants of the day). And, a “Professor of Writing” should have dealt with Mark Krikorian’s response to the SPLC piece on which she relies, as if it was dispositive. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-labeling-my-organization-a-hate-group-shuts-down-public-debate/2017/03/17/656ab9c8-0812-11e7-93dc-00f9bdd74ed1_story.html
    Nothing doing.

    Neither does the Professor tell us what a good solution to unchecked immigration is. She is chock full of useless anecdotes, such as one about a skilled surgeon, but that proves nothing because even if every illegal immigrant was a Chopin, DeBakey or Obama, these problems remain: [1] the law is bring violated and [2] the size of illegal immigration is immense, and burdens especially the border states. The Professor downplays [2] but she has not had kids in the LA School system, been to an El Paso ER lately, or looked at the high percentage of California prison convicts who entered illegally. Moreover, she might ask any economist if the menial workers whose presence she applauds depress wages. They do, and they thereby harm the poorest Americans.

    Apart from all of this, the MacCurdy piece rankles for a completely separate reason. If Krikorian was German, she would never have written anything about him. Yet, she feels herself free to criticize Krikorian because she thinks he is untrue to his heritage as an Armenian. Not so. I was not aware that Armenians came here in the 1890’s, or 1915-1955 because they were victims of domestic violence, which the Professor thinks is a recognized ground for asylum. They were not illegal entrants. They did not come here in these years looking for work.

    But in the most fundamental sense, Armenians, Mexicans, Central Americans et al are free to articulate arguments against laissez Faire immigration without scolds telling them that they are peculiarly disabled from making those arguments due to their ethnicity.

    I would grade the Professor’s pierce a D. But then, I don’t grade on a curve.

    Another leftist AW piece.

  7. Professor,

    Your first mistake was accepting anything the SPLC says as fact. The SPLC is a radical far-left smear organization that paints everyone they disagree with as a racist, a bigot, or an extremist. They even do this to liberal Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawazz. They go after people who stand up against Islamic terrorism, but not the terrorists themselves. As an Armenian woman who knows the history of Islamic oppression against our people, you should not take anything this sham organization says seriously.

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