Erik Larson Quotes
How you frame a debate is very important. When you call someone an 'illegal alien,' you've already stacked the deck against them.
The quote is often misreported as “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal illegal immigration."
Ironically, where national quotas have been used in American immigration policy, it has rarely been used to keep nationals of countries with which we were having difficulty, out. In almost all cases, the national quotas have been used to discriminate against racial and religious minorities in America. Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Catholics, Mormons and Jews have been the most frequent groups targeted. Even when we were in the midst of the Cold War, American policy was to accept immigrants from the Soviet Union and Cuba enthusiastically.
The racial targets of the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League widened and they changed their name to the Asiatic Immigration Exclusion League.
At the time, many people referred to immigrants who had entered the United States without the proper documentation or by contravening our laws were referred to as “illegals” or “illegal immigrants”. Bank robbers and rapists were never referred to as “illegals”—only immigrants. Carroll and others pointed out that there was no such thing as an “illegal person”—only illegal acts.
Erik Larson is an American journalist and author of nonfiction books. He has written a number of bestsellers, including The Devil in the White City (2003), about the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a series of murders by H. H. Holmes that were committed in the city around the time of the Fair. The Devil in the White City won the 2004 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category, among other awards.
