Justin Smith Morrill Quotes
[There are] many vicious and inconvertible elements [within the] multitude of foreign immigrants.
Justin Smith Morrill, 1810-1898, U. S. Senator (Republican, VT), 1881
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The senator later apologized for this remark.
Most immigration reformers want to open immigration more widely. Ward wanted immigration restricted to certain ethnicities and limited. He wanted a uniformity of assimilation and not diversity.
The party is a neo-Nazi party for who, race was a major issue.
Although generally a supporter of immigration, he began to oppose it when the very large numbers of immigrants who were ethnically and culturally different began to enter the United States. Northern Italians were OK but the Southern Italians were from a different social class. German Jews had made great contributions to America but the Russian Jews were peasants and serfs. Polish immigrants also. Walker was worried that for the first time in America there would be a social class division as the historical difference between rich and poor in America he believed was within ethnic groups and not between them.
He was referring to North African and other third world immigrants. France’s second largest ethnic group had become Muslims from North Africa. But they were only 10 percent of the population.
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.
This relatively rarely quoted statement was made by Roosevelt shortly after he graduated from Harvard and was typical of the upper class racism of the day. This is the same man who would be the first to invite a Negro to dine at the White House despite media and public opinion which castigated his act; the same man who later would have several close Japanese friends and be considered very pro-Oriental. This illustrates how people can grow and develop over time—especially politicians. Many politicians with few prejudices have publicly adopted the in order to pander to populist biases of the time. Roosevelt was the opposite. He started out with the popular racism of the day and as he grew and developed, publicly led with exemplary statements and actions. See {588991} for another of his early racist statements—this one targeting Native Americans.
Justin Smith Morrill was a Representative (1855–1867) and a Senator (1867–1898) from Vermont, most widely remembered today for the Morrill Land-Grant Acts that established federal funding for establishing many of the United States' public colleges and universities. He was one of the founders of the Republican Party.
