AMERIKA

In 1844, Nativist Protestants Burned Churches in

 the Name of Religious Liberty

News at Home
tags: immigration, political violence, religious history, Nativism, American Religion, `


by Zachary M. Schrag

Zachary M. Schrag is Professor of History at George Mason University and the author of the forthcoming books The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton University Press) and The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation (Pegasus Books).

A mob burns St. Augustine's Catholic Church in Philadelphia, 1844, from John B. Perry A Full and Complete Account of the Late Awful Riots in Philadelphia

 

 

Former U.S. senator Rick Santorum has deservedly lost his position at CNN for his April speech in which he described all of Native American culture as “nothing.” But he made that remark in service to an equally suspect claim: that America “was born of the people who came here pursuing religious liberty to practice their faith, to live as they ought to live and have the freedom to do so. Religious liberty.” Contrary to Santorum’s rosy picture, many of the English settlers of what is now the east coast of the United States were as devoted to denying religious liberty to others as they were to securing their own ability to worship as they pleased. And as a committed Catholic, Santorum should know that for many Protestants, “religious liberty” meant attacking the Catholic Church.

 

The first English monarchs to back colonization hoped to contain Catholic expansion with what historian Carla Gardina Pestana calls “a Protestant empire.” While some colonies persecuted dissenters—whipping Baptists and Quakers—most tolerated varieties of Protestantism. But the settlers often drew the line at Catholicism. Each November, colonists celebrated “Pope’s Day” by lighting bonfires, firing cannon, and marching effigies of the pontiff through the streets, all to celebrate their common Protestant identity. Colonial governments outlawed Catholic priests, threatening them with life imprisonment or death. Even Maryland, founded in part as a Catholic haven, eventually restricted Catholic worship.

 

The Revolution—secured with the help of Catholic Spain and France, as well as that of many American Catholics—toned down some of the most vicious anti-Catholicism. Most American Protestants learned to respect and live with their Catholic neighbors. But while the United States Constitution forbade the establishment of religion or religious tests for office, individual states continued to privilege Protestantism. Some limited office holding to Protestants, declared Protestantism the official religion, and, most commonly, assigned the King James Bible in public schools, over the objections of Catholics.

 

Political anti-Catholicism gained new adherents in the 1830s, in response to both Catholic Emancipation in the British Empire and increased Irish Catholic immigration to the United States. In 1835, New York’s Protestant Association debated the question, “Is Popery compatible with civil liberty?” In 1840, a popular Protestant pastor warned that “It has been the favourite policy of popish priests to represent Romanism as a harmless thing.” “If they ever succeed in making this impression general,” he continued, “we may well tremble for the liberties of our country. It is a startling truth that popery and civil and religious liberty cannot flourish on the same soil; popery is death to both!”

 

Such beliefs led anti-Catholics to attack Catholic institutions as alien intruders. In August 1834, a mob burned down the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, acting in the conviction the they were protecting American liberty against an institution that “‘ought not to be allow[e]d in a free country.’’ Five years later, a Baltimore mob threatened a convent there with a similar fate. As Irish immigrants filled both the pews and pulpits of American Catholic churches, such anti-Catholicism merged with a nativist movement that hoped to restrict immigration and make naturalization difficult.

 

The most sustained attack against Catholics came in Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1844. Inspired by the success of a third-party nativist candidate in New York City’s mayoral election, Philadelphia nativists staged their own rallies throughout the city and its surrounding districts. In May, rallies in the largely Irish Catholic Third Ward of Kensington sparked three days of rioting. On the third day, nativist mobs burned two Catholic churches, along with the adjacent rectories and a seminary. Outside of one church, they built a bonfire of Bibles and other sacred texts, and cheered when the cross atop the church’s steeple collapsed in flame. In a nearby Catholic orphan asylum, the superioress wondered how she could evacuate nearly a hundred children if the mob attacked. “They have sworn vengeance against all the churches and their institutions,” she wrote. “We have every reason to expect the same fate.”

 

In the aftermath of the May riots, a priest in the heavily nativist district of Southwark resolved to prepare his church against future attacks. Along with his brother, he organized parishioners into a security force, armed with a collection of weapons ranging from surplus military muskets to bayonets stuck on brush handles. When, in July, the church’s neighbors realized the extent of his preparations, they concluded that the Catholics were planning to murder their Protestant neighbors in their sleep. Mobbing the church, they launched a second wave of riots, and even bombarded the church with a stolen cannon. Eventually, the county’s militia arrived in force and fired into the crowd. By the time the fighting was over, two dozen Americans were dead, and the nation was in shock.

 

Throughout all of this, leading nativists insisted that they tolerated all religions. “We do not interfere with any man’s religious creed or religious liberty,” asserted one. “A man may be a Turk, a Jew or a Christian, a Catholic, Methodist or a Presbyterian, and we say nothing against it, but accord to all a liberty of conscience.” He then immediately revealed the limits of his tolerance: “When we remember that our Pilgrim Fathers landed on Plymouth rock, to establish the Protestant religion, free from persecution, we must contend that this was and always will be a Protestant country!” That second sentiment—the insistence that the country truly belonged to members of one creed—explains the fury of the mob.

 

The same cramped view of religious liberty echoes in Santorum’s speech. As a Catholic, Santorum unsurprisingly identifies America with “the morals and teachings of Jesus Christ,” rather than only Protestantism. He also calls the United States “a country that was based on Judeo-Christian principles,” letting Jews halfway into his club. But any effort to privilege some religions over others reminds us that purported advocates of tolerance may be religious supremacists under the skin. Pursuing religious liberty for one’s own kind is only the beginning of freedom. Securing liberty to all is the true achievement.

White Multiculturalism

Canada's welcome mat worn, immigrant studies find

Five new studies of immigrants of visible-minority background reveal cracks in Canada's ability to integrate newcomers, undermining the long-held consensus that multiculturalism has been an overwhelming success."It makes you wonder if multiculturalism is really working for more recent immigrants,” said Maraki Sikre Merid, who co-authored the study with several other Ethiopian-Canadians from a group called Young Diplomats. “We talk about Toronto being a mega melting pot, but it is really a lot of segregated communities. Is there something more Canada can do to give people a sense of what it means to be Canadian?”

Multiculturalism was the response to the Trudeau era Bilingualism and Biculturalism (the B and B) report, It was a politial movement within the Liberal party from the Ukrainian community and other European ethnic communities and linguistic groups in Canada that were the parties base. Professor Manoly Lupul of the U of A spearheaded the movement for inclusion of other linguistic minorities in the Canadian mosaic as it was called at the time.

The Ukrainian community like the new immigrant communities in Canada was an authentic diaspora, unlike other post WWII European Displaced Persons (DP's) who arrived in Canada, Ukrainians had no chance of returning to their homeland. Many were considered a threat to the Soviet state in the Ukraine.

Thus Ukrainian Canadians, the first of the hyphenated Canadians, viewed themselves as an authentic diaspora culture, keeping alive Ukrainian traditions here as the Ukraine became Russified.

It was the Liberals in the Ukrainian community that pushed for multiculturalism, aligning with other European DP communities, for whom English and French were their second languages. Multiculutralism was not so much about culture as it was the recognition of the 'other' linguistic minorities in Canada, Ukrainians, Germans, Polish, Italian, Finns, Icelanders, Jews etc.

Only the Jews continued to face racial discrimination that declined as the other ethnic communities were accepted into the Canadian body politic. Like the Ukrainians they too were an authentic diaspora, having no home to go to. That of course changed after 1948.

Culturally these communities were on the left prior to WWII, and populated the Communist Party and to a lesser degree the CCF. After WWII the first and second generations along with the newly arrived DP's moved towards integration into mainstream Canadian culture, and thus into the Liberal Party which was seen as cosmopolitan and was the anti-thesis to the nativist and Britishness of the Conservatives.

But linguistic based multiculturalism never concieved of inclusion of the other; that is visible minorities. It never reached out to the Chinese or Japanese commuities nor the West India diaspora. Nor did it include Canada's first nations, whose demands to be included the Canadian body politic arose at the same time.

It was essentially a white movement, an attempt to overcome the racist British nativist response of 'white anglo-saxon' Canadians to the immigration of Central and Eastern European immigrants. Ukrainians, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, etc. coming from peasant communities were descriped as niggers, wogs, etc. by the Anglo-Saxon community in Canada when they first arrived.

Years later as they were integrated into Canadian society, as all European ethnic communities were, they wanted to be white, they learned English, they supported the Dominion, they forgot their roots in their integration. Multiculturalism was the politics of integration, not a melting pot like the American nativist culture, into a 'white' culture, one that accepted accents. It was based on language, not culture despite its name.

Thus as Canada experienced more and more immigration from non-white countries the multiculturalism myth was expanded to include them. As it was a policy of the Liberals, it meant that politically the Liberals benefited from a broad based membership and support of these new immigrants.

The Conservatives as usual remained the home of the Anglo-Saxon's until Mulroney's united front party which for the first time included non-Anglo Quebecois.The destruction of the Conservatives into fragments was the result of The Reform Party and the Bloc Quebecois. The latter based on language the former based on nativist populism, some of the nativists now being second and third generation immigrants who view themselves as 'white'.

The Liberals as a party and a government has used this linguistic multicultural policy to attempt to integrate non-white immigrants into the Canadian mosaic.

It has failed. Because it was never about ethnicity or race, it was about language.

It never addressed racism, because it denied race as essential. It was about whiteness without talking about it. It was about accepting accents not skin colour. It was about accepting culture as dance troupes, food and fashion, not about ways of looking at the world that were different than ours.

The European immigrants shared a religious culture as well, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, the new immigrants do not. There are, Ishmalies, Taoists, Buddhists, Muslims, etc.

The Chinese experience in Canada, more so than the Japanese who are integrationists, was to remain outside of mainstream Canadian culture to accept the ghetto and make it their own, which is why every city has a China Town.

They were forced into the ghettos, and even in the era of multiculturalism there was little done to recognize the origin of the these ghettos were part of the Canadian State policy of dicrimination against Chinese immigrants.

The result for the community was to identify itself as a diaspora and thus saw themselves as Chinese first, Canadian second. Such is the case with other racial minorities that move here. The Filipino's, Jamaicans, Indians, Pakistani's, etc. all who view Canada as their home, but their home countries as the motherland.

There has been no integration into the Canadian mosaic because our policy of multiculturalism was never intended to adapt these immigrants into 'White' Canadian society.

In fact the reason we have dual citizenship, which the right wing is now attacking, is the result of the ideal of the hyphenated Canadian. That dual citizenship has existed since both the French and British colonialists came here.

The reason their citizenship is different than the rest of us, is they came here as conquerers, as agents of Imperialism. The rest of us came as workers, hewers of wood, drawers of water, the oppressed the subjects of Imperialism.

And that is the class base for understanding immigration in Canada, it is not the colour of ones skin, or country of origin, but the fact that all immigration to Canada is the countries need for workers.

Emigration is economic, those who leave their homelands do so to make a living.

Their integration into the Canadian body politic is dependent on them working.

The problem as outlined in the opening news item is simply that these communties have high unemployment, thus creating ghetto's, the very place they left their homeland to get away from.

It is not a case of needing a multiculturalism policy but a full employment strategy, which of course under the current goverment is not even on the agenda.


See:

Immigration

Migration

Happy Canada Day/Jour heureux du Canada

A History of Canadian Wealth, 1914.

Historical Memory on the Eve of the Election

Calgary Herald Remembers RB Bennet

Canada's First Internment Camps

Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

Rebel Yell

Draft Dodgers in Dukhbour Country

Origins of the Captialist State In Canada

Aboriginal Property Rights

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
multiculturalism, visible-minorities, immigration, immigrants, bilingualism-bicultrualism, Trudeau, Pearson, Liberals, Conservatives, Ukrainian-Canadians, hyphenated-Canadians, melting-pot, Cultural-Mosaic, white, people-of-colour, poltics, Canada, government,

Border Insecurity

Playing the card of National Security xenophobic racist white Americans are planning to close all their borders.

The Mexican border is only one focus of groups like the Minutemen the other is the US Canada border.

Less pronounced perhaps, but still there is the plan.

I was watching the Minutemen on the news yesterday building their own private security wall in Arizona. And they were flashing Minutemen Close the Border signs, which not only showed a fence on the Mexico border but also one on the Canadian border between Washington State and B.C.

Which makes the jingoist statist idea of National ID/ Passports/BioMetric cards even more stupid. Of course the US has no such national ID card yet though they have passed legislation on it. Its all smoke and mirrors.

Many would go to U.S. less if ID plan became law: poll

Canada wins minor victory in US border dispute

Its not about Security, thats just the face card. It's the joker in the pack that is driving this; racist anti-immigration xenophobes of the Protestant Right in America. In other words good old American Nativism.

American Nativism, 1830-1845
During the 1830s and 1840s Americans with nativist sentiments made a concerted effort to enter into the local and national political arenas. Nativism's political relevance grew out of the increase of immigrants during the ‘20s and ‘30s and the anti-foreign writings that abounded during these decades. While pivoting between anti-foreign and anti-catholic appeals, nativism became both practical and ideological in nature: platforms for the movement ranged from extending the length naturalization to protecting the sacredness of the Protestant Republic. In New York city's 1844 elections, the nativist movement formed the American Republican Party, which allied with the Whigs and resulted in the defeat of the Democratic Party. This political advancement, although local and short lived, presented a glimpse of the national nativist power later found in the know- nothings. Clearly, early nineteenth-century nativism participated in significant political changes, and the goal of this paper is to summarize nativism between 1830 and 1845 while analyzing these major political developments.

Border history repeated
Just as the Bush administration sees Canada as an indifferent ally in the war on terror, in late 1864 Abraham Lincoln's administration felt much the same way. Annoyed by raids across the frontier by Confederate States agents based in Canada and puzzled by Canadian sympathy for the Southern cause, Lincoln decided to act, ending the laissez-faire attitude towards cross-border traffic that had existed for half a century.Although the law lasted just three months, it stifled trade, created long lines at the border and was condemned in the court of public opinion on both sides of the frontier. But just as the Bush administration's actions have forced Canada to take notice, so did Lincoln's. John A. Macdonald formed a border police and Parliament passed a law aimed at dealing with suspected terrorists.

Also see: Migration

Build A Wall And They Will Still Come

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Minutemen, US-Mexico, US_Canada, border, American-Nativism, Nativist, racist, xenophobia, anti-immigration, National-ID-Cards, passports, biometric, Bush, Senate,

GOP ARYAN CAUCUS

UPDATED

Marjorie Taylor Green starting new GOP caucus pushing 'Anglo-Saxon political traditions'

Bob Brigham
April 16, 2021

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's Facebook


Controversial Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is once again back in the news.

"A nascent 'America First Caucus' in Congress linked to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) has been distributing materials calling for a 'common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions' and a return to architectural style that 'befits the progeny of European architecture.' Reps. Barry Moore (R-Ala.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) have also agreed to join the group," Punchbowl News reported Friday, citing an email invitation it obtained.

"We've been covering Congress for a long time, and this is some of the most nakedly nativist rhetoric we've ever seen," Punchbowl noted.

Punchbowl cited some of the "eye-popping" sections of the group's literature.

"America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions," the group argued. "History has shown that societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should they fail to contribute positively to the country."

GOP leadership scrambles after 'nativist dog whistles' from the new 'White Nationalism Caucus'

Bob Brigham
April 16, 2021

Republican leadership engaged in damage control on Friday after some of the most extreme members of the House of Representatives formed a new caucus to support Angelo-Saxon heritage.

The caucus -- which has the support of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) -- has been panned as a "White Nationalism Caucus."

GOP leadership scrambled to claim that the party once led by Donald Trump is not racist.
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"America is built on the idea that we are all created equal and success is earned through honest, hard work. It isn't built on identity, race, or religion. The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln & the party of more opportunity for all Americans—not nativist dog whistles," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tweeted.

House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) also attempted to clean up the mess.

"Republicans believe in equal opportunity, freedom, and justice for all. We teach our children the values of tolerance, decency and moral courage. Racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism are evil. History teaches we all have an obligation to confront & reject such malicious hate," Cheney urged.

Group promoting ‘Anglo-Saxon’ traditions criticised by senior Republicans

SAT, 17 APR, 2021 - 07:10

ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORTER

Hard-right House Republicans were discussing forming an America First Caucus, which one document described as championing “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and warning that mass immigration was putting the “unique identity” of the US at risk.

The proposal was first reported by Punchbowl News, a news outlet covering Capitol Hill.

The document was being circulated as the Republicans struggle to determine a clear direction as it prepares to try winning back control of the House and Senate in the 2022 elections.

Among the party’s divisions are how closely to tack behind Donald Trump, and the caucus’ seven-page policy platform clearly embraces the former president’s world view.

“The America First Caucus (AFC) exists to promote Congressional policies that are to the long-term benefit of the American nation,” it begins.

It says the group aims to “follow in President Trump’s footsteps, and potentially step on some toes and sacrifice sacred cows for the good of the American nation”.

The group calls for limiting legal immigration “to those that can contribute not only economically, but have demonstrated respect for this nation’s culture and rule of law”.

It voices support for infrastructure “that reflects the architectural, engineering and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture”.

In a striking criticism, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy issued a tweet that an aide confirmed was aimed at the group.

“America is built on the idea that we are all created equal and success is earned through honest, hard work.

“It isn’t built on identity, race, or religion,” Mr McCarthy wrote.

“The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln & the party of more opportunity for all Americans—not nativist dog whistles.”

Liz Cheney, who represents Wyoming, tweeted: “We teach our children the values of tolerance, decency and moral courage.

“Racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism are evil.

“History teaches we all have an obligation to confront & reject such malicious hate.”

Ms Cheney voted to impeach Mr Trump in January and has been under fire from some of the party’s most far-right politicians and the former president.

Conservative US House Republicans to form 'America First' caucus

Republican lawmakers Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar are involved in the caucus, Representative Louie Gohmert, who is considering joining, confirmed to reporters.

Jerusalem Post 

By REUTERS
APRIL 18, 2021 

The US Capitol building, which contains the House of Representatives and the Senate.
(photo credit: PIXABAY)

Conservative House of Representatives Republicans plan to form an "America First" caucus to promote the policies of ex-President Donald Trump and said on Friday the group would soon release a policy platform.

The platform promotes "a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions" and advocates for infrastructure with esthetic value that "befits the progeny of European architecture," Punchbowl News reported on Friday.

Republican lawmakers Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar are involved in the caucus, Representative Louie Gohmert, who is considering joining, confirmed to reporters.

A spokesman for first-term congresswoman Greene, Nick Dyer, dismissed the Punchbowl report as "gossip" but said in a statement that the America First platform would be "announced to the public very soon."

Congressional caucuses provide a forum for like-minded lawmakers to pursue common legislative objectives.

Democrats including Representative Peter Welch denounced the caucus on Twitter as "nakedly racist and disgusting."

"This supposed caucus and its members represent a dangerous nativist perspective that hurts our country, but sadly is not surprising," Welch added. Representative Don Beyer referred to the group as the "White Supremacist Caucus" on Twitter.

Trump introduced his America First agenda at his inauguration in 2017 and made it a repeated theme of his presidency.

Gohmert, a Trump ally, told reporters the caucus aims "to get our own country in order, so it's sustainable."

Congressman Matt Gaetz, who is being investigated by the Justice Department and the House Ethics panel over allegations of sexual misconduct, said he was becoming part of the caucus.

The group would push to "end wars, stop illegal immigration & promote trade that is fair to American workers," he said.

Gaetz has not been charged with any crimes and has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.

Gohmert denied the America First Caucus involves race.

"It's not returning to Anglo-Saxon tradition," the Texas Republican said. "It's not supposed to be about race at all. We're stronger, you know, diversified. But there's some things that helped make us strong."

The changed face of European football Yusuf Bangura

Football is too important to working and young people for scholars to ignore it or treat it as a diversion or just pastime and a sport for unruly fans.

By Yusuf Bangura
July 9, 2024
PREIMER TIMES

NIGERIA



The forthcoming semi finals in which more than half of the players will have African ancestry, would surely resemble an AFCON (African Cup of Nations) tournament. This is unprecedented. Will it generate a backlash from those with a nativist or narrow view of European heritage, or spur countries that want to excel in international football tournaments to seek out and give opportunities to players of African descent?

Something remarkable is happening in European football, which requires scholarly attention, especially by those working on multiculturalism, social integration, far right populist movements, and North-South relations. Football is too important to working and young people for scholars to ignore it or treat it as a diversion or just pastime and a sport for unruly fans.

European teams that seem to be doing well in international tournaments are increasingly becoming less white, with players of African descent accounting for a large share of the non-white players.


Even as late as the closing decade of the twentieth century, watching a Euros tournament in which teams fielded black players was rare. A few countries with large black immigrant populations, such as England and France, would select two or three players of colour. Having a team in which more than half of the players were black was a taboo and strange, even to enthusiastic black fans.

France, under its 1998 World Cup coach, Aimé Jacquet, led the way in the selection of a large number of non-white players when it fielded five players of African descent (about half of the team) in the final of that tournament. It went on to win it, beating Brazil, the most successful team in the tournament’s history.

That victory and the multiracial character of the team were big talking points during and after the tournament. An estimated one million fans of various skin colours and ethnic origins celebrated the historic event at the Champs -Élysées. But the leader of the far right Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, denounced the team and the victory, claiming that it was not a true French team, and referred to the black players as unworthy.

The current French coach, Didier Deschamps, played as a defensive midfielder in that World Cup winning team. As a coach, he has courageously ignored the racist protestations of the far right and advanced Jacquet’s multicultural football agenda.


There were six players of African descent in Deschamp’s 2018 World Cup team, which also won the tournament. And watching France play in this 2024 Euros, you would be forgiven to believe that France is an African country: nine of the eleven players Deschamps fielded to beat Portugal in the quarter finals are of African descent.

France’s success in fielding black players to win international football tournaments opened the floodgates for black players to dominate team selections or have a high level of representation in European teams.

For a very long time, England fielded only two or three black players in its national team. Even during the 2020 Euros (played in 2021), Gareth Southgate, a very conservative coach, did not field more than three black players at any given time in England’s matches, until the tail end of the match against Italy in the final, which they lost on penalties. The England team in the 2024 Euros is now a mosaic of colours. Five of the starting eleven players for the quarter finals match against Switzerland have ancestral links with Africa; and of the five players who came on as subs, four have an African lineage.

Many other countries have also followed France’s lead, chief among which is the Netherlands – the second most diverse team in the 2024 Euros after France. Seven of the eleven players that started the Netherlands match against Turkey have an African lineage and one an Indonesian ancestry. Germany, Austria and Switzerland have also recognised the value of fielding non-white players — black players are strongly represented in their 2024 Euros teams.

Remarkably, more than 50 per cent (23 out of 44) of the starting lineup of players for the quarter finals of the four teams that have qualified for the semi finals of the 2024 Euros (France, the Netherlands, England and Spain) to be played on Tuesday and Wednesday have African ancestry.

France had nine players with African links in its starting lineup against Portugal; Netherlands, seven, in its match against Turkey; England, five, when it locked horns with Switzerland; and Spain, two, when it dispatched Germany in what may be regarded as the best match of the tournament so far. The two black Spanish players (Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams) are easily Spain’s most exciting players in the tournament.

The transformation of the national football team of Switzerland — a country with no colonial history — is remarkable. Half of its 26 member squad consists of players with Nigerian, Ghanaian, Senegalese, Cameroonian, Latin American, Albanian and Turkish ancestries, who were either born in the country or migrated there at a very early age.

The forthcoming semi finals in which more than half of the players will have African ancestry, would surely resemble an AFCON (African Cup of Nations) tournament. This is unprecedented. Will it generate a backlash from those with a nativist or narrow view of European heritage, or spur countries that want to excel in international football tournaments to seek out and give opportunities to players of African descent?

Unfortunately, most West European national football teams are becoming highly diverse at a time when nativist, anti-foreign, far right parties are making big gains in European elections. For many of the players that have excelled in the sport, football offers, perhaps, one of the few paths to live decent lives and escape from the poverty traps of the banlieues or inner cities. Will the football prowess of these players and the happiness they bring to their countries feed into the attitudes of voters and the policies of centre and left parties to keep the regressive and alienating nativist agenda at bay?

One football powerhouse nation that has remained an outlier in this transformation is Italy. Only a few players of African descent have played for Italy in its football history: Fabio Riverani (the first black player to be selected and played from 2001-2006); Angelo Ogbonna, who has Nigerian roots, and played for Italy from 2012-2016; and the highly talented, charismatic and unpredictable Mario Balotelli, with Ghanaian roots, who terrorised defenders for a number of top European clubs and the Italian national team between 2010 and 2018. The Italian team for Euros 2024 has no black player.

The argument that the absence of black players in Italy’s team is because of its lack of a colonial history is dubious. Under its fascist dictator, Mussolini, Italy tried to annex Ethiopia, as well as present day Eritrea and Somaliland, but lost all three territories when it was defeated in the Second World War. Germany also lost its African colonies (Tanganyika — present day Tanzania; South West Africa — present day Namibia; Togo; and Cameroon) when it was defeated by the Allied powers in the First World War. But why are there many black players in the German team and none in the Italian team?

The absence of black players in the Italian team is even more intriguing when we examine statistical data on the proportion of black people in each European country. Italy is ranked as the country with the 10th highest proportion of black people (1.2 per cent) in Europe — higher than Spain (1.17 per cent), Germany (0.65 per cent), and Austria (0.51 per cent). Yet, Spain, Germany and Austria have many black players in their teams. Why is Italy unable to nurture and select black players from the almost one million people of African descent living in the country — many of them in precarious conditions as those in France?

There is a lot in football that begs for serious research, which can throw light on race relations, multiculturalism, racism, xenophobia and identity politics.

But let’s enjoy the AFCON-Euros on Tuesday and Wednesday. Don’t relax on your sofa with a TV. Get out of your house and try to watch it on a super screen at a fan zone if there is one in your neighbourhood. It is the next best thing to a stadium experience.

Yusuf Bangura writes from Nyon, Switzerland. Email: Bangura.ym@gmail.com

The Trump administration is using the pandemic as an excuse to target immigrants and asylum seekers

Nativist scapegoating and racist restrictions in the name of public health are nothing new. But this time, anti-migrant policy could have devastating effects.

By John Washington  May 15, 2020, 3:50pm EDT

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A basic tenet of immunology is that we are all safer if we are all safe. That should be a basic tenet for politics as well. And yet, our empathy too often runs up against border walls and dies out.

Migrants are decidedly not to blame for the pandemic. To blame are international travel, the interconnectedness of global capital, grossly ill-equipped national health systems, and leisure tourism. As the United States continues its immigration detention and deportation programs, we can now add anti-immigration policies to that list.

Foisting culpability for disease and contagion on migrants and asylum seekers remains a common cliché, one that has a long and vile history. Covid-19 has been a boon to the anti-immigrant agenda that President Trump — along with other nativist leaders — has been aching to implement since he took office: wielding extraordinary executive powers to temporarily shutter the refugee resettlement program, lock down the US-Mexico border, suspend asylum processing, and push children fleeing danger back into Mexico. Invoking what he has allegedly called his “magical authority,” Trump’s latest move, after threatening to stop all immigration, was a 60-day suspension of visa issuances, with some broad exceptions for health care workers, investors, plus spouses or young children of citizens or green card holders.

It’s not hard to imagine the administration making excuses, even after we begin to recover, for extending or even expanding the lockdowns and turning a temporary state of exception into a lasting status quo. The administration is already moving to extend the suspension indefinitely. Such authority is “magical”— or effectual at solving our current health or economic crises — as much as smoke and mirrors are able to delude and distract.

But while the government is willing to suspend immigration laws meant to protect or welcome people arriving to the country, it is not willing to suspend ones that keep people dangerously locked up in detention centers, where, as the coronavirus begins to creep in, it is almost certain to devastate. These detention centers are bad enough without the virus; in recent years, detainees have suffered outbreaks of measles and received dangerously substandard medical care, while the centers have been the sites of mass suicide attempts, ongoing waves of hunger strikes, rampant sexual assault from guards, and a host of other abuses including generally unhealthy, inhumane, and sometimes torturous conditions.

Nor has the government suspended its expensive wall-building or, most dangerous of all, deportation policies. Deporting people from the United States, the global epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, is another gust of wind to a raging wildfire. Hundreds of people deported to Guatemala and Haiti have tested positive for the virus. In Guatemala, some of the returned migrants are even facing discrimination, accused of bringing the virus with them.

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Baseless reproach, nativist scapegoating, and racist restrictions are nothing new when it comes to the intersection of immigration and disease. Amid a series of cholera outbreaks in the 19th century, Americans pointed the finger at Irish immigrants, even referring to the virus as the “Irish disease.” In the 1880s, Chinese immigrants were accused of bringing smallpox and the plague, among other diseases, to California — an accusation that bolstered the movement behind the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, one of the early and trend-setting pieces of racist and anti-immigrant legislation.

A decade later, the US suspended immigration for two weeks after “German authorities had blamed Russian Jews en route to America for a severe cholera outbreak in Hamburg,” as Tara Zahra writes in The Great Departure. It was the same year that Ellis Island was opened, not as a munificent welcome ramp to the United States — as it is sometimes memorialized — but as a bustling medical inspection center that eventually turned into a squalid detention center.

The misconception that migrants brought communicable diseases to the United States came up again in the 1930s in the Southwest, where Border Patrol agents subjected Mexican migrants who crossed the border to “gasoline baths,” spraying them with DDT and other noxious chemicals, including Zyklon B, the same poison the Nazis later used as their preferred killing agent during the Holocaust. As David Dorado Romo writes in Ringside Seat to a Revolution, “The fumigation was carried out in an area of the building that American officials called, ominously enough, ‘the gas chambers.’”

As recently as 1979, journalist Daniel Denvir points out in his recent book All-American Nativism, the Los Angeles Times wrote that “hundreds of thousands of Third World immigrants entering California and the rest of the United States are bringing with them a panoply of communicable diseases that could, according to health experts, move the country back toward nineteenth-century standards of public health.” Despite the lack of evidence, anti-immigrant diehards continue to latch onto that fear; arch-conservative talk radio host Michael Savage, for example, wrote a 2016 book called Diseases Without Borders, foisting blame on Obama’s “open borders policy” for America being “invaded by deadly viruses.”

The Trump administration is using these same false flags and racist fears to deport and expel more migrants, more quickly. The New York Times reported recently that White House senior adviser and anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller has repeatedly tried to use health concerns as an excuse to lock down the border and bar immigrants. According to an unnamed official, invoking public health “had been on a ‘wish list’ of about 50 ideas to curtail immigration” that Miller had written years before Covid-19. He has been digging for any evidence of a connection between immigration and disease, eagerly primed for a crisis to hit to unleash the new policies. The fact that immigration has nothing to do with the pandemic hasn’t stymied him.

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Antiquated, unscientific, and anti-immigrant invective has been repurposed not only against Mexicans and Central Americans, but especially against Muslims as Europe’s influx of refugees has grown. Hungary’s populist leader Viktor Orbán, a nativist homophobe who is one of Europe’s most outspoken anti-immigrant soapboxers, has led the charge on conflating the pandemic with illegal immigration: “We are fighting a two-front war, one front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus, there is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”

Likewise, former Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski began claiming, in 2015, that the Muslim migrants arriving to Europe were carrying diseases (a sentiment echoed by Trump when he declared that migrants bring “large scale crime and disease” into the country). Both Polish xenophobes and Donald Trump, however, are wrong. Migrants have been shown to be generally healthier than native populations, at least before they are marginalized and blocked from accessing standard medical care. As Sonia Shah, author of Pandemic and the forthcoming The Next Great Migration, told me, “The reflexive solution to contagion — border closures, isolation, immobility — is in fact antithetical to biological resilience on a changing planet.”

Anti-immigration policy is actually the more pressing health danger — from regulations scaring away immigrants from accessing health care to disease-incubating detention centers. I reported from the migrant camps hastily raised in Tijuana in the fall of 2018: They were overcrowded and unsanitary — migrants had no bathrooms, no access to water, were hounded by Mexican officials, and were turned away or sprayed with tear gas by US border guards. Currently, there are around 2,500 people forced into a makeshift refugee camp in Matamoros, just across the river from Brownsville, Texas. The Mexican border city “has only 10 ventilators and 40 hospital beds for intensive care,” Foreign Policy reports.

As poet Carolyn Forché recently told me, “The contagion of lack of empathy is going to be more harmful to us in the long run than anything else, because it will have no bounds.” Even as we remain on lockdown or in quarantine, we cannot let the Trump administration take advantage of a crisis, levy scurrilous and racist claims against some of the world’s most marginalized populations, and deport and deny migrants and refugees. Doing so will not inoculate us from the virus, but, in fact, infect us with something even worse.

John Washington is a translator and writer covering immigration and border politics, as well as criminal justice and literature. His first book, The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond, is out in May 2020 from Verso Books.