Aftandilian in The Arab Weekly on Immigration Ban
Gregory Aftandilian, Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent Op-Ed discussing how fear of immigrants and efforts to restrict immigration have antecedents in United States history.
Aftandilian’s Op-Ed, entitled “Trump’s Immigration Ban Evokes a Dark Period in U.S. History,” was published on February 12, 2017 in The Arab Weekly.
From the text of the article:
The political firestorm sparked by US President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily banning travellers and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries as well as all Syrian refugees, though now blocked by a federal appeals court, has reawakened debate in the United States about what it means to be American. What is less widely known is that fear of immigrants and efforts to restrict immigration have antecedents in US history.
The great wave of immigration to the United States occurred from the late 19th and the early 20th centuries when millions of people fleeing poverty or religious/nationalist persecution, mainly from Eastern and Southern Europe, headed to the United States. The vast majority of these immigrants had unhindered access, largely to provide a cheap source of labour for American industry.
This welcoming atmosphere changed as fear of the new immigrants started to grow among so-called native Americans, who believed that the immigrants were infiltrating the United States with radicals inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and anarchists from Southern Europe who would change the United States for the worse.
You can read the entire article here.
Aftandilian spent over 21 years in government service, most recently on Capitol Hill where he was foreign policy adviser to Congressman Chris Van Hollen (2007-2008), professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and foreign policy adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes (2000-2004), and foreign policy fellow to the late Senator Edward Kennedy (1999). Learn more about him here.