The Federalist Says Trump Should Model Horrifically Racist 1920s Immigration Policies. He Already Is.

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:03 Thomas: During the Cold War, we could stir up a bunch of hysteria over a common enemy. We couldn't have done that if we weren't so white.

0:00:17 Matt: We're bringing back what amounts to national origins quotas, which was our immigration system for a lot of the 20th century from 1921 to 1965.

0:00:32 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1217, which weirdly we happen to be recording on 1217. Something that definitely threw my mind for a quick loop, where I was like, wow, did I name it wrong? Yeah, then I went into an existential crisis for a second. No, we're all good. I'm Thomas. That over there is real life immigration attorney Matt Cameron. Cameron, how are you doing?

0:00:41 Matt: Hey, all right. Happy to be going into overtime a little bit from Wednesday to pick up on a piece we didn't get to talk about, and then also going to give you some recent news to put that piece in really depressing context. So that's what I'm here for.

0:01:01 Thomas: We're doing this way later than normal because we wanted to make sure to catch Trump's announcement thingy that as you're hearing this, I'm sure you've already found out was a dud, which is good. It's actually good. There's

0:01:13 Matt: Considering what it could have been.

0:01:15 Thomas: A certain weirdness where you were like, oh, is he announcing a war, a bombing?

0:01:20 Matt: Right.

0:01:20 Thomas: And then he starts doing his normal, like Biden ruined everything and I'm great.

0:01:23 Matt: Just ranting.

0:01:24 Thomas: And then there's the part of your dumb brain that's like, oh, I thought it was going to be a war. And you're like, wait a minute. This could have been an email wake me up when there's a war it's like no I'm glad I'm glad he's doing his dumb crap I was worried were you worried

0:01:38 Matt: A little bit. I was because of just the way things have been pulling together with this Venezuela thing. But, you know, another pep rally about how much everything sucked, I guess, last year, even though everything's actually objectively worse now. Just to remind everybody, that is fascism. When you say out loud that everything was terrible before I personally fixed it. Just want to remind you that. Yeah, after

0:02:03 Thomas: And when you bag dad bob you know like everything's crumbling in the background and you tell people not to believe their lying eyes or whatever so we we're doing a late recording I feel like it's a more intimate like oa after dark no but I'm glad we stayed up for that to find out that the nothing which is good again it's good that it was nothing. We foolishly thought we were going to have time for more stuff on the Wild Card Wednesday episode, which I hope you all have listened to. I know that's a different format, but this one was, I think, particularly meaningful and near and dear to our hearts because what the New York Times is doing is just, it's really, really bad. It's just an indicator of a societal thing that's really really bad,

0:02:09 Matt: Derek. That's right. Good times. Yeah. I mean, it's one thing to make fun of the Federalist and the National Review, which we do all the time. But sometimes we just have to point out what the New York Times is doing because it's terrible. It's just terrible. I really appreciated that we took the time on that.

0:02:51 Thomas: Yeah. So I hope you caught that and that was a long one. So we are going to talk about an amazing amazing Federalist article that says we should go back to 1920s immigration policy. Now, I'm not a historian or an immigration attorney. I don't know if that's part of your curriculum, Matt, but was that good? Was it a good policy?

0:03:12 Matt: I do actually teach immigration policy. I know quite a lot about this. And I mean when I see that headline that we're going to see in the Federalist, what I see is the equivalent of, hey, Jim Crow was fine. Let's do that again. It is really just about the same for immigration. Yep.

0:03:21 Thomas: Oof. Yikes. That's not good.

0:03:25 Matt: People need to understand. But you also need to understanding that we are doing quite quite a lot of it again, and it's not heard properly to say that. I'll explain why before we get into it.

0:03:31 Thomas: All right. What else we got today?

0:03:33 Matt: Got a fun footnote at the end about a very unusual sort of trademark meets cultural appropriation moment here over in the UK.

0:03:41 Thomas: Okay. That sounds fun.

0:03:43 Matt: It is, yeah. Something has nothing to do with our current moment otherwise, but I thought it was interesting to talk about.

0:03:48 Thomas: Good. We do deserve that with a footnote.

0:03:49 Matt: We do. Yeah.

0:03:50 Thomas: Company many policies, the footnote needs to be something not a bummer and kind of silly. And I thank you for giving us that when we're talking about 1920s immigration policy being our current thing. It's a bumper. All right. Well, excited to get to all that after this break, which you can avoid by going to patreon .com slash law, support the show, avoid the ads and get the goodies. So after this, we'll get to it.

0:04:16 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:04:16 Thomas: Okay. Where do we want to start?

0:04:18 Matt: Well, we just had a massive new increase in the travel and visa bans this week, just within the last couple of days. And I want to talk About how that fits into the bigger picture of what the the Trump administration has been doing since Thanksgiving, so that we can understand that basically we're bringing back what amounts to national origins quotas, which was our immigration system for a lot of the 20th century from 1921 to 1965. We'll talk a little bit more in the next segment about how that actually worked and why it was so bad and why no one should want that again. I just want to review what this all actually is, because I think that people were very tuned in in 2017 to the travel ban, to the Muslim ban, when they were kind of trying out different versions of it until they finally got one through that the Supreme Court would accept. But we are now in a completely new kind of territory where they are trying out banning now up to 39 countries.

0:05:07 Thomas: Yeah. I confess I have lost track of this particular fascism.

0:05:10 Matt: Yeah, it's easy to do. Yeah.

0:05:11 Thomas: I kind of forgot about this and what it, can you remind me the basics? Because a lot of this stuff too, it gets struck down so quickly that I kind have lost track of like what actually is still in effect. So can you kind of take us back and just remind us quickly what the status is of this?

0:05:27 Matt: And just to remind everybody, of course, that in 2017, the travel ban started with seven countries, Muslim majority countries. And of course, Trump had promised to do a Muslim ban. And that's kind of what that amounted to. It was informally called the Muslim ban, but it did include North Korea and other countries that weren't quite Muslim. The Supreme Court eventually, after they got through a couple of versions of it, upheld the use of INA 212F, which is a very broad sweeping provision that allows the president to suspend the entry of people from certain countries for given reasons. And the Supreme Court did what it likes to do and basically found that the executive has a lot of authority over this, which, you know, the 212F is written that way. Yeah.

0:05:59 Thomas: I remember at the time that was one where Andrew did predict that like this is something actually the president has power to do. And it was just because it was so badly done and stupidly done that he even failed the first few times, which was incredible. But yeah, that's the lesson is we shouldn't elect Trump for a second term, everybody. That's the lesson.

0:06:04 Matt: It will get through. Yeah, yeah. Don't do that.

0:06:19 Thomas: Make sure we all learned that back in 2017. Okay. Any time travelers listening, because

0:06:27 Matt: That would be the way. The Supreme Court in the end used rational basis review to basically just say that there was not an actual restriction on religious entry. It was just they had like some kind of reason that they gave for these countries. There is justification diversification in some of these cases. We've talked about this before, but Libya at this point has two governments, right? It's barely functioning. It can't really be relied upon to issue passports or screen people or know who's coming from where. There are still ways that you could verify people, but it's a lot of work. And we're just sort of saying until you get this figured out, until the country is pulled together into something that looks like a functioning government, we're not going to let people from Libya in. That's a very different situation from somewhere like Nigeria that does have a very good functioning government and is one of the most consistently educated and wealthiest countries in Africa. Trump just doesn't like it.

0:07:09 Thomas: I can't think of why that would be. I can'T think of any particular reason.

0:07:12 Matt: Couldn't have have anything to do with the population of Nigeria.

0:07:15 Thomas: There's something different about the past. Hmm.

0:07:17 Matt: Now, what they're using for that is Boko Haram, which does control some of the territory in Nigeria, and it is a very dangerous group. But that's not the entire country. Boko haram is not running the government. The executive order that we'll link to is typical kind of Trump executive order nonsense. It goes on and on about different countries without naming them.

0:07:37 Thomas: You know who you are.

0:07:39 Matt: Exactly. So you just have to guess.

0:07:39 Thomas: I bet you think this executive order is about you don't you sorry are we talking about the current one or the one that happened a few weeks ago or all of the

0:07:45 Matt: On January 20th, there was the initial executive order that said they're going to do this. June 5th, he implements it after there was a terror attack involving a guy from Egypt. Egypt is on the list. It was just a good reason, good excuse to do it. 19 countries, they were saying they're gonna start to suspend travel and essentially end most visa availability from those countries. They cited in that order percentages of visa overstays as a big issue. You. A country like Tanzania, and I've represented a lot of people, by the way, from Tanzania. Wonderful country, wonderful people. And again, I've just met a dozen, maybe 15 of them, and it's certainly not the whole country, but I've had a very good impression of it. I want to go now. They have something like a 5 % overstay for their student visas, which isn't that much statistically, I know.

0:07:59 Thomas: Above right yeah the overstay for I don't know anything about this but I've got to figure that there's plenty of I donno european countries where the overstAY is way worse because of white entitlement. I don't know, I'm just guessing would you do you know any of the numbers on that or oh right okay sorry

0:08:37 Matt: Yeah, or has been. Sure. Europeans get to come visa -waived, the way that we get to go without visas to their country. And the deal that you make as a visa -waved country is if we catch you, we will immediately detain you and deport you and kick you out. I still meet plenty of a visa waiver overstays, it does happen. It used to be very common from Ireland, for example. We had quite a few undocumented Irish people until very recently in Boston. Still meet a few.

0:09:00 Thomas: Yeah, I guess the reason I said that is, I seem to remember a talking point being that like there are a lot of quote unquote illegal immigrants if you want to call it that using kind of his definition of the word because it's people who overstay it's white people who overstay visas and trump doesn't care about that weird I don't know because I don't know because it's hard and impossible to know why he wouldn't care about that

0:09:20 Matt: It's completely arbitrary. About 49%, I think, at this point still of the undocumented population overstayed a visa, which means that they went to a consulate and they were vetted and determined to be somebody that the consulate thought was going to come back because they had sufficient ties or economic ability, and they still overstayed for one reason or another. Essentially, they're cherry -picking countries that have certain characteristics that we just particularly don't like.

0:09:40 Thomas: Yeah countries that have a tail light out for example just uh just

0:09:44 Matt: Countries you might want to stop and frisk. You just have to kind of guess which countries he's talking about. Literally, there's this long paragraph where they're just like, at least one country does this, and another country does that. My favorite sentence was, in another country, the population, for the most part, does not formally document life events. Yeah, they don't keep scrapbooks.

0:10:00 Thomas: What do they think that' s their way of like avoiding the obvious kind of malicious malicious intent that was why the original, you know, Muslim man got struck down. But that doesn't seem like exactly the right thing. Am I crazy?

0:10:15 Matt: This is rational basis.

0:10:16 Thomas: It strikes me as like a really ham fist, like a really clumsy way of trying to talk around a crime that you're doing. Anyone listening would be like, what? You're still talking in a very obviously criminal way. Sure.

0:10:28 Matt: Right. No, this is just enough so the Supreme Court can say, well, there is a rational basis here.

0:10:32 Thomas: You're going to take a friend of ours down to the harbor or something, you know, like something like that. I don't think this is just two mobster sounding guys talking about a delightful trip to the harbor yeah

0:10:42 Matt: No, this is racism. And we know it's racism because the president has been saying all kinds of racist stuff in the last few weeks, even more so than usual. He also just openly admitted to having said the shithole countries thing that he denied having said, you know, years ago. He just said that at a rally in Pennsylvania recently.

0:10:57 Thomas: Was he still bothering to deny that I guess not anymore huh

0:10:59 Matt: Yeah, he was. Yeah. It's not even worth denying anymore.

0:11:03 Thomas: I think that's pretty funny to be like god I don't even remember what I lied about back then was that something I lied he's so obviously has unmedicated ADHD I say that was as someone with ADHD I could see if I were an evil piece of shit forgetting which stupid lie I told and then just you know oh whoops did I not say that no no well

0:11:13 Matt: Yes, he does. I got to say he was snorting his Adderall tonight.

0:11:24 Thomas: What do I care nobody do there's no consequences for anything

0:11:27 Matt: Right. Just to give you a quick quote here from the rally. Why can't we we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few. Let us have a few from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few? Send us some nice people. But we always take people from Somalia, places that are disaster, filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they're good at is going after ships.

0:11:33 Thomas: Ever

0:11:45 Matt: Says a guy who's very good at going after shifts. He would know.

0:11:41 Thomas: Oh boy oh yeah that's a yeah let he uh he who smelt it dealt I don't know I'm not sure that's a dark

0:11:52 Matt: That actually reminds me of my favorite part of the order. We talked about the Trump gold card last week, and there's a whole paragraph complaining in this executive order about about how some of these countries have offered citizenship by investment, CBI. They're just letting people buy residency in these countries.

0:11:58 Thomas: Thing oh god well that's one of their oh that's what are their complaints about

0:12:11 Matt: Yes, that anybody can get just residency because they'll just buy it. That includes allowing people to like, basically, they don't have to trace the funds, which they're not going to do for the gold card either. We're talking about how drug dealers or crypto guys can just buy the stuff from suspicious money, right? I just thought that was a funny detail.

0:12:25 Thomas: Yeah that is absolutely on brand it's not bad when the good people do do it according to them.

0:12:30 Matt: No, of course. This is one piece of it, but I wanted to mention because again, just this week, and I haven't barely seen this reported, the list went from from at least 19 to 39, there's now a whole bunch of other restrictions. Some of these are partial bans on visas. They're all travel bans of one kind or another that are going to restrict tourist and student visas.

0:12:48 Matt: But the one thing that really upset me and that I think should be getting so much more news is they're completely removing the exemption for close family members of U .S. citizens. So at least in all of these previous bans, you could still bring your spouse or your parents, your minor children, immediate relatives. They are completely lifting that now. The explanation for this. And again, they're doing kind of this conflation of, well, there's a bunch of overstays and also people are violating their immigrant visas. Non -immigrant visas are tourists and students, right? People we expect to return. Immigrant visits are people we expect to get residency. They don't talk about how people are violating the immigrant visas, which would mostly be through criminal acts. They don't actually get to give you the data on that. In removing this exemption, he says, these pervasive risks concerning nationals from the covered countries apply with at least equal force to family -based visa applications, which comprise most of the immigrant visa applications from such countries, and I want to point out all all countries, and potentially with even greater force. Familial ties can serve, and in the past have in fact served, as unique vectors for fraudulent, criminal, or even terrorist activities through means such as domestic or international financing of such activities. So basically, we're presuming that all of your family members are terrorists if you're a U .S. citizen who's trying to bring family members from these countries. Honestly, this is disgusting.

0:13:59 Matt: This is so much worse because you're effectively cutting off immigration. This isn't just stopping business travel. It's not just stopping students and tourists. And that's all bad enough because students and tourists are a really important part of our economy. We're also doing this ahead of the World Cup, which is absurd. I mean, I don't even know how the World Cup is supposed to work at this point. They are going to make exceptions for the athletes that's actually in here, that the athletes and their families can still come. So I guess they can still play the games. Just people that want to come in from those countries aren't going to get to come here. This is huge. I mean, it's a really big development. And this is just one of the things that has happened since Thanksgiving with the D .C. shooting. The others, of course, we've already discussed, but these full suspensions on any numbers of kinds of applications, all the big ones, basically adjustment assessment of status, residency, naturalization. And I'm sure you heard the story about people being pulled aside from naturalization ceremonies and taken out, basically told to leave. They'd already passed their exam, but the suspension effects even at that point. This is not unexpected. People were very surprised by this. I guess I was fully expecting it because that's what the order said it was going to do, was going keep people from naturalizing.

0:14:56 Thomas: This seems nuts. I completely, you know, like you say, I mean, this isn't getting much coverage. Is this like the equivalent, just to put it in context of what was like Cuba for the longest time? Is it like that?

0:15:09 Matt: Oh, it's not reciprocal. I mean, if they want us, we can still go visit these countries. Nothing has changed there and it's a crime to go there.

0:15:15 Thomas: Oh, oh, okay. So it's not both ways. It's just, that's why I don't know what this is. So it's only, when you say travel ban, I would interpret that as no one could go there either, but it's Only One Way. Oh. Well,

0:15:26 Matt: So it just means they can't visit us and they can immigrate. It's very serious.

0:15:30 Thomas: I'm glad I asked that because I think I was under that misconception. It's like if you have a U .S. visa, they can trust that that's all hunky -dory when we're coming back or something. And so that's alright. That's all fine. But we can't trust these countries to send their best or whatever.

0:15:44 Matt: We were just saying we can't give them visas because we can screen them. We don't know who they are. And when you look at the map of the countries that are now affected, it's pretty much, I mean, Africa's lit up. Pretty obvious what we're doing here. They're also now no longer giving visas to anybody with documents issued by the Palestinian Authority, which is what runs the West Bank. Obviously, people from Gaza were already excluded. Countries like Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Malawi, Benin, I means, these are not countries that ARE going through civil wars right now. In June, they'd already basically had a full ban on Haiti. And Haiti isn't a lot of turmoil right now.

0:16:15 Matt: That makes some sense, right? But partially even restricting Nigeria is ridiculous. Places like Senegal, Venezuela, of course, you can just assume is on the list, right?"

0:16:15 Thomas: It will allow barrels of oil to immigrate, though. It can come.

0:16:28 Matt: This is the president doing national origins restriction. So we'll talk in the next segment about what that actually is and why it's so bad. As you said, this is providing a veneer. It's providing a way to just say, well, people from these countries that aren't as wealthy, that are majority black, that are majority Muslim, we're just going to stop taking them. Congress didn't say that. The president has said that. And it's supposed to be Congress that actually determines how our visa system works. So that's pretty bad.

0:16:52 Matt: Congress did also give the president this power under INA 212F to determine who they can suspend entry to. The argument has been made by Trump that he could actually end all immigration with 212f. They could try to extend it that far. I don't think the Supreme Court would allow that, but they could try, to do a full moratorium.

0:17:07 Thomas: Is that a unitary executive bullshit thing? I don't know.

0:17:10 Matt: It could be. I should also mention there was a policy alert that issued after Thanksgiving, after the shooting, that I'm very concerned about, where USCIS is being told that they have to consider relevant country -specific specific factors, the kinds of things we're talking about where they think that there's issues with these countries, as significant negative factors in the adjudication of discretionary benefit requests. And pretty much all residency is discretionary. They can decide whether or not you deserve it. So they're saying this could extend to other countries as well, or other countries they determine have these kinds of issues. This is very loose language, and I'm very concerned about the idea of just creating a negative inference against somebody because of what country they're from.

0:17:41 Matt: That's what it comes down to, that we can decide that, you know, everything else looks good, but you're Haitian. So no thanks. That'S not how it's supposed to work. So I want to come back and look at this Federalist Archaeological, because I think in this context, you'll understand how much worse this is, even than it looks on its face.

0:17:54 Thomas: All right. Well, we'll take a break and then put on our flapper attire and go back to the 1920s.

0:18:03 Ad: [Ad break 2 — ad music]

0:18:03 Thomas: Just right off the bat, I don't think there's a lot of policies from the 20s that I would imagine are super cool.

0:18:09 Matt: Especially these, because 1920s immigration policy was actually, this is very unfortunate, actually, but it was the first time that Congress acted on the advice of science to pass policy, which sounds great.

0:18:20 Thomas: Oh, Jesus. Until you look at the calendar.

0:18:25 Matt: Eugenics.

0:18:25 Thomas: Science means eugenics, yeah.

0:18:26 Matt: It was the idea that we can breed people and that some breeds of people are better than other breeds of people, objectively and scientifically. Eugenix was a very very strange movement because it united Northeastern liberals from Harvard who bought into a lot of this stuff along with Klan members, right? Like straight up people who were openly racist and said, we don't want these kinds of people. The Immigration Restriction League was based here out of Boston, Cambridge. Like it was a, you know, it was very respectable organization operating at the highest levels of the Ivy League that wrote a lot out of this policy and got the system going. I'm going to give you a little taste of eugenics so you can see because just a little sample. Take a look at this map and describe for the audience how artfully they have divided Europe into races that we don't even think about anymore.

0:18:57 Thomas: No thanks. Oh, wow. Oh, I love old -timey stuff like that. Old -time erasable labels. Oh, geez.

0:19:14 Matt: It's amazing.

0:19:15 Thomas: Let's see. Here we go.

0:19:16 Matt: This was serious science. This is Madison Grant, who's one of the leading eugenicists. Serious racist.

0:19:21 Thomas: Yeah, as opposed to some of the more amateur racists, you know, casual. Casual so we've got nordics alpines and by the way if any of these are slurs my apologies yeah I don't know what this 1920s thing nordics Alpines Mediterranean okay I can kind of understand that and Cro -Magnon area

0:19:24 Matt: Oh yeah. He was a pro. Yep. Yeah. I don't even see where the pluses are on this map because that's what that is.

0:19:41 Thomas: Pluses yeah it's nordics is reddish alpins is greenish Mediterranean's is yellowish and then Cro - Magnon area is like two plus signs

0:19:48 Matt: I don't know what's going on there, but I, yeah, it's not a very good map.

0:19:52 Thomas: Is that just because it's like like sprinkled amongst the other areas or something

0:19:57 Matt: And the weird stripy stuff, like we're going to have to link to this map cause it is amazing.

0:20:01 Thomas: Yeah what the heck is that

0:20:02 Matt: The stripes are so strange, little dots and stripes we can use nordic that's our word that's okay just just us nordics here but alpines like I've never once heard of anybody called an alpine that's a lot of russia and france and hungary romania it's very strange but there was this thought I mean in racial theory that it's it's like a lowest common denominator thing that if a mediterranean breeds with an alvine then they become a

0:20:12 Thomas: Okay alpines I don't yeah alpins oh it's a trump it's like trump's it there's it's likespades and whatever so it'slike if you if you why doesn't go the other way I guess it's probably based on like skin color I imagine or something

0:20:30 Matt: Meditanian yeah right it's a great question they also set aside jews because Because we have to remember, and before we get into this piece, 1920s immigration policy was explicitly anti -Semitic. That was a lot of the purpose was to keep people from Eastern Europe. So let me just explain what happened here. We have the golden age of immigration, which is considered to be basically from 1890 to 1920. That's when people really think about Lady Liberty and people coming over through New York Harbor, Ellis Island, like pretty much a third of this country, including I'm sure maybe you, but certainly my family can trace themselves to Ellis Island.

0:20:46 Thomas: Awful no

0:21:07 Matt: That is sort of the romantic idea of American immigration. But the problem for the purposes of Congress and the racists, which is pretty much everybody at this point. Even people who call themselves progressives were still super racist. The most progressive you could be is somebody who's like, well, Jews and Italians are okay, but of course, we're not going to talk about the Chinese. That's just not happening.

0:21:06 Thomas: Idea right oh yeah yeah we've made progress and we've held on to some of

0:21:29 Matt: What they decided was up until 1900, it was okay because you're getting mostly Nordics and Alpines, and that's okay, or at least mostly Nordic. They got very concerned because the old masses started to go further and further east in Europe, get more more and more Jewish, more and more Slavic. There was another racial designation they were very concerned about that we don't talk about anymore. Yeah.

0:21:47 Thomas: It yeah I'm surprised I don' t see it on this stupid map Oh,

0:21:51 Matt: All these designations, you know, of different kinds of white people that you can discriminate against, basically. Italians and Jews were the real concern, along with the Slavics. The game they played, the way they rigged the system, is they came up with a visa system that was going to be based on national origins. That way they can say it's not explicitly racist, even though there's a different national origin quota set aside for people born in China who are white versus people who are Chinese.

0:22:11 Matt: The worst thing, I think one thing that I've never heard heard anybody really talk about that I think is the worst and most racist thing that the immigration system has ever done was to declare that no one ever immigrated from Africa. So they had no quotas for Africa. Yep. Because nobody voluntarily came from Africa, there was like one Libyan immigrant in like 1898, who came over as a Muslim missionary and gave up and went home like this is documented in the records, because you can imagine it's a long trip to make. And there were very few people interested in immigrating from Africa but there were a whole lot of people who were brought here. But they didn't count for the purpose of trying to figure out how we're going to allocate the visas is because the system they decided to use was, let's look at the existing population of the United States and put together a proportional visa system that tries to represent that. So we keep that racial makeup. This is a system you can very easily game. And one of the ways they could game that was by saying, well, of course, the people that we brought here involuntarily are not immigrants. We're not going to count them at all. So black people just aren't in the factor. That is double punishing. Essentially, you've already got the horrible crime of slavery, and then you're not even going to allow them to be recognized as existing in this country to the point that we can reflect them in our racial makeup when you're doling out the visa system. The visa system was really only concerned with Europe because we had full exclusion from China. We actually ended up excluding Japan, which was very unpopular because we were getting better relations with Japan. But what they decided to do to game the system was to use the 1890 census and not the 1900 census.

0:22:19 Thomas: What? Oh, wow. Oh, no.

0:23:31 Matt: So they could use the proportional makeup that they liked of Nordics. They wanted to make sure that they reflected as much from Germany and UK and Scandinavia as possible because that's when those people were coming over for the most part. There there was a lot of debate about this, but they came up with a racial system that was national origins quotas. And Jack Reed, who's one of the sponsors of this, the senator, stood up and said on the floor of the Senate, I can quote this verbatim because I've taught this so many times over and over in my class. He said, the American people want us to discriminate. The only question is how we're going to do it. That's what he said. So we're just going to figure out how we are going to discriminate, we're gonna pass it into law, and we're to call it good. And I got testimony from eugenicists to come in and talk about how there's certain kinds of people that can't assimilate. And it's the same language that Trump is using. It's the language we're about a certain people just aren't fit for citizenship. And we're going to make sure that we design a system explicitly that keeps them out. And so what they ended up doing was giving these quotas out. This is the introduction of the visa system in 1921, and it was codified in 24. The visa system had not existed before. We didn't have this idea that you had to get permission while you're in your home country before you could come over here. Basically, we were just screening people at the border, which is actually the system I would like to see now is an Ellis Island kind of thing where we just screen people on arrival. The visa systems, of course, allowed us to severely restrict and in all kinds of racist racist ways. These quotas were kind of useless because, you know, I'd love to do a whole episode on 1920s immigration. It's fascinating stuff. People should know this history the same way that we should know about Chinese exclusion, the same ways we should we should have a Jim Crow. Before we move on to the Federalist article, I have a little game here to guess who said what.

0:24:59 Matt: The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements and simply excludes the immigration Of certain races. That was Calvin Coolidge. Nope, that was Adolf Hitler. That Was Adolf Hitler from Mein Kampf praising the American visa system. Calvin Coolidge wrote in Good Good housekeeping. Of all places, he wrote a piece of good housekeeping.

0:25:19 Matt: This is just before he became vice president. Of course, he'd become the president who would sign off on the bill we're going to talk about. He wrote something that was actually more extreme than what Hitler said in Mein Kampf. He said, biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics, once again, propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Calvin Coolidge, 1921.

0:25:16 Thomas: My God. Oh for F's sake. Wow, and that's just good science, I'm sure, he thought.

0:25:42 Matt: Yeah, just basic eugenics. Hitler and the Nazi lawyers were very impressed by the American visa system. And they really liked the idea of passing laws that essentially were racially based. They thought some of it went too far the same way they thought some Jim Crow went too much.

0:25:57 Thomas: Some of it was a little too far for Hitler, is the sentence that you just were saying. Okay, just checking.

0:26:01 Matt: But yeah, yes. Yes. By World War II, there were two countries in the world that had racially restrictive visa systems. It was us and the Third Reich on opposite sides of the war. Fundamentally, the Nuremberg laws were immigration laws. They determined that some people were just no longer citizens and that they could be deported, which just meant moving them around the empire at that point. But people forget that early Nazi policy was deportation policy. I think it's very important to stress that. All right, we should get into this piece and I'll maybe pick up a little more history as we go here.

0:26:29 Thomas: All right, yeah, so I imagine this is another piece from, you know, 1920s. Is this in Good Housekeeping that we found this?

0:26:36 Matt: These are our friends at The Federalist and another young, promising author who knows absolutely nothing about anything. So this is Casey Chalk, who has absolutely no qualifications to be writing about any of this, and he looks like he's maybe 22. And if you want to just read the headline, we can start there.

0:26:49 Thomas: Oh boy, Trump should absolutely model 1920s immigration policies because they worked.

0:26:55 Matt: Great start.

0:26:56 Thomas: Define worked.

0:26:57 Matt: They did work. It's true.

0:26:59 Thomas: That is really funny. Like what?

0:27:00 Matt: They were designed to be racist, and they were racist. So yes, they worked.

0:27:02 Thomas: Like, yeah, well, there weren't any terrorist attacks or something, you know, some stupid crap. I don't want something that works in a 1920s sense. I would like something that's compassionate and allows more people to benefit from our embarrassing wealth that we have in this country.

0:27:17 Matt: Phones worked in the 1920s, but I don't want those, right? We have better phones, it turns out now. So it's

0:27:22 Thomas: I do not know. Maybe we should have those, Matt. Maybe would not be doing 1920s immigration policy if we had 1920s phones, to be honest with you. Might be a connection there.

0:27:30 Matt: True, it's true. It'd be a little harder. That's true? I will point out before you begin that Casey Chak is a senior contributor at The Federalist, but his most recent upcoming book apparently is called Wisdom from the Cross, how Jesus's seven last words teach us how to live parentheses and die end parentheses.

0:27:48 Thomas: You first.

0:27:49 Matt: Casey Chuck. Yeah. So that's who is writing this. Let's just get through it. It's actually quicker than it looks.

0:27:55 Thomas: And we got a subheading. Yeah, it says five minute read. They don't, they're six minute read, they don't need to try too hard on their, on their racism here. So restrictive immigration policies need not be racist. Indeed, when properly framed and executed, they can be the very means of lowering the temperature of societal strife.

0:28:08 Matt: If you say they're not racist, this is the same shit.

0:28:17 Thomas: Hey, man, that's a non sequitur. Yeah.

0:28:20 Matt: This could have been written in 1920. It really could have. This whole thing.

0:28:22 Thomas: Yeah, is this guys, we should have done that as a quiz. Is this Calvin Coolidge or some asshole college Republican who's who is a senior contributor at the age of 26 to a racist magazine? There's a lot of talk from the left comparing the Trump administration's immigration policies to a supposedly backward 1920. I want to remind everyone of what Matt just said like four seconds ago about how racist this time was and how that guy was like, well, it's not a question of whether or not racism, it'S how much racism, right? Like on the floor of the, boy, a supposedly backwards 1920. 1920. And now we got a quote, Trump's latest anti -immigration push echoes the nativism of the 1920s, alleges a December 7th analysis by the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty, probably someone

0:28:52 Matt: Literally racial categories you've never heard of were being invoked. Yes, that's backwards. Correctly. Correctfully. Yep.

0:29:08 Thomas: Who, yeah, actually has some qualifications as a reporter. Language such as that, and this is still quoting, language such as used by the president and those around him harks back more than a century ago to the passage of a series of laws capped by one in 1924 known as the Johnson The Johnson -Reed Act, to multi -warns, but the reality that some of those who advocated for tighter restrictions may have done so for less than noble reasons doesn't obviate the fact that the Johnson -Reed Act served an important purpose at a time when the United States was becoming increasingly fractured because of high levels of immigration from cultures different from America.

0:29:32 Matt: Some of them, yes. Everyone. Culture is different from America.

0:29:49 Thomas: Is that a problem from the 20s? I actually don't even know what he's talking about. Out.

0:29:53 Matt: He's talking about the same thing that they were talking about in 1920, which is that we don't want Jews and Italians because they just don't understand how anything works here. Or also that the Slavics are fundamentally incapable of governing themselves and will never understand democracy.

0:30:05 Thomas: Yeah. I wonder if he's a little history, the next section, a little history on the Johnson redact. I'm just trying to think back. Like I can't, I can't think of like a common knowledge historical thing that was like, well, there was this suicide bombing or something, you know, like that, what it was even talking about other than just racism stuff in the first two decades of the 20th century, almost 15 million immigrants poured into the United States. They didn't, they didn't come here.

0:30:08 Matt: Yes. Please. Please.

0:30:29 Thomas: They poured into the United states in 1920, about 13 % of the United United States population was foreign born. Today, that number is slightly higher than 15%. Okay. American citizens whose families had been in the United States for generations became increasingly concerned that large populations of recent arrivals would not be able to effectively assimilate, including by adopting English and learning the principles of American Republican self -governance, since these immigrants formed ghettoized communities.

0:30:58 Thomas: Yeah, they come here and they prefer to be like ghettoized. That's just their way of life, Matt.

0:31:02 Matt: So, yeah. They're called immigrant enclaves. And this has been going back to Ben Franklin warning about the Germans. Ben Franklin has a very famous letter where he's like, these Germans are never going to assimilate. They've got their own newspapers. They got their own street signs. These people are impossible, basically. He actually stirred up the German population enough that they ran against him in something. And I mean, it's just like that kind of thing in one.

0:31:14 Thomas: So imagine saying you're not going to assimilate in the year 17 something like there isn't. What are you assimilating into that? I mean, I guess there is definitely a culture even before the founding of the country of of the place, I'm sure. But like, come on, you all came five seconds ago. Are you did you assimilate? Did you learn Native American languages? Did you all learn that? Did you assimulate?

0:31:43 Matt: Did he read back his own sentence here where he says, American citizens whose families had been in the US for generations, which again, means they assimilated, right?

0:31:49 Thomas: Well, yeah.

0:31:49 Matt: They became increasingly concerned that new people aren't going to assimilate the way they did, right, after generations.

0:31:55 Thomas: Generations. That's the thing. They got here a little bit earlier. So there it's just so good at it. Some of these immigrants were from Asia, primarily Japan, China, and the Philippines, but most of them were from European countries. The Johnson -Reed Act had a dramatic effect. Between 1901 and 1914, an average of 210 ,000 Italians arrived in the United States every year. Is that good or bad? What is he saying? The new quota placed the number of those who were allowed to enter at about 4 ,000 per year. Jesus.

0:32:21 Matt: Right, it's not very many.

0:32:22 Thomas: Because of the act, quote, more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Romanians, Spaniards. It is a miracle that no slur has happened so far that I know of. Spaniard's Chinese and Japanese left the United States, then entered.

0:32:33 Matt: Yeah, and again, you're saying that's a good thing, apparently, that it's great that these people left. Many people listening, including myself, and maybe you, have Eastern European heritage.

0:32:46 Thomas: I have no idea, Matt, but you're probably right. My generations are super spaced out on my dad's side. And so my dad'S grandfather was like a Civil War hero. That was kind of cool.

0:32:55 Matt: That's cool. All right, all right.

0:32:57 Thomas: My dad's dad was born in like 1890 something. Isn't that crazy? Yeah.

0:33:01 Matt: My great-grandmother was Hungarian, so I know that. Yeah, for sure.

0:33:03 Thomas: I don't have any stories of anything beyond that. I have no idea. But, oh, wait, my mom's family might've been German at some point, I think. Yeah. So there's probably that. Never thought about it. Don't care. We're all Americans. And it's great if you care and value your culture still. I just, I've never been something that was important to my family, I guess. I don't know. Okay. I was worried that was a quote from the twenties, but that was a quote from an immigration book from 2010. Okay?

0:33:26 Matt: Yeah, that was an actual fact. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

0:33:30 Thomas: Immigration plummeted immediately. And for the decades after the total immigration plunge from more than 700,000 in 1924 to 294,000 in 1925 and 280,000. In 1929, by 1930, the foreign born share of the U.S. population had dropped to 11.6 percent. And in 1970, the number reached a record low 4.7 percent. Yeah, so that's working. When you mean working, you just mean racist stuff.

0:33:55 Thomas: It's amazing the idea that people can just write this now. Now, let's go back to when everybody was too woke, allegedly, according to society. Wasn't that a better time?

0:33:54 Matt: It kept people out. Yeah. Right.

0:34:06 Thomas: Boy, I sure like that five years ago or whatever the hell it's supposed to be.

0:34:06 Matt: And How was the economy doing in the 70s when it was at a record low of immigration?

0:34:13 Thomas: Again, not a historian. I imagine we could have used more people like in World War II, you know, like it probably would have been good to have like more population in our country in general when World War II happened. Probably would have been good, right? More economy, more soldiers. Yeah.

0:34:25 Matt: Cato has a great study, basically a counterfactual about how many more people would have come here if we hadn't done the law the way we did and how much more prosperous we could have been. But yeah, let's keep going. There's some great stuff about World War II coming up too.

0:34:38 Thomas: Really? Okay. It's true. Some of the support for immigration restrictions. Okay. Let me deal with this real quick. And some of that. Okay. It's true. Some of the support for immigration restrictions came from unsafe resources, such as eugenicists and the Ku Klux Klan.

0:34:54 Matt: All of it. All of it was eugenicists in the Ku Klux Klan. That's who passed it.

0:34:57 Thomas: What's the rest of that sentiment?

0:35:05 Matt: We're less openly racist and they also passed it. Yes. Check out the next sentence.

0:35:16 Thomas: It's material difference. Congress was expressing the spirit of the nation.

0:35:21 Matt: Yep. That's the problem.

0:35:23 Thomas: So it's like, yes, okay, I get it. Sure, the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf effing Hitler and whoever else supports my immigration plan, but that wasn't important. We would have been racist anyway.

0:35:37 Matt: It was the spirit of the nation, which is literally true. That is. Yeah. And how dare you invoke John Higgum, who wrote Strangers in the Land is an absolute classic in immigration policy. It is completely misunderstanding. It's about the history of nativism and this exact point about how the spirit of the nation has always been anti-immigrant, right?

0:35:40 Thomas: It's probably true. Yeah. Yeah, it's good that we reckon with that. We're not whitewashing history there. Often I feel like in our movies and our media, we like to do this thing where the racists were like this outlier, you know, and then there's, there was some super nice white knight who was there to like be the not racist of the time and the period piece. But like everybody was racist as F for the most part.

0:36:15 Matt: And he uncritically just quotes Higgins saying Congress is expressing the spirit of the nation and moves on.

0:36:21 Thomas: So that's fine.

0:36:22 Matt: Yeah, that's how it was.

0:36:23 Thomas: It's literally, don't worry about the fact that I'm wearing a Klan hood right now. The nation was that racist anyway.

0:36:30 Matt: That's what we all got. Yep.

0:36:30 Thomas: The nation agreed. That's not even, this is incredible. The point, what he's trying to do, what this person is trying to do is let me deal with the counter argument that, hey, wasn't this like the Klan and weren't they super popular in the 20s? And the rebuttal to that is, yes, but everyone was that racist and they agreed with the KLAN.

0:36:53 Matt: And Congress was doing Klan policy. So what are we talking about? It's fine.

0:36:57 Thomas: As the Department of State declared, Americans simply wanted to, quote, preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity. That's not better you're not making it better man these restrictions remain in place until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 oh boy this is this is someone saying no let me explain you're like okay and they're like I'm even more racist okay yeah and we should still be racist yeah wow

0:37:23 Matt: We've always been racist and we should be racist. It gets stupider.

0:37:28 Thomas: What low in oh here we go what low immigration achieved in America I maybe you better take over I feel like my voice is getting annoying my throat's a little worn

0:37:37 Matt: In the decades following the Johnson -Reed Act, America emerged as the greatest power on the face of the earth. Of course, it would be beyond simplistic to assert that a single federal law is responsible for American dominance in the 20th century. I will actually assert that we could have been better without that law. But it is not unreasonable to observe that an increasingly homogenous population enabled America to weather many of the unprecedented challenges it faced. Now, try to follow the logic.

0:37:46 Thomas: Out yeah I can't remember who won in World War II was it the Japanese or was it us who ended up ahead there that was an incredibly homogeneous population but back then for like fanatical religious you know quasi-religious like weird nationalist reasons it didn't go well it wasn't good

0:38:08 Matt: Yeah, still is. Sure. And the Germans too. Just try to follow the logic of this paragraph about World War II. It's incredible. When the United States entered World War II, it was able to draft millions of American citizens who had been inculcated in a peculiarly American brand of patriotism. Let's start with the fact that we're drafting them.

0:38:22 Thomas: Okay here we go yeah

0:38:32 Matt: So it doesn't matter how patriotic they are. Men whose ancestors came from many different countries and spoke many different languages were bound together, fought and died for an America they shared as home. They were going to fight in Europe where these people were coming from that they were trying to exclude. A lot of Italians and Eastern Europeans were in the U.S. military and went and were happy to liberate Europe. It's incredible.

0:38:52 Thomas: I don't understand this is yeah Yeah, I'm amazed. Okay, let's see if this logic gets any clearer here.

0:38:59 Matt: After the war, Americans had shared the Great Depression and World War II as a common experience and as a common people, which I guess they wouldn't have if they were different kinds of people. They would have just not shared the Depression.

0:39:06 Thomas: No, yeah. They wouldn't have... I guess. This is so stupid.

0:39:10 Matt: They wouldn't know if they had the same experience of having no money.

0:39:16 Matt: Yep. Also emblematic of the shared identity in the 1950s and 60s, religious affiliation and church attendance, the mark of civilization, reached likely unprecedented highs, with church membership exceeding 63% in 1960.

0:39:24 Thomas: Oh, well, that settles it.

0:39:29 Matt: That is the America we want to make great again, 1960.

0:39:32 Thomas: This person's from the 20s. If you're a time traveler from the 20s, you have to tell us.

0:39:34 Matt: Time traveler. Yes. I'm going to skip a couple paragraphs. There's some stuff about how during the Cold War, we could appeal to God and the Declaration of Independence, whatever else. Nobody cares about that anymore.

0:39:43 Thomas: Yeah, and that was great. Yeah, during the Cold War, we could stir up a bunch of hysteria over a common enemy. And you know what?

0:39:49 Matt: Our best values.

0:39:50 Thomas: We couldn't have done that if we weren't so white or something. I don't know.

0:39:51 Matt: Yep. Yep. Many of our institutions dissuade people from learning English. This is a time-honored thing about English literacy. Again, all of this could have been written in 1920. I really appreciate, of course, the reference to, given such trends, is it any wonder then that as ISIS entered various urban areas that Latinos, even Latino American italicized citizens, have waved Mexican flags.

0:40:14 Thomas: What?

0:40:14 Matt: I'm going to send you a shocking photograph from Boston, Massachusetts. Brace yourself for this one. Yeah.

0:40:18 Thomas: Yeah, I was going to say, Irish. Oh, my God, these terrorists.

0:40:22 Matt: Here's St. Patrick's Day in Boston, of course, with Irish flags everywhere. Yeah, yeah.

0:40:26 Thomas: We need to put an end to this.

0:40:28 Matt: I got some questions here. American identity was hard won. Let's not lose it. It was not easy to forge a nation like ours out of so many distinct people groups. Yes, we had to do a lot of racism. In the last decades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, America was flooded with immigrants who knew little or no English, who had no familiarity with the Republican government, and he worshiped differently than the Protestant majority. That is very telling.

0:40:47 Matt: We forget about this now because most immigration opposition was either anti -Semitic or anti -Catholic.

0:40:48 Thomas: F off. Oh my God.

0:40:54 Matt: That's really what it came down to. We don't even think about that anymore because Catholics are just another kind of immigrant. Most of the Supreme Court is Catholic. Two -thirds of the country was Protestant. And he's making this point that, again, this is what we call, what historians call, what Americans think of and romanticize as the golden age of immigration. And And he's talking about it as a time when we're flooded with immigrants and we have to do something about it, right? This is when we were very prosperous and doing very well and sort of set up for everything that would be our success in the 20th century was those first few decades. Think about how jarring it must have been for native -born Americans, their communities transformed in the course of a few decades, it only takes a little imagination to consider how unnerving that must have done as citizens wondered, can the Republican door huge numbers of immigrants? Again, 13%.

0:41:30 Thomas: Won't someone think of the white lady who clutches her purse as a black guy walks by? That's what you're saying. I don't want to gender it. Apologies. But like, what are you talking about?

0:41:35 Matt: Exactly, right. Every generation has done this, right, has been worried about the influx. Keep in mind, these were predominantly European and Italics immigrants, right? So you can only imagine how much worse it would have been if they weren't Europeans. But we did. In time, people of Italian, German, Polish, Chinese, and Filipino heritage, families that arrived at the turn of the 20th century, came to view themselves as American first, while still retaining pride in their heritage. Amazing how that worked. It actually worked.

0:42:02 Thomas: Wait.

0:42:04 Matt: Giordano, Hoffman, Kowalski, Chen, and Bautista became common Italicized American names. He's totally killing his own point.

0:42:11 Thomas: Yeah. Sorry. Is this the same guy? Did someone else take over?

0:42:13 Matt: Yeah. Someone punched him in the face finally.

0:42:18 Thomas: Yeah? Yeah. I hope so. Yeah.

0:42:19 Matt: All of us, including my father's Polish -born grandparents, really saved that right in the middle of the piece. It would have been excluded under the 20s law, but because he's young enough that his grandparents probably got to come after 1960, were welcome to participate in the American dream. Or if they didn't, they came out in the quotas.

0:42:35 Matt: The nation today faces a demographic crisis even worse than that of 100 years ago.

0:42:34 Thomas: What, what demographic crisis? What are you talking about?

0:42:41 Matt: It's exactly the same demographic crisis we talked about on Wednesday.

0:42:44 Thomas: This is the weirdest thing.

0:42:46 Matt: It's the same one.

0:42:46 Thomas: He's simultaneously having to say we needed more quote unquote Americans by which it just means his brand, you know, the preferred white American kind of thing. And they were so great having immigrated like a little bit before this, like that there, they were fine then. Like cause they, they, the assimilated, but the people who were going to come slightly after that, it would have ruined the whole place oh

0:43:02 Matt: But these people, and people were saying the same thing about Polish people, that they could not integrate, they couldn't assimilate, they would never learn English, and they didn't understand Republican government. They said all of those things about Eastern Europeans. I love this, though. This is exactly like the New York Times stuff we're talking about, where they're like, well, anecdotally, right? The demographic crisis, even worse than 100 years ago, as evidenced by stories, like those of Somali immigrants in Minnesota. Now, this is amazing. Who not only refused to assimilate—which, again, most at this point of the Somali immigrants in Minnesota have become U .S. citizens, but also allegedly stole an estimated $1 billion in taxpayer revenue. The mastermind of the Feeding Our Futures charity scam, which I'm familiar with, I will send you a picture of this terrifying Somali woman so that you can fully take in and describe to our audience just how Somali she is. Amy Bach.

0:43:54 Thomas: Yeah that's a traditionally Somali

0:43:58 Matt: Bach, yes, B-O-C-K, for sure.

0:43:59 Thomas: Name. I just see a picture of mayonnaise. This is a very white person. I don't. I've heard about this and obviously there's some truth to the fact that like Somali people were involved in this right but you're saying that the mastermind was this white

0:44:10 Matt: We're involved. Yes. Trump's DOJ is prosecuting her right now and calling calling her the mastermind. Trump referenced this tonight in the address he just gave.

0:44:16 Thomas: Lady oh my oh my God

0:44:21 Matt: This has become a talking point. Again, yeah, sure, there's been fraud.

0:44:22 Thomas: Yeah one billion taxpayer revenue how much has Trump stolen how much has he been found liable for with his fake charity and that's one guy we need to get rid of whatever country all the billionaires are coming from enough of them you know because they're just looting the country that's the culture problem we have

0:44:40 Matt: PPP loans, I think there was like $150 billion. You think those were all Somalis that were taking out PPP loans fraudulently? Come on. There's so much fraud going around just that one program. But no, it's the Somalis.

0:44:46 Thomas: Yeah ridiculous here's a parenthetical you got to

0:44:53 Matt: Oh, yes, yes. Their most well -known and vocal leader is also Ilhan Omar, who has compared the United States to Muslim terror groups and dismissed the Islamic terrorist attacks of 9 -11 as a time when some people did something. They love that. Their most well -known and vocal leader. I mean, this is just straight up.

0:45:04 Thomas: Read yeah putting that right after the like criminal thing that you're saying you're alleging

0:45:10 Matt: Yeah. Yep. Yep, yep. To aggravate the issue, Somalia and other immigrant groups with cultural and societal values radically different from most Americans, he means white people, face a much more difficult path to assimilation than did the European immigrants who came to the US before the Johnson -Reed Act. Yes, they do, because before the Johnson Reed Act, it was open borders.

0:45:29 Matt: So yes, it is a much More difficult path, right? They have all of the same challenges that the people who came here not speaking English with no money had yeah they have

0:45:30 Thomas: Yeah what are you talking about but a path to assimilation is there some reason they wouldn't yeah it's probably a lot easier now wouldn't you think there's technology like you know there's the

0:45:45 Matt: Much more support and there's yeah non-profits

0:45:46 Thomas: You know easier to like learn English if you want to and you know like seems like assimilation would be easier than

0:45:52 Matt: Said this before but our refugee system is should be the model for the world it should be something we're very proud of because we it doesn't actually cost us anything because we let faith-based groups do the heavy lifting and they teach them things like how to wear a winter coat in Minnesota like that's you know they like fully assimilate the necessary enculturation that's an interesting way to put that all the more unlikely and he's saying again all the same things as people would have said about his great-grandparents from Poland it's not that any particular group of people is incapable of becoming fine American citizens yeah except you just said they aren't. But when immigrant numbers are high, these groups can... There's just too many. Yep. These groups can insulate themselves from assimilating, which again is what Ben Franklin said about the Germans, because they have little incentive to do so. Exactly the same thing. This is compounded by an unwillingness by so many of our enculturating institutions to tell them that as much as they are free to retain pride of their nation of origin, they must be first and foremost Americans. Again, this is 1920s talk.

0:46:03 Thomas: Ever yeah yeah sure yeah yeah but there's too many of them there's yeah

0:46:41 Matt: Restrictive immigration policies need not be racist. Indeed, when properly framed and executed, they can be the very means of lowering the temperature of societal strife.

0:46:44 Thomas: Why not why even bother with that sentence like I think you're saying racism is great is what

0:46:54 Matt: You are. You are. And right.

0:46:54 Thomas: You're they need not be racist just super effing racist wow

0:46:59 Matt: One of the things that is causing the most societal strife in this country right now is mass deportation, which is ripping communities apart. Yep.

0:47:04 Thomas: Racist like this. This asshole.

0:47:06 Matt: That's what's behind it.

0:47:07 Thomas: Unbelievable.

0:47:08 Matt: So there you go.

0:47:09 Thomas: This is ridiculous.

0:47:10 Matt: It's so bad. This is why I had to read it.

0:47:12 Thomas: It's so funny because the whole time it's contradicting itself with like, what is the meaningful difference between the immigrants of 1919 and the ones of 1921 or whatever? Like, am I missing something? He just seems to be like, he'll tout like how, well, they're from that part where he's like, oh, Chen and whatever. There's a common American names now. Why?

0:47:33 Matt: Right.

0:47:33 Thomas: What's special about that that wouldn't have worked in 1921.

0:47:38 Matt: Yep and people openly talked about Jews and Catholics the way that they talk about Muslims now. Like it's nothing different. It is all the same stuff.

0:47:45 Thomas: That is ridiculous.

0:47:47 Matt: It really proves it.

0:47:47 Thomas: What an asshole. People like this should not be welcome in polite society. They really shouldn't. We need to get back to where people like this aren't comfortable saying this racist shit out loud, let alone publishing it.

0:48:00 Matt: That's why I wanted to read because this has become mainstream talking kind of stuff. So if you hear somebody saying something like this now you know Now you know who that is.

0:48:07 Thomas: We needed a delightful footnote segment to wash the racism out. So we'll take our last break and then get to that.

0:48:17 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:48:17 Thomas: All right, Matt, can we do something not Klan related, preferably? What's our footnote? No. Now, OK, I'll take it. OK.

0:48:22 Matt: Bad news, it's still racism, but it's a little funnier.

0:48:26 Matt: So I'm going to do this one quickly, but I thought this was really interesting. Today's footnote comes from The Guardian, and this is a piece that caught my eye a few days ago, because I'll just read you the headline, which is, I called my recipe book Sabzi vegetables, but the name was trademarked and my legal ordeal began. So this is about a legal ordeal in the UK, and the author author of this book is Yasmin Khan, who's a human rights attorney who happened to publish a cookbook and it's called Sabzi, colon, Fresh Vegetarian Recipes for Every Day. So she's just putting out basic vegetarian recipes, looks pretty tasty. She's Pakistani -Iranian herself. And Sabzi is a word that 1 billion people, I'm sure all of whom are listening right now would recognize, because it's a Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Persian, Dari, and Pashto word for fresh greens or cooked vegetables, basically for veggies. So if you called your book in English, veggies, colon, fresh vegetarian recipes, right? You would not expect you're going to violate any trademarks because you can't trademark the word veggies or vegetables, right. You just can't.

0:49:25 Thomas: Oh, so she's getting sued for like having vegetables in the title.

0:49:31 Matt: Yes. Just simple word that anyone should recognize. You know, again, you and I wouldn't recognize, but I'm just saying in terms of as soon as it's explained to you, you're like, oh yeah, you can trademark that. Right. And this kind of got me down a rabbit hole of other examples of people actually trying to trademark, something like, for example, basmati, right? Which is just a kind of rice. It's been around for thousands of years, very tasty rice. The U.S. Patent Office initially granted somebody a patent for the word basmati because they didn't know.

0:49:55 Thomas: A patent. Wow.

0:49:56 Matt: Yes, because they said that this is basically a unique kind of rice. And everybody's like, no, you can't just patent the concept of basmati rice. Like I said, it's been bred for thousands of years. So they took it back eventually after a few years. It was actually a major cultural victory. And they allowed them to instead patent a strain of basmat rice, which is what they should have done.

0:50:13 Matt: But something like rooibos tea, right, which is just Afrikaans from South Africa for Red Bush, right? But you can't have a brand of rooibos because it's just too generic, right. Somebody at one point tried to trademark the word pho, just Vietnamese soup. They tried to say that a restaurant chain tried to say that they owned the word, pho. They tried to sue independent Vietnamese restaurants for using their word. It's incredible.

0:50:36 Matt: This went kind of the same way that there became a major PR battle because the deli owner got themselves a PR firm like Justin Baldoni and started doing that whole thing and got the book banned from Amazon as a trademark violation. Yep. And got Prince William's family on board with this.

0:50:43 Thomas: My god. Wow. Oh, come on.

0:50:55 Matt: Yeah, just ridiculous. And this is, you know, again, using Western IP law to colonialize, basically, to colonize language from the rest of the world.

0:51:04 Thomas: That is ridiculous. Good.

0:51:06 Matt: It's so stupid. But it's a good news story because eventually there was enough public bullying of these people that were trying to do this, that they had to withdraw.

0:51:12 Thomas: Good. See? Public bully racists.

0:51:16 Matt: It works.

0:51:16 Thomas: That's what you got to do. That is what we are trying to help do on this show.

0:51:19 Matt: It works. Yeah.

0:51:20 Thomas: I am glad it is a good ending because that is wow. That is ridiculous.

0:51:24 Matt: And I just want to read this quote from Yasmin Khan, the author who said, it's totally surreal to me the title of a family cookbook could face such a legal challenge. It's a reminder of how the entitlement born of colonialism still echoes through institutions, and can even be internalized by those that once excluded just incredible stuff.

0:51:38 Thomas: Unreal.

0:51:39 Matt: You can't trademark the word vegetables, it turns out.

0:51:41 Thomas: That is a delight. I'm glad that it's a good ending, but wow. All right, Matt. Well, thanks for a great show. Mark ourselves safe from Trump's blathering nonsense from today, from tonight that we stayed up for. Glad that was nothing and thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you on Monday.

0:51:55 Matt: All right, later.

0:52:38 Thomas: Oh, I thought it was going to be a war.

0:52:42 Matt: Nope, that was Adolf Hitler.