Immigration News and Antique Legends in Journalism History

A decade before William Randolph Hearst became publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, Mark Twain and his co-author Charles Dudley Warner coined the era that Hearst exemplified as a captain of industry. In their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, Twain and Warner, both with newspaper and magazine backgrounds, also outlined an idea of public memory. They framed it this way: “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.” Here I use the news of the day as proxy for the “pictured present” and the news of the past to stand-in for “the broken fragments of antique legends.”

In our current period, with dazzling technologies and immense corporations on the rise, and the same for heated debates about immigration and increasing inequality, it is fair to say that Twain and Warner were right: The Gilded Age is indeed a tale of today. It is a time in which the White supremacy and anti-immigrant polemics Hearst practiced continue to flourish in mediated representations—not to mention real life. The same might have been said a few years earlier, in the post–Great Recession, when I began research for my 2018 book, They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression. The book draws a line in media history from Hearst’s newspaper empire of the early 1930s, when, in the words of Fortune magazine, Hearst was the owner of the “biggest pile of newspapers in the world,” to right-wing media’s amplification of the “pictured present” of former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Bryan Denham’s insightful analysis of the derogatory depictions of immigrants in Hearst magazines in the first half of the 20th century rekindled my interest in the ways xenophobia has been imprinted and reprinted on the pages of journalism history and journalism present. While I was exploring Denham’s evidence cementing Hearst’s reputation as the “enemy of everything that is noblest and best in our American tradition,” as Charles Beard, the former president of the American Historical Association put it in 1935, news alerts concerning White supremacy cases from Wisconsin, Virginia, and Georgia pinged across my computer screen. Pivoting off Denham’s piece and my own work in They Came to Toil, it is these kaleidoscope combinations of the “pictured present” of immigration drawn from “the broken fragments of antique legends” that I wish to develop further. In other words, I will use the “antique legends” of old news clips as a site of memory, or lieux de mémoire, to borrow Pierre Nora’s conception of public memory.

In a similar vein, Denham traces well-documented tropes in Hearst magazines that conflated immigrants with the spread of disease, deviance, and depravity. He connects these themes to similar ideas proliferating in the media today. For instance, as Denham pointed out, the turn of the century’s Sinophobia is resonant in today’s xenophobic references to the “China virus” and the “Wuhan virus.” It is also worth noting, however, that anti-Chinese representations in the kaleidoscope combination of the “pictured present” are seen as de facto anti–Asian American representations. Almost 60% of the more than 10,000 hate incidents reported to the organization Stop Asian Hate between March 19, 2020, and September 30, 2021, were directed against Asian Americans who are not of Chinese descent. The shards of media representations past are both similar and shifting in the pictured present.

It is an all-too-often lack of connection with the media past that stunts the messages of the media present. A search of the NewsBank, Inc.’s, U.S. newspaper database found that between 2010 and 2019, the word “unprecedented” appeared in news coverage more than 1.3 million times, nearly double the references between 2000 and 2009. Even adjusting for anomalies in the periodicals archived during these periods, there appears to be an unprecedented growth in the unprecedented. Put another way, journalism suggests that the more things happen, the more things never happened or existed before.

This dichotomous interpretation of the past and present captured in “unprecedented,” the phenomenon of happened/never happened and existed/never existed before, is often misleading. It is the parallels, the analogies, and Twain’s broken fragments of antique legends that inform the present, and when known and understood, alleviate our historical and cultural amnesia. Comprehension of history’s nuances keep us from living in only one dimension—the present—to paraphrase New Mexican poet Sabine Ulibarrí. Like many issues, removing news coverage of immigration from a historical vacuum would significantly enhance our understanding of it. For more than 30 years, starting with my journalism career as a reporter trainee at the Los Angeles Times, I have reported, researched, and written about immigration in the United States. As a granddaughter of immigrants, I have lived with the narratives of newcomers far longer.

Piercing the airtight seal of immigration news with history or, as Twain might have said, with the archived clips of antique news coverage isn’t difficult. Consider a CBC news story from 2019, headlined, “Trump wants ‘an immigration system like they have in Canada’. Would a merit-based system work in the U.S.?” The article went on to quote Trump explaining the change was necessary “so we have people coming in that have a good track record.” To be fair, the CBC article noted that the United States had considered the Canadian system before, going all the way back to the 1960s, when then President Lyndon Johnson pushed for immigrant admission based on “abilities.”

Borrowing immigration policy from our northern neighbor, however, was a theme in the headlines long before Johnson. It was popularized by Hearst. Having failed to get the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904, Hearst continued to push his own policy ideas from his bully pulpit in the press. On July 6, 1929, Hearst’s San Antonio Light published an editorial stating, “Canada sets an example in selective immigration.” Extolling this “wise and workable system,” the editorial noted that Canada’s immigration policy was driven only by “what is best for Canada.” Therefore, “what is best for America should be the chief concern of the American government in selecting its immigrants.” For Hearst, and other White supremacists before and since, best meant White.

In fact, Hearst’s editorial applauded President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 decision to finally enforce an earlier 1924 law that kept in place immigration quotas favoring European immigrants. “This means that for the future the national origins method of computing immigration quotas will be followed that the present racial composition of the American people may be maintained,” the editorial stated. This same fear of America’s changing racial makeup was resonant in President Trump’s reported 2018 comment (which he later denied making): “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” According to news accounts on CNN and in the Washington Post, among others, the reference was to Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries.

As Ibram X. Kendi noted in a January 2019 piece in The Atlantic, the Know-Nothing political party and eugenicists of the 19th century held even more restrictive, exclusionary ideas about immigration than did Trump. The Know-Nothings counted Catholics and the Irish among the unwelcome. However, Trump’s view that Asians and White European immigrants benefit the country economically and his placement of Asians above Blacks on the color hierarchy were not as unprecedented as Kendi suggested. Although the Chinese Exclusion Act and related subsequent policies successfully limited Chinese immigration until 1943, these laws were inspired in large part by the perceived economic threat that industrious Chinese immigrants posed to White Americans. Racism was an important subtext, but the success of the Chinese was also salient.

Moreover, Trump’s attitude was not “unprecedented.” On May 3, 1852, about 9 years before the start of the Civil War, the New York Times printed “Cotton, Cane, and The Coolies,” arguing for the replacement of Black slaves with Chinese immigrant laborers. “African (labor) must at the South give way to Asiatic labor,” the author asserted.

The Chinaman . . . is an indefatigable worker. He will condense the reluctant toil of a slave for two days into one. He does not require the stimulating lash of an overseer. For the reckless, indolent abandon and passion for amusement, characteristic of the African, he substitutes the Asiatic gravity and consistency of purpose.

Negative attitudes toward this “model minority” spurred the 1862 federal law barring the importation of “coolie” labor, which predated subsequent limits on Chinese immigration. The same year, California passed its own Anti-Coolie Act, formally called “An Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition With Chinese Coolie Labor, and to Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese Into the State of California.”

Similarly, dehumanizing tropes found in headlines such as CNN’s 2018 article, “Trump ramps up rhetoric: Dems want ‘illegal immigrants’ to ‘infest our country,’” are reverberations of Hearst headlines. When applied to Mexicans, these in turn trace to even earlier attitudes the English colonists brought with them, particularly about the Spanish. That Hispanophobia, called the Black Legend, characterized Spanish-speaking immigrants as barbarians and even as “mongrels,” because Anglo Americans were shocked at their inter-marriage with Indigenous people. In an August 2, 1930, editorial in Hearst’s San Antonio Light, published in a city founded by Spanish-speaking immigrants, the paper stated, “The farmer rids his barn of rats, his henhouse of weasels. The government of the United States should clean house and get rid of undesirable human vermin.” The route for such criminal “undesirables” to becoming Americans was too easy, the editorial suggested. In language that Trump later echoed, the editorial stated, “At present any politician gathering together ‘a bunch of foreigners’ that will later obey his orders on election day can have them made into American citizens.” Compare this Depression-era language with a Trump tweet as reported by CNN: “Democrats are the problem,” he wrote. “They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!” he wrote. Immigrants, then as now, represented a political party dividing line.

Another headline-generating Trump immigration policy was his administration’s reinterpretation of the administrative Liable to Be a Public Charge (LPC) rule, which was first included in the Immigration Act of 1882. Immigrants who couldn’t support themselves were barred from entering the United States. During the early years of the Great Depression, Hoover applied these measures to potential Mexican immigrants, preventing many from gaining a visa to enter the country. Hearst didn’t think Hoover’s effort went far enough. In an August 4, 1930, editorial in the San Antonio Light, “Undesirable Aliens Heavy Charge on Uncle Sam,” the Hearst press argued that “tens of thousands of undesirable aliens” are “costing big hearted Uncle Sam a pretty penny.” Lamenting the immigrants in prisons and poorhouses, the editorial concluded with the idea that “we should have the right to deport aliens who become public charges after they enter.” By 1996, the public charge regulation applied to someone whose source of income was drawn primarily from government programs. Trump’s rule, which the Biden administration later blocked, expanded this charge to include non-cash benefit programs, with the idea of stopping more immigrants from being eligible to legalize their status.

Although the media format featured in Denham’s study—the magazine—is as long past its heyday as are the newspapers I research, when it comes to immigration, among other ideas, the more the media change, the more the message stays the same. News of intolerance is platform indifferent. But it’s more than that. To paraphrase Twain and Warner, the present pictured in our news today is created at least in part from the reassembled fragments of our news past, including those pages missing from the archives. In the context of immigration news, the promotion of Whiteness is an antique legend indelibly etched in the pictured present. This is why journalists, media consumers, and media scholars must not forfeit the history of the message for an all too easy and all too common belief in the “unprecedented” nature of today.