Open arms better than closed doors

In the mid 1800s, shop windows across New York City sported handmade signs that had only four letters but contained a ton of hostility. NINA was the acronym. No Irish Need Apply the message.

About 4.5 million Irish, most fleeing starvation, landed here between 1820 and 1850, among them grandparents of John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. We had plenty of room since our population was only about 20 million.

During World War II, when we had a clear enemy, we gathered Japanese Americans in camps since there was no place to send them. We interned about 120,000 men, women, and children, about two thirds citizens. They were Americans, they were loyal. Donald Trump would have called them all “illegals.” We ripped families apart, sent “war prisoners” to internment camps. They were no real threat. Almost 40 years later, President Reagan signed the law which had bipartisan support and we compensated over 100,000 Japanese Americans who had been imprisoned. They got a formal apology and about $20,000, neither quite enough to erase humiliations.

We have needed immigrants and benefited from their presence from the concert hall to the barn, but the compulsion for demonizing non-WASPs still is here, nowhere more stridently than from Donald Trump.

When he talks of deporting 10 million “illegals” if he becomes president again, he is including about 50,000 Iowans. They are not likely to pack an overnight bag of toiletries or a change of underwear and show up at the State Fairgrounds, at our Cedar Rapids airport, or outside an Iowa National Guard barracks.

If “they” won’t come on their own, how do you gather the flock without force? How would you fed them? Build internment camps? A President Donald Trump would, I guess, send military to stand outside church on Sunday mornings, knock on barn doors, ask Iowa farmers to turn over the people who work on their farms? Does the National Guard round them up? How do we get them to the border? Trains, buses, or walk? Many, of course, came on foot for a thousand miles, and Trump may think they ought to leave the same way.

Today, the war on democracy blossoms with Trump and his toady foot soldiers, including silent senators. Trump’s illegals in Iowa are not all farmworkers. They are scattered from classroom to hospital to factory; they deal with soybeans, but computers are as likely to be their implements. They earn only slightly less than others in the workforce.

I hope with a passion Donald Trump will not be elected president again, but if he avoids jail, as he probably will, and makes it to the ballot, he might. It is time for Republicans, including Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, to speak out. Trump is not a Republican. He is not a democrat, as in democracy.

Trump likes to call people names. When he talks about 50,000 of my, and your, neighbors here in Iowa as “illegals,” he makes their lives more difficult, our state less than it can be. Our senators should have the guts to just call those here “Hawkeyes” and ask Donald Trump to leave the field.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary.