Becoming American Initiative Director Linda Chavez had an op-ed in the Daily Caller about anti-immigrant tropes in American politics.
The go-back-where-you-came-from refrain is one I experience frequently when I write on immigration or appear on television to discuss the subject. A few months back, one self-identified “college conservative” informed me he’d written to the president asking him to “arrest and deport” me, while most others just invite me to leave “their” country.
Never mind that my family has been here more than 400 years. My father’s family left Spain in 1597 and arrived in what is now the state of New Mexico in 1601. My mother’s family also came here in the 1600s, from England, and the first American-born child in the family, William Clements, was born in Gloucester, Virginia, in 1692. The last foreign-born ancestors in my family arrived in 1848 — from Ireland.
Read the whole thing here.