NC's immigration dragnet reflects generations of xenophobia

Republicans want to turn North Carolina’s social-service state into a dragnet for immigrants. The bill, now on Governor Stein’s desk, would require universities, government health clinics, and social service providers to “vet” the immigration status of people applying for help. Imposing these sorts of jaws of exclusion helped destroy the California Republican Party. North Carolina Republicans are pursuing it with confidence.

Having nurses help ICE catch immigrants is rather grotesque. But there have traditionally been few limits on the xenophobia North Carolina politicians have showered on immigrants and other outsiders. After white settlement, North Carolina became an immigration desert. Sixty German machinists immigrated to Durham to operate some of the earliest cigarette-manufacturing machines in the late 19th century, but generally the state’s growing industries employed transplanted mountain “hillbillies” instead of the immigrants who streamed into northern factories. North Carolina was Black, Anglo, and Indigenous. Only 0.3% of North Carolinians were foreign-born in 1930.

This insularity created an abiding hostility and loathing of foreign immigrants in North Carolina. U.S. Senator Furnifold Simmons, the racist hatchet man who ruled the state like a white realm for 30 years, pushed through a national literacy test to disenfranchise immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. (It was blocked in the House by shipping interests.) Simmons’s contemporary “Our Bob” Reynolds, a populist clown who mused, Trump-like, that Hitler was doing some good things, called for an outright end to immigration at a time when immigrants in the industrial North were FDR’s base. Reynolds was a staunch Roosevelt supporter but his constituents were so anti-immigrant that he called for a policy more draconian than anything Stephen Miller has proposed.

Even in the 21st century, North Carolina politicians tended to be hostile to immigrants. Richard Burr first attained a lead over Erskine Bowles in 2004 with what then-New Republic writer Jason Zengerle called an “ugly nativist ad.” Elizabeth Dole, a political superstar with a reputation for kindness and Southern grace, gave an equally ugly speech decrying the supposed epidemic of undocumented drunk drivers. It’s a reminder of how conservative the North Carolina Democratic Party was until very recently that Senator Kay Hagan voted against the DREAM Act in 2010, coldly turning her back on young unauthorized immigrants who had done nothing wrong. Hagan was an extremely cautious politician. She clearly believed that she had to take a harsh, even cruel anti-immigrant position to appease North Carolina voters.

North Carolina immigration politics have not changed. But something has: immigration to North Carolina. Nine percent of North Carolinians today are foreign-born. While that’s still a smaller proportion than the national figure of 13%, it represents a staggering multiplication of magnitude relative to our homogenous past. In an interesting way, North Carolina may be returning to the immigrant-driven diversity that defined the state in the colonial era. Colonial North Carolina resembled New Amsterdam-New York with its immigrants from all over Europe, including Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, and Germany. This lovely quilt of peoples had a long legacy. Gaelic was spoken in the North Carolina mountains until the mid-19th century.

Did Celtic mountaineers “need to learn English”?

We need a revolution of the heart. North Carolina is no longer a humid, impenetrable backwater shunned by global migrants. We were born as a teeming, streaming destination for Moravians, Presbyterians, and anti-slavery Quakers. This openness is what has set apart North Carolina—at its best—from the darker regions of bigoted Dixie. Immigrants troop into the fields of the sweltering tobacco belt and endure tough obstacles to assimilation in a state that seems to have forgotten how to welcome them. Why shouldn’t Cape Hatteras glow like the Statue of Liberty?