Cynthia Farrar is the co-founder and CEO of Purple States.

When Hillary Clinton talks about immigration reform, she speaks in rosy terms. “The United States was built by immigrants, and our economy depends on immigrants,” she said last month. “Our future will always be written in part by immigrants.” According to Clinton, most Americans agree that comprehensive immigration reform is “the right thing to do,” and she expresses amazement when her opponents take issue with her premise: As a nation of immigrants, we will always welcome immigrants.

On the campaign trail, Clinton invokes her own family’s story to show that we have all benefited from America’s role as the land of opportunity: Her Rodham grandfather, an immigrant from the north of England, worked his way up in a Scranton, Pennsylvania, lace company and gave her father the chance to go to college. So began her American dream—a dream, she insists, that is “big enough for everyone to share.”


But as we discovered when we researched Clinton’s ancestry for this video, there’s another strand to her family’s story, and it casts a shadow on Clinton’s sunny portrayal of a nation with a shared immigrant identity. Her grandparents, Hugh and Hannah Jones Rodham, realized the American dream. Not so Hannah’s brothers, who worked in the mines. At the end of the 19th century, Welsh-American miners were sidelined by economic change, and they blamed the latest immigrants for the alteration in their fortunes—as a core group of Donald Trump’s supporters do today.

America’s ongoing dispute about immigration policy began in earnest in the Jones brothers’ day, and their story reveals why the politics of immigration is so toxic, and the conflict so difficult to resolve. If Clinton wants her reform agenda to succeed, she should consider what happened to the Jones side of her family.

To document the Jones family trajectory, we enlisted the help of a genealogy expert and sifted through birth and death records, city directory listings and other documents. We relied on contemporary sources and the research of historians William D. Jones and Ronald L. Lewis for our portrayal of the Welsh-American experience in coal country.

Clinton’s great-grandparents William and Mary Ann Jones left the South Wales coalfields for Scranton in 1879. American coal companies valued the experience and skills of British miners. Their early and instrumental role in the evolution of American mining, and their ready assimilation to a Protestant, English-speaking culture, gave the Welsh a prominent role in the industry and their communities. Life in the mines is never easy, but the prospects for advancement were good for a Welsh mining family.

As the Scranton economy diversified, some colliery families abandoned the arduous mining life to pursue other opportunities. Clinton’s grandmother, William and Mary Ann’s daughter Hannah Jones, married into one such family, the Rodhams. Through hard work and determination, they succeeded in giving their son—Clinton’s father—opportunities they never had.

But what happened to Hannah Jones’ brothers, David and Reese, and the other Welsh-Americans who remained in the mines? In the 20 years after the Jones family arrived, competition among coal producers increased. To reduce costs and increase output, the mining companies mechanized, thereby reducing their dependence on experienced miners. They imported cheaper unskilled labor from Eastern and Southern Europe. The earnings and opportunities of Welsh miners shrank, and David and Reese Jones stalled in low-level positions as laborers. The Welsh began to abandon mining altogether. Between 1880 and 1900, the percentage of foreign-born English-speaking miners fell from 94 percent to 52 percent, while the percentage of “Slavs” in the industry rose from 1 percent to 46 percent.

The Welsh miners were being stymied by modernization and industrial change, but they blamed their trouble on the “Slavs” who were brought in to meet emerging workforce needs. In 1892, Henry Rood reported that Welsh and Irish-born Americans “discuss the immigration question and either curse Congress or pray that it may realize what will happen to the nation if these swarms are allowed to fester and breed misery in the land.” The 1911 Senate report on immigrants in industry documented Welsh aversion to the newcomers: “The Welsh did not and do not desire to be associated in the mines with the recent immigrant.”

Economic anxiety and fear of cultural displacement spawned America’s first significant restrictions on immigration. Welsh-American and other English-speaking miners supported efforts to limit “Slav” access to mining jobs. Petitions to impose an English language requirement circulated in the mines. In 1889, Pennsylvania passed legislation that required would-be miners to document two years of practical experience and English competency. Government initiatives to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe culminated in the federal Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, which imposed quotas by national origin.

Ever since, a vicious cycle has propelled a bitter and intractable dispute about immigration. Economic changes that spur demand for foreign workers also shrink the horizons of some Americans. Employers call for expanded access to foreign workers to meet this new demand, and anxious American workers—who associate the newcomers with the loss of their well-paid jobs—try to block them. Meanwhile, reformers struggle to satisfy both sides, an impossible task. So when compromises are reached—as in President Lyndon Johnson’s landmark legislation of 1965, which is still in force—the result satisfies no one: It fails to align the legal supply of foreign workers with workforce needs, and it fails to shelter workers from the effects of economic change.

The immigration debate is intractable because it’s a displacement of the underlying issue. Like other would-be reformers, Clinton doesn’t acknowledge the reality that emerges in her own family’s story: Economic fundamentals have sidelined American workers—and their legitimate grievances need economic fixes.

And the immigration debate is bitter because, although immigrants aren’t responsible for stalling economic mobility, they’re a ready target—especially when the influx is large, rapid or associated with the loss of a way of life. When the immigrants are culturally or ethnically alien, hostility deepens.

As the history of Welsh-American miners suggests, Clinton’s appeal to a shared immigrant history is not only ineffectual, it’s also potentially counterproductive. She recently drew a distinction between “xenophobic” Trump supporters (whom she lumped with racists, sexists and homophobes) and those whose concerns she takes seriously: the Americans who feel left behind by the economy and let down by the government. This kind of rhetoric disparages deep and understandable feelings of frustration as un-American and turns a blind eye to the rifts caused by economic disruption. Clinton’s rhetoric dismisses the fears of the Jones brothers.

Clinton and Trump argue about whether immigrants are inspiring embodiments of our values or alien threats to our future. But as their own family histories reveal, that way of framing the debate is beside the point, and exacerbates the underlying conflict. What’s at issue is the impact of economic change: reduced opportunities to move up in the world, and growing inequality between those who benefit from modernization and those hurt by it. Until those root economic issues are addressed, tomorrow’s Jones brothers will blame immigrants for their suffering, employer needs will be frustrated and the immigration debate will remain bitter and intractable.

