To my Jewish, Irish, Asian and Italian friends, let's remember:

Your ancestors were lower than dirt when they arrived here.

Italians were referred to – openly – as a subhuman race of rats and criminals.

Irishmen were apes and monkeys.

Laws were passed to keep Chinese women out of the country, so that the Chinese males who were brought over for menial labor couldn't produce offspring.

Jews were spat upon in the streets and routinely excluded from polite society.

Unhire-able. Undesirable. Laws were passed to allow for the mass discrimination and segregation of your great grandparents, not much more than a century ago.

It's nice that you now view yourselves as "Real Americans." Just yesterday, your kind were anything but. And I don't mean in the deep south or in obscure corners of the country. Your forebears were considered human garbage on the streets of New York, Philadelphia and Boston. It wasn't all that long ago when mainstream politicians were actively seeking ways to get rid of you too.

Here's Uncle Sam being swallowed by Chinese and Irish immigrants, many of whom came over in the mid-1800's to work on the railroads.

In "The Evolution of the Murphy", an Irish child begins life as a potato, then becomes a vagrant, a cop and finally a corrupt political official. (Click here for photo.)



Here's an Irish ape, swinging a bottle of rum, rocking back and forth on a barrel of gunpowder. (Click here for photo.)

A ship filled with big-nosed Jews, being ridiculed for fleeing the pogroms and sporadic outbursts of homicidal rioting against them across Russia and Eastern Europe. You'll notice the ship itself is given a giant Jew nose for a prow, nice touch.



Here are Chinese locusts infesting America. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed by President Chester A. Arthur. It mandated a 10-year moratorium on all Chinese immigration into the United States. Amazingly, the US didn't fully repeal the restrictions on Chinese immigration until 1943, as a check on Japanese attempts to weaken American-Chinese relations during the war. (Click here for photo.)



Here's an Oregonian settler offering a choice to the Chinamen who were inhabiting the west when he arrived – you can go or stay. (Click here for photo.)

The irony of a country built by immigrants building walls to keep out specific types of immigrants should be lost on no one. Here you see a former African slave, a Civil War vet, another Irish ape, a Frenchman and a Jew building a wall to keep out whatever might come in behind them. (Click here for photo.)



In 1915, Congress passed a law stating that immigrants had to pass a literacy test to come into the country. President Wilson vetoed it, but a much harsher measure passed two years later. Here was the list of undesirables banned from entering the country – word for word: "alcoholics", "anarchists", "contract laborers", "criminals and convicts", "epileptics", "feebleminded persons", "idiots", "illiterates", "imbeciles", "insane persons", "paupers", "persons afflicted with contagious disease", "persons being mentally or physically defective", "persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority", "political radicals", "polygamists", "prostitutes" and "vagrants". Here's the "Americanese Wall."

