Mass Deportation in North American history was prelude to hundreds of years of historical upheaval

Echo opinion published in the Conway New Hampshire Daily News (Also in the Berlin NH Daily News and in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, by David M. Shribman:  At this link here.

David M. Shribman: Donald Trump’s planned ‘Great Upheaval’ has a dismal precedent.

Le Grand Dérangement

This is an excellent opinion by Mr. Shribman and I thank him for taking time to write about how devastating the Great Upheaval continues to be among descendants of Acadians and how this horrible history is a prelude to what is in store for the Trumpzi administration especially with real time media coverage to document the terror. IMO, I have said, Rep. Elise Stefanik is like the Lady Macbeth of the Congress and now, if she is approved to be the United Nations Ambassador, she will be the face of this Mass Deportation fiasco to the world and, indeed, she will be washing the figurative blood of genocide off of her hands.

CHETICAMP, Nova Scotia- In the middle of the 18th century, Great Britain undertook a deportation program in the New World with many of the elements of President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to expel hundreds of thousands of immigrants, perhaps even mor than a million, from the United States. It did not go well.

This episode is lost in the memory of most North Americans, but is vivid today, some 270 years later, in the lives and cultures of descendants of the French colonists who lived, generally peaceably, among Indigenous peoples for a century and a quarter.

It was a mass deportation known variously as the Acadian Expulsion or the Great Upheaval (in French, Le Grand Dérangement).

This episode remains a blot on British history- and, perhaps, an object lesson for the new U.S. administration as it is contemplating an even more massive expulsion.

Acadian flag with "Stella Maris" star

What Trump wants to do in terms of moving people has a eal parallel,” said Donald Savoie, Universite de Moncton, scholar with Acadian roots. “It was extremely painful and Acadians have not forgotten that experience.”

Here in the land of what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in “Evangeline,” called, “the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with moss,” ae the successors to the Acadian ruthlessly expelled from Nova Scotia (Acadie), between 1755 and 1763, and deported to the American Colonies, Great Britain and France. In all, about two-thirds of the Acadians were expelled in a brutal effort that provides the backdrop of Longfellow’s epic poem about lost land and lost love.

Some of the Acadians and their descendants later returned here, to the fishing village of Cheticamp on Cape Breton Island, where Acadian culture is nurtured and Acadian ercipes are renewed and revered. Everywhere flies the flag of Acadia, a yellow star (the stella maris, or “star of the sea”, signifying the Virgin Mary) affixed to the familiar blue-white-red rectangles of the French flag.

Just as the Acadian lovers Evangeline Bellefontaine and Gabriel Lajeunesse were separated during the Breat Upheaval in the Longfellow poem, so too were hundreds of Acadians in an expulstion that began when Colonel John Winslow summoned males over the age of 10 to the Grand-Pre Church, where he read a decree ordering, “That your Land & Tennements, Cattle of all Kinds and Livestocks of all Sorts are forfeited to the Crown with all other your effects Savings you money and Household Goods, and you yourselves to be removed from this Province.”

The appointment of Tom Homan, who has promised, “a historic deportation operation,” as the Trump administration’s border czar, and the strong role that Stephen Miller, the administration’s leading anti-immigrant figure, will play as Trump’s deputy chief of staff make it clear that the new president intends to set in motion what he has called, “the largest deportation in the history of our country.”

There are, however, obstacles to a mass deportation of those in the country illegally that could affect as many as 11 million peple- about a quarter of the immigrants in the United States now.

One is the backload of cases in the nation’s immigration courts, the Supreme Court has ruled that migrants facing deportation have the right of due process. The American Immigration Council, sometimes criticized for being an advocacy group for immigrants, puts the cost of such an operation above $315 billion for arrests, detention, processing and eventual removal. The group argues such an operaton would reduce Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent and would lead to a reduction of more than #47 billion in federal tax returns and $29 billion in state and local tax revenue.

More than half of the country wants drastic changes in the border. A year ago (circa 2023) 41 percent of Americans wanted immigration decreased, according to the Gallup Poll. The figure now is 55 percent. The poll found that 42 percent consider immigration a crisis. Only four years ago, the public was split between those wanting to admit fewer immigrants and those favoring more.

The number of foreign-born people in the United States reached a record 47.8 million last year, about 14.3 percent of the population, according to the Pew Research Center, just below the record (14.8 percent) set in 1890.

Stephen Miller has spoken of creating staging grounds that would include runways for military aircraft near the Texas border. Trump confirmed the other day that he would use military personnel for deportations and has talked of using local police in the effort. No plans have been made in Mexico for the reception of those sent back across the border, no shelters have been created, and no means of feeding or employing the migrants are available- challenges that face Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president for less than eight weeks.

“This will be a great burden on President Sheinbaum, who will need time to put a plan in place, and it will be highly disruptive to the U.S.- Mexico relations,” said Patrice Franko, a Colby College (in Waterville Maine) expert on Latin America. “This is going to be a complex process that merits great discussion, a lot of interagency work, and negotiations in how to do this in a way that does not spill over into other areas, including the drug war.”

The acadian precedent offers no comfort, only disruptions in the short term and anxieties in the long term.

Professor Savoie, the leading Canadian expert on government operations, rmembers the 1955 bicentary commemorations of the Acdian expulstion.

The celebration was that we were still alive and kicking,” he said. “To this day, Acadians have never let go. They have demanded an apology. It’s still a part of who we are. I think people andentire generations will be marked forever by the Trump expulsions. The United States will make enemies for generations.

The big difference between the 1755, expulsions and the ones that Trump is planning is the media technology of the time. The Trump expulsions will be visible globally in a way that was inconceivable when the Acadians were deported after refusing to swear owths to the British crown without assurances that they would be free to practice their religion and could remain neutral in the case of war with France.

The Acadian precedent to the Trump plan didn’t work out very well,” Savoie said. “It did not work out for us, as it is still a bone in our throat. We Acadians have never turned the page. And, it didn’t work out for the British crown, because centuries later it is still a stain on their history.”

David M. Shribman is a Dartmouth College graduate and the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Immigration lawyer explains consequences of terrible policies- Echo op-ed

Donald Trump is the son of a Scottish immigrant. 

Mary Anne MacLeod Trump (1912-2000) is the mother of Donald Trump. She was a Scottish immigrant

Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was born in Scotland. 

In memory of his mother, Donald Trump should be completely compassionate toward all immigrants. Donald Trump's two out of three wives are also immigrants. In other words, Donald Trump's children are the progeny of immigrants. Therefore, the Trump administration's adversarial relationship with immigrants is cruel and makes no practical sense. 

In fact, the draconian immigration and deportation policies being enforced by US immigration are preventing badly needed labor and creative talent from entering America. 

There's no doubt that America will ultimately pay a cost for the Trump immigration policy. This opinion is an echo from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

America is not first in welcoming talent anymore

The Trump administration already is building walls to keep out immigrants — immigrants who could help build our country ~ opinion by Robert S. Whitehill

Robert S. Whitehill is an attorney based in Pittsburgh who chairs the Immigration Group of Fox Rothschild LLP, a national law firm (rwhitehill@foxrothschild.com).
What a way to start a new year.

President Donald Trump is building walls. There’s a travel ban on people entering the United States from certain countries. Temporary Protected Status is being withdrawn for Haitians, Sudanese and Nicaraguans. U.S. admissions of refugees are at record lows, notwithstanding a record high number of refugees worldwide.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has been withdrawn for hundreds of thousands of young people whose only infraction has been entering the country as children, usually brought by their parents, without inspection or proper papers.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is exercising little prosecutorial discretion and going after even those who have committed trivial violations of immigration or criminal law. Immigration judges are being pushed by the Department of Justice to move cases through in assembly-line fashion.

U.S. and Indian media outlets are reporting that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is considering measures that could send back to India (and elsewhere) a half-million tech workers.

Let’s be frank. The United States is not the welcoming place it once was, and some people are just not coming anymore. Businesses are leaving the country or setting up operations elsewhere so they can hire and retain the professional talent they need without the frustration and expense of trying to climb over the Trump administration’s obstacles.

The number of foreign students in the United States has fallen by about 7 percent year over year. Fewer foreign students translate into fewer educated, globally attuned potential employees. There also are thousands of foreign nationals graduating each year who then cannot stay in the country even when have both a degree and a job offer. The wall blocking H-1B visas — time-limited work or study permits — keeps rising higher.

To qualify for an H-1B visa, a foreign national must be offered a position requiring at least a bachelor’s degree. The person must be fully qualified and credentialed. The employer must offer and be able to pay the prevailing wage, as determined by the Department of Labor.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has made a concerted and successful effort to make entry-level H-1B’s more difficult to obtain. 

For example, one of my clients, a major university, was seeking an H-1B visa for a post-doctoral fellow. 

USCIS required the university to provide evidence that a position requiring a doctorate also required at least a bachelor’s degree. (!)

That seemed laughable, but it cost the university time, money and frustration. There are many such examples, as approximately 40 percent of the fiscal-year-2018 H-1B petitions have been subjected to requests for evidence — some serious, some frivolous.

Moreover, USCIS has announced that it no longer will recognize previously adjudicated judgments regarding extension petitions for H-1B and other types of visas. This means many more requests for evidence can be expected, translating into time and money spent and work undone.

Because of all this, there is greater reluctance to engage or continue to engage foreign nationals in positions requiring college degrees, even when no Americans qualify or are willing to take them. America will not benefit from much-needed workers, including highly educated aliens with extraordinary abilities and executives, managers, entrepreneurs and others with specialized experience. Even multinational firms are having a harder time transferring workers into the country.

USCIS also has greatly increased the frequency of fraud-detection audits to make sure that foreign nationals lucky enough to have obtained visas are doing the work identified in their approved applications. It now requires in-person interviews of virtually everyone seeking permanent residency in the United States. Fraud detection is fine, but USCIS hasn’t increased its staff to handle this work. This adds to the already-long processing times, which, in turn, further discourages companies from hiring foreign nationals and foreign nationals from staying.

The Trump administration is seeking to sharply reduce not only illegal but also legal immigration and to revoke Obama administration policies. Almost every step it takes in this direction results in vigorously contested lawsuits fought to protect the rights of immigrants.

When DHS sought to delay implementation of International Entrepreneur Rule (IER) — which permits foreign entrepreneurs to invest in enterprises in the United States and employ U.S. workers — a request for an injunction was filed in federal court. The judge ordered DHS to get the program moving as required by federal regulation. As it begrudgingly did so last month, DHS stated that, while it “complies with the court order and implements the IER parole program, DHS is also in the final stages of publishing a notice of proposed rulemaking seeking to remove the IER. “

Mr. Trump might be having no luck getting congressional approval to build his physical wall along the Mexican border, but his administration is building plenty of less-visible walls to keep out immigrants — particularly immigrants who could and do contribute to America’s strength and vitality. These construction projects are being countered by legal action and advocacy, decision by decision. Unfortunately, this unceasing battle is making our country less attractive to many of the world’s best and brightest, whose energy and talents are welcome elsewhere.

(MaineWriter~ it's just  matter of time, ultimately, the US will pay for this terrible and exclusionary immigration policy.)

Commentary about blog "echos": Echo on Echo

"ideological echo chambers"

Haha (needing a smiley emoticon here!) Echo!: "..interesting is the study’s secondary finding. Political posts rich in moral and emotional content may spread faster and wider than other kinds of political messages"

This blog is proof about how difficult it is to be fresh and original on social media.  Although my blogs certainly aren't eligible for an originality award, I did have the wrong minded opinion about the series I labeled as "Echoes". This was the subtitle I used to describe my method to reinforce certain "letters to the editors", found in randomly read newspapers.

Coincidentally, I was "randomly cursing" the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, when I found this opinion article about social media and "Echoes".  Who knew? 

Echo, echo: The power of new social media to reinforce- An editorial board "echo"

A psychology study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has shown that political messages on social media containing “moral and emotional language” diffuse far faster than political posts on more morally neutral topics.

For example, an impassioned rant about proposed gun control legislation is much more likely to “go viral” than an evenhanded analysis of the effects of cutting interest rates in the current economic climate.

More interesting is the study’s secondary finding. Political posts rich in moral and emotional content may spread faster and wider than other kinds of political messages — but very rarely so wide as to penetrate the conversation on the other side.

Pundits have long warned of social networking’s tendency to create “ideological echo chambers,” which constantly reinforce users’ existing beliefs while insulating them from arguments on the other side. Indeed, most people can attest to the effect themselves from a glance over their own newsfeeds. But, until now, there has been little empirical grounding for these concerns.

The proof is important because, without it, it was all too easy to dismiss the worriers as heirs to a long tradition of doomsaying when a new medium of expression gains a large, young following. TV was debasing popular and political culture before the internet, and the radio before TV, etc. — the pattern stretches back to the printing press. Yet if these findings are correct, this moment is different.

MaineWriter: In my opinion, the way to counter this "Echoes" momentum is to train social media wonks with the opportunity to achieve a certain status, so people can determine their credibility. An "echo" blogger, like me, would have to apply for this credential and it would involve training and certification. Included in this process would be an ethical promise to support promoting "echoes" that contribute to protecting Free Speech and supporting the public's right to access credible information.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette - echo: improving health insurance

Take these steps toward viable health care solutions

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette August 2, 2017

Letter to the editor:

How can we secure a viable plan to address health care needs in the United States?

Step 1 — Eliminate these words from the vocabulary:

Obamacare, Trumpcare and repeal. The first two are polarizing misnomers. The third is a useless strategy with no avenue to effect workable solutions.

Step 2 — Begin a constructive, bipartisan national conversation (Congress and citizens) on the current law (legally known as the Affordable Care Act) to identify what needs to be improved or fixed. Build on elements that people agree have had some success.

Americans want access to affordable health care for all. 

Can we put aside the political posturing and address that concern? Collaboration and compromise are essential to the task.

SISTER PATRICIA McCANN
Oakland

Book Review: Anti-Vaxxers "those who forget history are doomed to repeat"

The Fever of 1721, by Stephen Coss, should be a lesson for the 21st Century, if modern civilization is willing to learn from the past to protect our future generations from preventable infectious diseases.

People who have evolved to become "anti-vaxxers" or those who have fallen victims to the unfounded beliefs about how preventative vaccines somehow cause deliberate harm to mankind, are obviously ignoring the medical science to prove them wrong.

George Santayana- Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana (16 December 1863 in Madrid, Spain – 26 September 1952 in Rome, Italy) was a philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist.

Stephen Cross examines a time in history when people were desperately seeking inoculations, rather than avoiding them, a retrospective history about past epidemics.  

From The Pittsburgh-Post Gazette reprinted in the June 2016 "The Rotarian" magazine.  Book reviews by Harry Kloman (PPG) and Frank Bures (Rotarian)

We live in a time when people doubt science and fear that inoculation will debilitate them rather than help them.

A time when working people struggle and the rich tell them to wait until wealth trickles down. A time when a crime committed by a person of color leads us to assume that everyone else who looks like that must be a criminal as well.

But in this particular time, “we” are the people of 18th-century Colonial America, and the focus of “The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics” by Stephen Coss, a book about a turning point in medical science and the yet-to-be-born First Amendment.

“The Fever of 1721” is informative and solidly told, although I can’t quite tell if Mr. Coss wants us to recognize the ways in which the nascent 21st century reflects 1721. It’s hard to imagine he doesn’t, and perhaps his choice to not bludgeon us with comparisons is a prudent one.

The book’s central story begins when a smallpox epidemic hits Boston, and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston — who, Mr. Coss tells us, performed history’s first recorded mastectomy — decides to experiment with a controversial prophylactic: Expose healthy people to a drop of the disease to let their bodies destroy it, thus making them immune if they’re exposed to a bigger dose as the virus infiltrates the population.

His experiment saved the lives of hundreds of people, but not without exposing him to accusations, led by the government and the press, that he was doing Satan’s work. When at last, late in 1721, more people began to embrace the technique, those who could afford it rushed to him and paid his fee. Those who couldn’t pay continued to die.

It didn’t help Boylston’s experiment that Cotton Mather had urged him to attempt it in the first place. Mather, the notorious and troubled Puritan evangelist who presided over the Salem witch hunts 30 years earlier, had since seen a new light in medical science, but many still believed he was an exploitative menace.

Nor did James Franklin, Ben’s older brother, help the daring doctor. James invented modern journalism by launching a bold newspaper that reported relentlessly on the smallpox epidemic, something his cowardly rivals largely refused to do. But he also seized on the fear and frenzy to further malign Boylston. His New-England Courant was witty, scandalous, snickering, aggressive and sensational in its anti-inoculation jeremiads (a favorite word of Mr. Coss’). So the birth of modern medicine left us with the afterbirth of tabloid journalism.

Mr. Coss admires what James Franklin did, and in the long run, so should we: His newspaper crossed a long-honored Rubicon with its merciless critique of government, something no paper had ever done with such impunity (that is, until it landed James in jail for a month). Still, the newspaper’s fanciful fabrications and clamorous crusades often weren’t the proudest moments in the history of the American media, something that Mr. Coss acknowledges grudgingly and only in passing.

And James’ paper did allow its frustrated and abused apprentice — his 16-year-old brother Ben, a self-taught polymath — to find his voice as a writer and his passionate disdain for religious hypocrisy (copious back then) and government tyranny.

Set half a century before American independence, Mr. Coss’ book lays out the themes and conflicts that would soon consume an emerging nation. That some of these issues still consume us offers no comfort about our future at a time when knowledge increases by magnitudes every day. In 1721, politicians and the people refused to see how science could help. If Coss’ tale teaches us one thing, it’s that the fever pitch of ignorance and denial is not so lovely a way to burn.

Harry Kloman is a freelance writer and journalism teacher at the University of Pittsburgh.