Immigration policies based on racism and junk science like evils of eugenics cause harm to generations of innocent people

Echo report published in the Times Union  newspaper, published in the North Country of the Adirondack Mountains, New York.

In the North Country, fear of the 'other': French Canadians in the Adirondacks once faced hatred and discrimination. Considering their history may help us see today's hostility toward migrants in a new light.  By Jason L. Newton

French phrase for "the more things change, the more they stay the same" is "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose". 

On February 18, 2025, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka "ICE") agents detained nine immigrants working at Tupper Lake Pine Mill in the Adirondacks and scheduled them for deportation. ICE said the workers were in the country illegally, though lumber mill officials said they had met all work eligibility requirements.

This raid was surprising: Tupper Lake is not an immigration hub, and while the lumber industry persists in the Adirondacks, the region is now known more for its logging restrictions.

Yet, logging has been an ever-present part of regional history and once drew immigrants from across the globe. A look at the history of the Adirondacks affirms that immigrants have been essential to the economy and have positively shaped regional and national culture.
Immigrant workers are embedded in the traditions of the Adirondacks. In Tupper Lake there is an 11-foot tall lumberjack statue, the school mascot is the lumberjack, and the baseball team is the Riverpigs, a moniker for log drivers. The workers that created this venerated lumberjack, the embodiment of strength, hardiness and determination, came largely from the Adirondack’s northerly neighbor, Quebec.

In 1870 about 24% of residents of Franklin County, where Tupper Lake is located, were foreign born. 

Into the 1920s, about one in 10 were Canadian and probably half of them were French Canadian. 

During this period, there were consistently about 3,000 French Canadians in the county. And not all this historical immigration was legal. Into the 1920s, the border was lightly policed. Americans and Canadians crossed at will.

In the 1900s, my great-great grandfather Louis Auguste Deschene and his wife, Anna, made this journey from Quebec to the Adirondacks. He Americanized his name to Angus and in 1910, was living in a lumber camp in Fine, New York, with Anna, five children and four workers. Angus’ son Ernest became a logger and settled in Tupper, and my grandmother Delia spent time in logging camps.
Though it seems strange now, there was a time when these French Canadians, like immigrants today, were not welcomed.

The time of high immigration to Franklin was the apex of eugenics, the powerful but pseudoscientific study of racial difference that is now fully discredited. 

People like the Deschenes were not initially considered to be “white” people, according to immigration experts and the public. Eugenicists argued that the French developed differently than other Euro-Americans: They retained medieval traits and a primitive dialect, and had an innate predilection to Catholicism. Their often-reported “swarthy” complexion was evidence of inferiority and intermingling with Native Americans.

In 1881, the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics declared the French Canadians “the Chinese of the Eastern States” — a damming comparison because that year, the U.S. was debating the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. In 1904, the Watertown Re-Union newspaper did an exposé on Adirondack lumbering, declaring that “these French-Canadian inhabitants of the woods are half-wild folk.” 

The paper depicted immigrant children as sickly, barefooted “untamed creatures” and “caged animals.” Eugenicist and historian Madison Grant wrote in a 1916 book that French Canadians were “a poor and ignorant community of little more importance to the world at large than are the Negroes in the South.”

Building off this type of “evidence,” in 1919 the state of Maine banned the use of French as the primary language of instruction in public and private schools. In 1924 the Ku Klux Klan intimidated union members who were organizing French Canadian lumber workers in Maine. A year earlier a Klan member addressed a crowd in that state, declaring, “This is not a Catholic nation.”

Claims of racial difference justified poor treatment and low wages for French Canadians. In the Adirondacks, three lumber companies — Emporium, Santa Clara and A. Sherman — conspired to set low wages for French Canadians. They were shot by bosses in logging camps, disciplined by force and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet French Canadians helped New York become the second most productive state in pulp wood production by 1920.

Industrial dependency on French Canadians became a government-sponsored contract labor program during World War II, similar to the Bracero Program for Mexican agricultural workers. French Canadians were “bonded” to one American employer for a six-month logging season. Employers could order workers by filing the “Woodsman Order Form.” 

The program continued after the war, and between 1951, and 1955, about 6,000 French Canadian workers were “bonded” to Northeastern logging companies each year.

Like the Mexican “Braceros,” French Canadians endured unbearable conditions. A Senate investigation found eight Canadians living in a dirt floor shack alongside horses in winter. Others were housed in an “abandoned bus.” A Maine logger wrote, “You can make them work harder [than Americans]. They will live under worse conditions.”

Another said, “I think we agree … [the French Canadian] has been exploited. … He knows he is not loved.”

There is a pattern in American immigration history: Racism drives fear and disdain of immigrants, forcing them to accept low wages and poor conditions. Industries become dependent on low wages, furthering native workers’ disdain of foreigners. The French Canadian example is important because through hindsight, it shows how ridiculous these types of racial divisions are.
Today some Americans see Latin Americans as racially and ethnically different from “white” Americans. 

But history shows that whiteness as a racial category has no historical or scientific mooring. For example, between 1850, and 1920, the census counted most Mexicans as "white."

The Trump administration’s mass-deportation promise forces those interested in history to ask: What would the Adirondacks be like today if Americans had banned French Canadians like we did the Chinese? What would the Northeast be like if the KKK had abolished Catholicism? 

If we can entertain these hypotheticals, we can ask what today’s immigrants will add to Adirondack history. Might future generations carve statues depicting them? What will the children of immigrant workers become?

If the Trump administration succeeds in spreading race-based division, if they end birthright citizenship and expel immigrant workers, what will future Americans think of people today who allowed this? Through our actions today — capitulation or resistance — we will shape future history. What do we want the future of the Adirondacks — and of America — to be?

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has a lot of explaining to do for her constituents

About the time Congresswoman Stefanik is criticized by national and her own home state media, he has a lot of explaining to do.😮😬

Elise Stefanik ambitiously wants to be the former guy's choice to run (reported in the The Washington Post)...as vice-president❓ Obviously, Stefanik never learned Mother Lesson 101:  Beware who you choose for friends, because they will define you.

Rep. Elise Stefanik is obsessed with former guy Trump

An opinion published in the Albany, New York newspaper Times Union: No doubt U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York District 21 Schuylerville is basking in the outrageous national outrage over her use of the word “hostages” to express her wrong minded sympathy — even solidarity — with the hundreds of seditionists, police assailants, vandals and other thugs convicted in the January 6, 2021, attack on our democracy. Provoking outrage to generate attention is, of course, the MAGA modus operandi.

January 6th convicted sedition rioter the QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley

But this is not just the usual hyperbolic blather from another sycophant of Donald Trump. And Americans shrug off such rhetoric at our nation’s peril.

This offense — a perversion of the very meaning of the word “hostage” — is not some mere bit of demagoguery. It’s part of a broad and relentless assault on the foundations of our republic by Mr. Trump and his loyalists.

There was Ms. Stefanik on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, echoing Mr. Trump’s depiction of the Jan. 6 mob as “hostages,” even as she equivocated by insisting she condemns violence. She’s still using the incendiary rhetoric — the big lie that the 2020, presidential election was stolen from Mr. Trump — that incited that violence.

To call the January 6th insurrectionists “hostages” is to turn the word on its head. It demeans and diminishes the plight of the very real hostages being held around the world. The terrorist organization Hamas still holds an estimated 120 of the more than 230 Israelis and other foreign nationals it kidnapped in the brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Russia is said to have taken at least 20,000 Ukrainian children captive in its invasion of Ukraine, though some estimates range into the hundreds of thousands. Russian President Vladimir Putin wantonly imprisons political rivals and critics of his war, and even foreign journalists such as Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal. Russia and other repressive regimes like Iran and North Korea have held Americans and other foreigners hostage on minor or trumped-up charges as propaganda tools or pawns in foreign policy.

The January 6th rioters aren’t unwitting, innocent victims of a terrorist organization or a rogue regime. They’re criminals who attacked the heart of our republic, the Capitol in which the representatives of the people had gathered to affirm the results of a free and fair election, the very foundation of our representative democracy. They sought to overturn the results of the 2020, election — which President Joe Biden won decisively by more than 7 million votes — and to reinstall Donald Trump as president instead.

Of the more than 1,230 people charged with federal crimes for their role in that attack, about 730 have pleaded guilty and roughly 170 were convicted at trial, according to The Associated Press. 

Two suspects were acquitted. Some of the leaders of armed, violent anti-government groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, fiercely loyal to Mr. Trump, drew long sentences of up to 22 years in prison. Others with lesser involvement were sentenced to terms of months or even days.

It’s worth noting that, according to The Washington Post, the majority of punishments — 67 percent — were below federal sentencing guidelines.

Yet here comes Mr. Trump, calling these thugs “hostages,” and suggesting that he’ll pardon them if he’s elected president. There’s Ms. Stefanik right behind him, parroting his corruption of the word and recklessly speculating that these people have been treated unfairly.

Who is it, we wonder, that Mr. Trump and Ms. Stefanik so sympathize with? Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, perhaps, who drew the longest sentence, whom Judge Amit P. Mehta called “an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, to the republic and the very fabric of our democracy”? Or Christopher Worrell, who was convicted of using pepper spray gel on police officers? Or Jonathan Pollock, who has been on the run for months, accused of punching police officers, pulling one down a set of steps and attacking another with a riot shield? Or Danny Rodriguez, who drove a stun gun into a police officer’s neck? Or Thomas Webster — a retired New York Police Department officer — who used a metal flagpole to assault an officer defending the Capitol that day?

It doesn’t take a mind reader to know that Ms. Stefanik’s concern isn’t on the conviction of these criminals, but on her own political fortunes, which she has chosen to bond with her obsession for Mr. Trump’s.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik wrongly labels her constituents

Some questions for Representative Elise Stefanik: This opinion letter about the Republican congresswoman that is New York state's 21st district representative to congress, was published in the Times Union newspaper, in Albany New York state. 

Dear Editor: have been a public school teacher for 27 years, doing my best to help students achieve success in school and in life. I have mentored them, I have consoled them in their grief and exalted with them in their successes, coached them, even fed them.

I was raised Roman Catholic and I have always tried to live my life by the church’s creeds, “You are your brothers’ keeper" and “There but for the grace of God go I.” I have always tried to help when asked, to help those in need.

I believe in freedom, all freedoms for all, not just those who look like me. Freedom to live like you choose, marry who you choose, freedom to control your own body, etc. You don’t get to pick and choose.

Representative. Elise Stefanik: Do you believe in freedom or don’t you?

I pay my taxes, I support law enforcement, I support the (veterans) troops, and I believe that the laws of our land apply to everyone. I live my life each day trying to be a good citizen, looking out for my neighbors and family.

And I voted Democratic. 

So, I ask you Ms. Stefanik, when did I become a “pedo-grifter?" So, now, I’m a pedophile because I voted for Democrats? When did I become a “communist”? Please, let me know how and when this happened?

From Sergio Diana in  Colonie, New York