Take a moment. Look at your last name.
Now think about your family tree. Your grandparents. Your great-grandparents. The people who crossed oceans, fled persecution, escaped poverty, or simply chased a dream that America promised them.
Do you see an O'Brien? A Kowalski? A Romano? A Schwartz? A Hernandez? A Nguyen?
If you do: and statistically, most Americans do: then you need to sit with something uncomfortable before you cheer on the current immigration crackdowns sweeping this country.
Because the people your ancestors were? They were the "other" once, too.
The Signs Your Grandparents Had to Walk Past
History has a short memory, but the evidence doesn't lie.
"No Irish Need Apply." Those signs hung in windows across American cities throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Irish were considered dirty, drunk, criminal, and dangerously Catholic. They were the immigrants Americans didn't want.
Italians? They faced slurs we won't repeat here. They were called criminals by nature. The largest mass lynching in American history happened in New Orleans in 1891: and the victims were Italian immigrants. Newspapers at the time celebrated it.
Eastern Europeans: Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and others from Slavic countries: were viewed as unintelligent, unassimilable, and a threat to American values. They took the jobs "real Americans" didn't want, lived in crowded tenements, and were treated as less than human.
Jewish immigrants fled pogroms and persecution only to face quotas, discrimination, and the shameful reality that the U.S. turned away ships full of refugees fleeing the Holocaust.
And we haven't even touched on the brutal history faced by Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and people of African descent: whose "immigration story" was often not a choice at all.
Catholics are not safe either—if you think being a conservative Catholic will protect you, think again.
This isn't ancient history. This is likely within two or three generations of your own family.
And it’s worth saying out loud: toxic nationalism isn’t new. It’s the same disease with a different flag pinned to it. In fact, a huge share of Americans are here because unhealthy nationalism failed in their country of origin—and their families had to run, rebuild, or start over somewhere safer.
Did you flee the Eastern Bloc to escape Soviet oppression? Do your Irish roots reach back to the famine? Did your Ukrainian ancestors escape the Holodomor? How about immigration from Latin America, Africa, or Asia?
Congratulations, you’ve already been touched by toxic nationalism.
As Timothy Snyder put it (citing Danilo Kiš), nationalism and patriotism are not the same thing:
"The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, "although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge," wrote Orwell, tends to be "uninterested in what happens in the real world." Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism "has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical."
A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better."
The Door That Was Open for You
Here's what's remarkable: despite all that hatred, despite all those slurs and signs and violence, America eventually let your ancestors in. Someone: whether through policy, through activism, or through sheer exhaustion of the nativist movement: opened a door.
Your family walked through it.
They worked. They struggled. They built lives. And eventually, their last names stopped sounding "foreign" and started sounding "American."
That's the American story we love to tell ourselves.
But here's the part we conveniently forget: at every single wave of immigration, there was a group of people: often descendants of the previous wave of immigrants: who wanted to slam that door shut.
The Irish who faced "No Irish Need Apply" signs eventually had children who looked down on Italian immigrants. Italians who were lynched and called slurs had grandchildren who viewed Eastern Europeans with suspicion. And so the cycle continued.
This Was Never About "The Law"
Let's be absolutely clear about something: the current crackdown isn't about following the law.
That's the talking point. That's the spin. But it doesn't hold up to even basic scrutiny.
Many of the people caught up in these enforcement actions are law-abiding individuals. They came here legally. They applied for asylum through proper channels. They renewed their visas on time. They did everything "the right way": exactly what critics told them to do.
And then the system was gutted from the inside.
Immigration courts are backed up for years. Applications sit in bureaucratic limbo. Status expirations happen not because immigrants failed to comply, but because the government failed to process their paperwork. People who followed every rule are having the door slammed in their faces.
Research backs this up. Studies on large-scale immigration enforcement programs have found "no evidence" that crackdowns improved employment rates for U.S. citizens. In fact, one major study found that enforcement actually led to a decline in citizen employment. The economic justification doesn't exist.
What these crackdowns do create is fear. Workers become afraid to report wage theft. Employers feel emboldened to exploit vulnerable people. Minimum wage violations increased by 100 percent for Hispanic workers and 40 percent for non-Hispanic workers under previous enforcement regimes.
This isn't law and order. This is chaos dressed up in a uniform.
The Company You're Keeping
If you're cheering on these crackdowns, you need to understand whose footsteps you're walking in.
The Ku Klux Klan didn't just target Black Americans. In the 1920s, the Klan was one of the most powerful anti-immigrant forces in America. They targeted Catholics, Jews, and anyone who didn't fit their narrow definition of "American." They would have been thrilled to run your Irish grandmother out of the country. They would have celebrated deporting your Jewish great-grandfather. They would have cheered sending your Italian ancestors back across the Atlantic.
The "America First" movement of that era: the original one, not the rebranded version: aligned with some of the ugliest forces in global history. They didn't want your family here.
So when you support today's crackdowns, ask yourself: are you honoring the sacrifice your ancestors made to get here? Or are you spitting on their graves while pulling up the ladder behind you?
"It Doesn't Affect Me"
Maybe you're thinking: this doesn't affect my family. We're citizens now. We're safe.
Are you sure?
History shows us that the definition of "acceptable American" shifts constantly. The Irish weren't white enough until they were. Italians weren't white enough until they were. Jews were considered a separate race entirely until, gradually, they weren't.
These categories are made up. They're political tools. And they can be redrawn at any time.
Do you have a last name that sounds a little "different"? A little too ethnic? A little too foreign to someone's ears?
Right now, they're going after the "other guy." But the thing about the "other guy" is that the definition keeps expanding.
As we've discussed in our piece on why defending due process protects us all, the erosion of rights for one group is never contained to that group. It spreads. It always spreads.
Honor Your Heritage
This isn't about politics. This is about who we are as a country: and who you are as a person.
Your ancestors didn't cross oceans and endure discrimination so that their grandchildren could become the very thing they fled. They didn't survive "No Irish Need Apply" signs so you could put up metaphorical signs that say "No Guatemalans Need Apply."
If you have an ounce of respect for where you came from, you cannot support policies designed to slam the door on people doing exactly what your family once did.
Look at your last name again.
Remember where it came from. Remember what your people endured. Remember that someone, at some point, extended a hand instead of a fist.
And then ask yourself: what kind of ancestor do you want to be?
The one who remembered? Or the one who forgot?
Want to get involved in building a more just approach to immigration policy? Contact Win Blue Strategies to learn how you can make a difference in campaigns that fight for the values your ancestors believed in.