New York City, N.Y., Apr 28, 2010 / 04:18 am
Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan has criticized Arizona legislation targeting illegal immigrants as “mean-spirited” and “counterproductive and harmful.” Viewing the measure as a manifestation of historic American nativism, he said immigrants should be welcomed and their legalization and citizenship should be advanced.
Writing in an April 27 entry on his blog “The Gospel in the Digital Age,” Archbishop Dolan said at times of social turmoil the immigrant “unfailingly becomes the scapegoat.”
He then listed what he described as “periodic spasms” of anti-immigrant “fever”: the Nativists of the 1840s who led mobs to torch Irish homes and Catholic churches; the Know-Nothings of the 1850s; the American Protective Association of the late 19th century who feared the arrival of immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Germany; the Ku Klux Klan who fomented hate against blacks, Jews, Catholics and foreigners; and the eugenics movement.
He also listed the Protestants and Other Americans United group of the 1950s who were “apprehensive about Catholic immigrants and their grandkids upsetting the religious and cultural concord of America.”