President Trump Is Not Our First Racist, Anti-Immigrant President: Woodrow Wilson

As President Trump rallies his base, again, by vowing to place the military on the  U.S.-Mexico border, I share this brief immigration excerpt from my work-in-progress, “Delegating Racial Animus to Presidents: White Workers, Migrants, and Heightened Scrutiny.”

President Woodrow Wilson was a useful tool for Europhobes. As a scholar, he published a book that singled out the “sturdy stocks of North Europe” for contributing to America’s early success while disparaging “multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland.” As a politician, he compared America’s breeding stock as the best of God’s creation. As a governor in 1912, he supported a eugenic sterilization bill.  Aligned with academic eugenicists, Wilson asserted that these undesirables had “neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.”  To the future president, they were rubbish from low European nations who “were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.”  In the oval office he fanned the fires against Europeans. 

Numerous presidents shared President Trump’s worldview of immigrants and blacks. My paper does not condemn them: I show that too much of our law has delegated the animus of white people—often voiced from unions— to Congress and on to the president. 
These policies are contrary to the Declaration of Independence, and constitutional guarantees of equal protection to “all persons”: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”