The Migrant Child Farmworkers©
Press Room
John J. Pitney, Jr., Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College, is a consultant for the Told They Can’t© documentary. He has written for The Washington Post, Politico, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times, among others – and has been interviewed for numerous TV news programs. His scholarly works include The Art of Political Warfare, The Politics of Autism and American Government and Politics: Deliberation, Democracy, and Citizenship. His most recent book is called The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.
Below are key points from his recent opinion piece in The Mercury News entitled, “Bashing the bloodlines of migrants is an American presidential pastime: Trump’s obsession with genes fits into long, ugly tradition of presidents who consider immigrants inherently inferior.” where he shares historical Presidential anti-immigrant sentiments and how film stories like those in The Migrant Child Farmworkers © can counter them:
President Trump recently talked about undocumented immigrants and farm work: “You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried, we’ve tried. Everybody tried. They don’t do it. These people do it naturally, naturally.” The word “naturally” is a tell. Forgetting that Hispanic farmworkers often lack any alternative to sweating in the fields for little pay, he suggests their genes suit them for nothing but farm labor.
As an American historian, Pitney provides important perspective by pointing out that Trump is not the first President to bring such attitudes to the Oval Office:
- Richard Nixon said in 1971: “The Mexicans are a different cup of tea … at the present time, they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life.”
- Grover Cleveland said that Chinese immigrants were “an element ignorant of our constitution and laws, impossible of assimilation with our people and dangerous to our peace and welfare.”
- Theodore Roosevelt: “The average Catholic Irishman of the first generation … is a low, venal, corrupt and unintelligent brute.”
- Woodrow Wilson, on immigrants of the late 19th century: “men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland.”
- Calvin Coolidge: “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside … biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.
Pitney discusses the importance of a film like The Migrant Child Farmworkers © which tells the real life stories of individuals who grew up amid poverty, neglect, the punishing demands of a childhood of full-time farm labor and people telling them the same sort of message: “You will never go to a good college or make it in a white-collar job.”
Today they are engineers, physicians, medical research scientists and elected public officials. Their achievements showcase what even the children of immigrants working in the fields with their parents are capable of, giving testament to the universal truth that every child is endowed with limitless potential. It is a reminder to audiences that the indelible human spirit should not be underestimated and debunks the current onslaught of the same age-old false narrative about immigrants and refugees that has been spoken in this country throughout history.