NC Immigration politics has dark history

While the controversy over President Donald Trump's immigration policies has roiled the nation, immigration has a long history as part of Tar Heel politics.

North Carolina, until recent decades, had experienced little immigration compared with other states. In the 1700s there were waves of English, Scots-Irish, Germans and others who moved into the state. But until the 1970s, North Carolina was better known as a people exporter.

In 1968, before North Carolina experienced its rapid Sunbelt growth, North Carolina had one of the most homogenous populations in the country, ranking 48th, with only Arkansas and Mississippi having less social, economic and religious diversity, according to one study.

U.S. Sen. Furnifold Simmons, a Democrat from Jones County who served from 1901 to 1931, was the state's powerful political boss as well as chairman of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. He is best known as a key strategist to bring about Democratic control of the state, in part, by disenfranchising black voters and instituting Jim Crow laws.

He didn't like immigration into the United States from Southern or Eastern Europe, or what he called "the scum of the backward nations of the world."

The largest immigrant groups in that era were Italians and Jews, the latter who were fleeing religious persecution in Eastern Europe.

In an effort to "keep out this undesirable horde," Simmons introduced in the Senate in 1906 an amendment to an immigration bill prescribing a literacy test for admission to the country — similar to the one used to prevent blacks from voting. The measure eventually passed in 1917 with Congress overriding President Woodrow Wilson's veto.

Simmons' anti-immigrant politics were taken up mid-century by U.S. Sen. Robert Reynolds, an Asheville Democrat who served from 1932 to 1945 and was a populist demagogue.

Reynolds, an isolationist who spoke admiringly of fascist dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini before World War II, created his own anti-immigrant organization called the Vindicators Association Inc., with headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The group published its own newspaper with 118,000 subscribers and had five basic objectives: keep America out of war; register and fingerprint all aliens; stop all immigration for the next 10 years; banish all foreign isms; deport all alien criminals and undesirables.

Reynolds wanted readers to set up seven-member groups of Vindicators in their neighborhoods known as the Circle of Seven that would meet monthly. Vindicators would create their own Border Patrol open to young people between the ages of 10 and 18, who would wear badges covered with stars and stripes and who would be able to win $20 if they captured "alien crooks," according to Pleasants' book.

The Vindicators was anti-Semitic, arguing against more Jewish immigrants from Germany and complaining that Jews were too influential in the country. Reynolds was nicknamed by some of his Senate colleagues the "Tar Heel Fuhrer."

Reynolds was not alone in his fascist leanings. In Asheville in 1933, the Silver Shirts, an anti-Semitic fascist organization patterned after the Brownshirts, was formed. It claimed 15,000 members.

Reynolds, as chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee during World War II, ordered an investigation into reports that Japanese-Americans held in internment camps were being pampered and getting food, clothes and housing while other Americans received nothing.

Without any proof, Reynolds denounced Japanese-Americans as "fifth column" agents who acted as saboteurs against the American war effort.

That none of these charges were true never seemed to bother Reynolds, who as a former patent medicine salesman knew the world was full of gullible people.

Rob Christensen has covered politics for The News & Observer of Raleigh for nearly four decades.