I’ve seen a couple of people online sharing a speech by Ronald Reagan in January 19 1989, just before he left office. Their purpose is to contrast Reagan’s apparent pro-immigration sentiments with Republican rhetoric today. The idea is, back in the day, even ultraconservative Ronald Reagan was in favour of immigration. The text of the speech is here.
The part I find triggering is really the core of Reagan’s message:
You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.
(These are not actually Reagan’s words. He’s quoting from a letter he claims to have received. It’s long been standard practice for evangelical Christians to invent conversations or anecdotes such as this for rhetorical effect, a tradition proudly carried on by Donald Trump. But perhaps there really was a letter.)
Now, I happen to be trying to “become a German” right now. In fact, I’ve been trying for over a year. The German citizenship process is a right pain in the arse. Before even submitting the application I had to obtain certification about my language ability. And I had to book an appointment for a citizenship test where they ask all kinds of impertinent questions, such as whether Nazis are bad.
Still, I might have it bad now, but it would have been so much worse in 1989. Germany still believed in “jus sanguinis”, which is Latin for “relaxed and juicy”. German citizenship was generally inherited, not granted. Germans interpreted their country as an ethnostate. This is nothing like the United States at all. So you can see Reagan’s (correspondent’s) point here.
But hang on, I made a mistake there. What’s “Germany”? There was no such country in January 1989. So what the fuck was Reagan even talking about?
After all, in Reagan’s day, many East Germans became West Germans. Sometimes spectacularly so. They literally made a movie. It was so well-known that it seems likely even Ronald Reagan would have heard about the phenomenon.
I think liberals enthusiastically sharing this speech are completely failing to get into the mush inside Reagan’s head on this one.
Reagan believed that, for example, a German, could come to America. And they could become a German-American. A German-American is still an American. The German-American would live among Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans and African-Americans, and all of those are also Americans. The German-American might then find a German-American partner and have children. In which case, those children would also be German-American. Relaxed and juicy.
But just as an African cannot become a German, a German-American cannot become an African-American. An American audience in 1989 would consider that idea laughable. And so would an American audience in 2025.
Reagan believed that “German” is the name of a race, not a nationality. That’s what he was talking about. That’s what the audience listening to him heard and applauded.
The rest of his speech is emphasising that America is a multi-racial nation, and that it is proud to be a nation of immigrants. And that’s nice, for sure. It is indeed a contrast to West Germany and many other nations of the time. There’s a bit of a problem concerning the first nations of America who never immigrated anywhere, but let’s not think about that now.
What’s relevant here is that while America has always been a multi-racial nation, the elephant in the room is and always has been that it is a nation defined by a racial hierarchy. It has always welcomed arrivals from both Europe and Africa: the latter to work, and the former to force the latter to work. This system relies entirely on the principle that nationality is mutable, but race is not. This is the mental framework within which Reagan was bound, as were the people in the crowd he was addressing.
America is the only place where people proudly claim to be “one-eighth Polish on my mother’s side”. That’s a property that simply cannot exist, whether biologically or sociologically. Europeans don’t talk like that. There are plenty of people whose parentage crosses borders, but they understand that borders are not ethnicity. It’s kinda obvious if you live in a border region, and many European countries are all border region. Americans think in fractions and booleans precisely because they are entirely divorced from their ethnic heritage. The property of being German-American is both critically important in daily life, and completely irrelevant. German-Americans today are not objectively distinguishable from other Americans in any way. It’s nothing more than a label. But in an apartheid regime, labels dictate everything. And Americans are ever-keen to display theirs.
In short, this is a speech delivered by a racist, to racists, in a racist country, endorsing racism. It is not “woke, for a Republican”.
There are other aspects to the speech that are frustrating. No, America was not and is not the only multi-racial immigrant nation in the world, WTF. And it has never been true that “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America”, where the fuck did that come from? Also, Jesus, what on earth is going on with Reagan’s rhythmic lilting baby-talk voice? Is that just so we fall asleep and don’t pay attention to the words?
But it’s the “becoming German” part that triggers me. Reagan was an important part of the system that I hate. And so are the self-proclaimed liberals endorsing this speech.