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MARCH 28, 2024: SUPPLY CHAINS, IMMIGRANTS AND BALTIMORE  
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Heather Cox Richardson
February 29, 2024
Letters from an American
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_ The workers who died in the bridge collapse on Tuesday “were not
‘poisoning the blood of our country they were replenishing it….
They may have been born all over the continent, but when these men
plunged into our waters, they died as Americans." _

,

 

Yesterday [3/28] the National Economic Council called a meeting of the
Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force, which the Biden-Harris
administration launched in 2021, to discuss the impact of the collapse
of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the partial closure of the Port of
Baltimore on regional and national supply chains. The task force draws
members from the White House and the departments of Transportation,
Commerce, Agriculture, Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services,
Energy, and Homeland Security. It is focused on coordinating efforts
to divert ships to other ports and to minimize impacts to employers
and workers, making sure, for example, that dock workers stay on
payrolls. 

Today, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg convened a meeting of
port, labor, and industry partners—ocean carriers, truckers, local
business owners, unions, railroads, and so on—to mitigate disruption
from the bridge collapse. Representatives came from 40 organizations
including American Roll-on Roll-off Carrier; the Georgia Ports
Authority; the International Longshoremen’s Association, the
International Organization of Masters, Mates and Pilots; John Deere;
Maersk; Mercedes-Benz North America Operations; Seabulk Tankers; Under
Armour; and the World Shipping Council.  

Today the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway
Administration announced it would make $60 million available
immediately to be used as a down payment toward initial costs.
Already, though, some Republicans are balking at the idea of using new
federal money to rebuild the bridge, saying that lawmakers should
simply take the money that has been appropriated for things like
electric vehicles, or wait until insurance money comes in from the
shipping companies. 

In 2007, when a bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis
suddenly collapsed, Congress passed funding to rebuild it in days and
then-president George W. Bush signed the measure into law within a
week of the accident. 

In the past days, we have learned that the six maintenance workers
killed when the bridge collapsed were all immigrants, natives of
Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Around 39% of the
workforce in the construction industry around Baltimore and
Washington, D.C., about 130,000 people, are immigrants, Scott Dance
and María Luisa Paúl reported in the _Washington
Post_ yesterday. 

Some of the men were undocumented, and all of them were family men who
sent money back to their home countries, as well. From Honduras, the
nephew of one of the men killed told the Associated Press, “The kind
of work he did is what people born in the U.S. won’t do. People like
him travel there with a dream. They don’t want to break anything or
take anything.”  

In the _Philadelphia Inquirer_ today, journalist Will Bunch
castigated the right-wing lawmakers and pundits who have whipped up
native-born Americans over immigration, calling immigrants sex
traffickers and fentanyl dealers, and even “animals.” Bunch
illustrated that the reality of what was happening on the Francis
Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed creates an opportunity to reframe
the immigration debate in the United States.

Last month, Catherine Rampell of the _Washington Post_ noted that
immigration is a key reason that the United States experienced greater
economic growth than any other nation in the wake of the coronavirus
pandemic. The surge of immigration that began in 2022 brought to the
U.S. working-age people who, Director Phill Swagel of the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office wrote, are expected to make the U.S. gross
domestic product about $7 trillion larger over the ten years from 2023
to 2034 than it would have been otherwise. Those workers will account
for about $1 trillion dollars in revenues. 

Curiously, while Republican leaders today are working to outdo each
other in their harsh opposition to immigration, it was actually the
leaders of the original Republican Party who recognized the power of
immigrants to build the country and articulated an economic
justification for increased immigration during the nation’s first
major anti-immigrant period. 

The United States had always been a nation of immigrants, but in the
1840s the failure of the potato crop in Ireland sent at least half a
million Irish immigrants to the United States. As they moved into
urban ports on the East Coast, especially in Massachusetts and New
York, native-born Americans turned against them as competitors for
jobs.

The 1850s saw a similar anti-immigrant fury in the new state of
California. After the discovery of gold there in 1848, native-born
Americans—the so-called Forty Niners—moved to the West Coast. They
had no intention of sharing the riches they expected to find. The
Indigenous people who lived there had no right to the land under which
gold lay, native-born men thought; nor did the Mexicans whose
government had sold the land to the U.S. in 1848; nor did the
Chileans, who came with mining skills that made them powerful
competitors. Above all, native-born Americans resented the Chinese
miners who came to work in order to send money home to a land
devastated by the first Opium War.

Democrats and the new anti-immigrant American Party (more popularly
known as the “Know Nothings” because members claimed to know
nothing about the party) turned against the new immigrants, seeing
them as competition that would drive down wages. In the 1850s, Know
Nothing officials in Massachusetts persecuted Catholics and deported
Irish immigrants they believed were paupers. In California the state
legislature placed a monthly tax on Mexican and Chinese miners, made
unemployment a crime, took from Chinese men the right to testify in
court, and finally tried to stop Chinese immigration altogether by
taxing shipmasters $50 for each Chinese immigrant they brought.   

When the Republicans organized in the 1850s, they saw society
differently than the Democrats and the Know Nothings. They argued that
society was not made up of a struggle over a limited economic pie, but
rather that hardworking individuals would create more than they could
consume, thus producing capital that would make the economy grow. The
more people a nation had, the stronger it would be.

In 1860 the new party took a stand against the new laws that
discriminated against immigrants. Immigrants’ rights should not be
“abridged or impaired,” the delegates to its convention declared,
adding that they were “in favor of giving a full and efficient
protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or
naturalized, both at home and abroad.”

Republicans’ support for immigration only increased during the Civil
War. In contrast to the southern enslavers, they wanted to fill the
land with people who supported freedom. As one poorly educated man
wrote to his senator, “Protect Emegration and that will protect the
Territories to Freedom.”

Republicans also wanted to bring as many workers to the country as
possible to increase economic development. The war created a huge
demand for agricultural products to feed the troops. At the same time,
a terrible drought in Europe meant there was money to be made
exporting grain. But the war was draining men to the battlefields of
Stones River and Gettysburg and to the growing U.S. Navy, leaving
farmers with fewer and fewer hands to work the land. 

By 1864, Republicans were so strongly in favor of immigration that
Congress passed “an Act to Encourage Immigration.” The law
permitted immigrants to borrow against future homesteads to fund their
voyage to the U.S., appropriated money to provide for impoverished
immigrants upon their arrival, and, to undercut Democrats’
accusations that they were simply trying to find men to throw into the
grinding war, guaranteed that no immigrant could be drafted until he
announced his intention of becoming a citizen. 

Support for immigration has waxed and waned repeatedly since then, but
as recently as 1989, Republican president Ronald Reagan said: “We
lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our
strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by
doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation…. Thanks to
each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation
forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always
on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the
door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be
lost.”

The workers who died in the bridge collapse on Tuesday “were not
‘poisoning the blood of our country,’” Will Bunch wrote, quoting
Trump; “they were replenishing it…. They may have been born all
over the continent, but when these men plunged into our waters on
Tuesday, they died as Americans.”

—

Notes:

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Hidetaka Hirota, _Expelling the Poor, Atlantic Seaboard States and
the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy_ (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 

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