Certain statements are, on their surface, so offensive that they draw an almost reflexive denial from many people. The idea of “dirty, disease-ridden immigrants” is one such talking point. The notion is so dehumanizing – so evocative of the regressive animal as compared to the clean, highly-evolved human – that we are tempted to dismiss it out-of-hand. Yet, if a person is willing to chance the possibility that a deeper truth may be hiding behind this repulsive veneer, it becomes a doorway into understanding that there truly is more that should be uniting rather than dividing us.

The problem with the assertion is not that it is false; it is that in the process of becoming overly Americanized we tend to forget how historically true it has been. Take the Irish, for instance. From 1845- 1849 the Great Famine forced a flood of over one million Irish immigrants into the United States. Most did not want to leave their home country. But with no food to be found and often only weeks to live if they stayed, they used the last of their savings or indentured themselves to buy passage to America for themselves and their decimated families.   

They sailed on ships reminiscent of the coffin ships that made the slave trade possible. They came in droves, sleeping floor to ceiling like human logs, with hardly room to move or relieve themselves properly. They landed in the new world so riddled with lice, typhus, cholera, and other diseases that the ships they sailed on had to be quarantined for 30 days before continuing their journeys. The Irish themselves were tested before leaving port, forced into hospitals rather than entering the general population if they were found to be ill.

One story, in particular, provides an indelible example of their circumstances. Canada, where many of the Irish landed, had hospitals similar to their United States counterparts for treating these sickly newcomers. One of the county’s pastors felt it was his religious duty to visit these poor afflicted souls, if only to provide a comforting presence. Knowing the prevalence of typhus and cholera among the Irish, his wife implored him to stay away. As a matter of conscious, he refused and, within weeks, was infected and died.

Nor did the Irish’s conditions improve if they managed to escape death on the ships or in the port hospitals. The following two paragraphs describe their subsequent plight as well as any I have read,

In Boston, as well as other American cities in the mid-1800s, there was no enforcement of sanitary regulations and no building or fire safety codes. Landlords could do as they pleased. A single-family, three-story house along the waterfront that once belonged to a prosperous Yankee merchant could be divided-up room by room into housing for a hundred Irish, bringing a nice profit.

The overflow Irish would settle into the gardens, back yards and alleys surrounding the house, living in wooden shacks. Demand for housing of any quality was extraordinary. People lived in musty cellars with low ceilings that partially flooded with every tide…

The History Place: The Irish Potato Famine

But step back in time even a short distance more and an entirely different set of stories support the narrative of the dirty immigrant. The advanced intellectual, spiritual, and military superiority of the Spanish and English allowed them to conquer and subdue both South and North America, or so the story goes. But more accurate accounts of what transpired note that only around ten percent of the indigenous population were dispatched by violent means. The remaining ninety percent who died succumbed to newcomers so unhygienic that the maladies they carried decimating the indigenous population. Some of the new arrivals even thanked God that after they were exhausted from war, smallpox finished what they had been unable to.  

In contrast to these 16^th through 18^th century immigrants, North American natives brushed their teeth, bathed regularly, and begged arriving Europeans to do likewise. The newcomers refused, imagining that washing with water was risky. They believed the better approach to cleanliness was to change into new clothes, particularly white clothes. Why? Because the European theory of cleanliness held that white clothing absorbed bodily impurities. Replace a person’s vestments with visibly clean whites and he was presumed to be clean once again. It did not matter if someone had failed to bath for several weeks, the prominent display of a white clergy collar, starched white cotton shirt or white bodice proved a person’s impeccable hygiene.

Hearing this today, it is hard not to intuit echoes of the notion that white skin was, therefore, cleaner and more indicative of purity than brown or black skin that seemed to lack the power to leach impurities from excessively dirty bodies.

If you merely read Japanese history without visiting their country, then you will likely fail to appreciate the incredible discipline required to live and write much of that history in near ninety-percent humidity and hundred-degree temperatures. Similarly, read English, German, Spanish, or French history without setting foot in their great halls of power, and you might miss the stench of hundreds of aristocrats relieving themselves in every room and corner of Versailles, the lice and nits being picked willy-nilly from wigs across the courts of Europe, and the sheer reek of everyday life. There is a reason the plagues swept through Europe multiple times over the centuries. It was not because these soon-to be immigrants hailed from countries that were pillars of cleanliness.

Is it fair to look at current immigrant populations with a judgmental eye when the historical patterns that marked our own ancestors’ arrivals predisposed them to the same or worse hygiene? Is it just to demand – after traveling thousands of miles on foot or hundreds by sea, after being trafficked, exploited, abused, or worse – that a person arrive at our shores in perfect health and pristine clothing? Are we exercising the fullness of our humanity when we judge everyone as if their journeys are near the end of the destines they aspire to rather than closer to the beginning?

More than we might like to admit, becoming Americanized means forgetting. It entails repressing ugly truths clinging to our old-word roots or mentally sanitizing abuses visited on others or endured by our own family lines. Unfortunately, it is impossible to forget where we have come from without also forgetting a part of who we are and should be – a kind of moral Alzheimer’s that is every bit as capable of robbing us of our humanity as its physical counterpart.