If You’re Shocked by Reports on Children at the Border, You Haven’t Paid Attention to American History

Americans love their children, agonizing about offering them a hopeful path to the future.

But since the nation’s beginnings, we have been at once sympathetic to images of childhood and unkind in our treatment of “other” people’s children. For migrants at the southern border, this seeming paradox is playing out once again.

This story stretches back through the 1930s–when Jewish refugee children from Europe were blocked from the U.S.–to the early 19th century, a time when the children of the poor, the displaced and those from broken homes were pitied but consigned to lives of servitude. These were often the children of immigrants.

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