My maternal grandparents were Cajun.
Letter writer Morgan Landry’s is not clarification. It is sentimentality masquerading as judgment. Landry celebrates Cajuns as having been “welcomed with open arms,” then weaponizes that romance to imply today’s immigrants are less lawful, less deserving, less human. That move collapses under law and history.
Start with the law Landry sidesteps. Congress could not be clearer: A noncitizen who is physically present or who arrives may apply for asylum whether or not at a designated port of entry and regardless of status. (8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1)). That is black-letter law, not a vibe.
Now to the history Landry airbrushes. Spanish h did not “welcome” Acadians out of benevolence. The Crown needed settlers to secure territory and blunt British power, so it relocated Acadians and subsidized them with land, tools, livestock and rations. That was utility, not virtue.
The irony is rich. Landry praises open arms in the past while demanding a clenched fist today, as if suffering becomes respectable only after centuries of genealogy.
Louisian’s record of “welcome” is anything but tender. After New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy’s killing, Mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare publicly vilified Italians as criminal and filthy, stoking hysteria that culminated in 1891 when a mob lynched 11 Italian immigrants at the Orleans Parish Prison, the largest mass lynching in American history.
Cajuns themselves were targets of American nativism. In Roach v. Dresser Industries, the plaintiff sued because he was Cajun, and the federal court held that Cajuns constitute a protected class based on ethnic and national origin. (494 F. Supp. 215, 218–19 (W.D. La. 1980)). And here’s the part that does not fit her narrative: The suit was brought under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
History is not a permission slip for cruelty. It is a warning.
BARRY RANSHI
New Orleans