What R.I. can teach about immigration

Fear and loathing of immigrants drives much of our superheated politics. Two months ago, President Donald Trump ranted that California’s restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents might help “animals” — likely referring to members of the MS-13 gang — enter or stay in the United States.

The smallest and strangest state in the union might help us take things down a notch.

Tucked between Connecticut and Massachusetts, tiny Rhode Island has some of the most conspicuous immigrants in the country. Portuguese and Spanish are commonly spoken around Providence, the state’s capital. Refugees from Guatemala and Liberia live near older communities of Colombians and Armenians. One-fifth of the residents speak a language other than English at home.

Yet Rhode Islanders show little interest in race-tinged plans to deport newcomers or make English the official language. What’s their secret?

Some of it has to do with very old patterns in the state’s economy. Rhode Island whaling and textile bosses often recruited immigrant laborers for new, specialized work, so older residents didn’t fear losing existing jobs to newcomers. Another factor is the historical dominance of ethnic minorities among the state’s Democrats, who swept aside the short-lived and anti-immigrant “Know Nothing” party in the 1850s.

At a deeper level, Rhode Island has never fit very well into the United States’ epic tales of perfection and destiny, enabling a more relaxed view of difference and diversity.

Settled by dissidents from Puritan Massachusetts, Rhode Island became a hub for all sorts of misfits. Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians, freethinkers — all of them came to this obscure slice of Atlantic coast, neither wanting nor pretending to form a “City upon a Hill” on behalf of a terrifying God.

Happy to live under a precociously democratic charter from 1663, Rhode Islanders fiercely resisted British impositions during the 1770s. But they also balked at the Founders’ plans for a “more perfect Union” in the 1780s, which demanded that all states submit to new international norms about contracts and trade. The people of “Rogues’ Island,” the Founders grumbled, would rather shelter their struggling residents from unpaid debts than turn the United States into a world power.

Like most New Englanders, Rhode Islanders were opposed to the second war with Britain, in 1812, and cool to the conflict’s hero, Andrew Jackson. They weren’t part of Jackson’s white nationalist mission to spread slavery across the continent. But they also weren’t prominent in the moralistic crusades that other New Englanders began in this period.

As Americans moved toward the Pacific in the later 1800s, Rhode Island remained connected to an Atlantic maritime world that stretched to Portugal and Cape Verde. Its mixed economy of farms, factories and seaports resisted incorporation into greater Boston or New York, creating a culture that was both provincial and cosmopolitan.

If the rest of the nation became a melting pot, Rhode Island remained more of a patchwork. Left out of the endless efforts to make the country more powerful or virtuous, its people were free to do what worked for their small and mixed communities. They could focus on getting along rather than defending or perfecting some ideal notion of the nation.

The result today is not just a broad tolerance of new faces but also a quirky pragmatism in public life.

The mayor of Providence from 1991 to 2002, Vincent "Buddy" Cianci Jr.

, was a felon. His successor, David Cicilline, was the first openly gay mayor of a U.S. state capital.

It’s a Democratic state that often elects some of the few remaining GOP moderates to office. It’s a heavily Catholic state in which religious conservatism has little traction.

And it’s a place where immigration is just one issue among many.

After all, Rhode Island has always been a work in progress, a collection of unusual people trying to live together in peace, if not harmony.

Now more than ever, that sounds like a good model for the nation.

J.M. Opal taught at Colby College before moving to Montreal in 2009, where he is now the chair of the department of history and classical studies at McGill University. This piece first appeared in The Washington Post.