The Holocaust was all about diversity...
...and how to get rid of it.
Tech is not alone in his concerns. I quote from the floor of the Senate:
[M]ore precious even than forms of government are the mental and moral qualities which make what we call our race. While those stand unimpaired, all is safe. When those decline, all is imperiled. They are exposed to but a single danger and that is by changing the quality of our race and citizenship though the wholesale infusion of races whose traditions and inheritances, whose thoughts and whose beliefs are wholly alien to ours and with whom we have never assimilated or even been associated in the past. The danger has begun. It is small as yet, comparatively speaking, but it is large enough to warn us to act while there is yet time and while it can be done easily and efficiently. There lies a peril at the portals of our land; there is pressing in the tide of unrestricted immigration.
The time has certainly come, if not to stop at least to check, to sift, and to restrict those immigrants.*
Mexicans and Guatemalans? No, the ancestors of Rudolph Giuliani, Rachael Ray and Harry Caray (born Harry Carabina). That's right: the Italians, that wretched refuse that washed up on our shores in the late 1800s and threatened to overwhelm America! We would lose our identities and our nation would go straight to hell. Well, the nation didn't go straight to hell (though, for Giuliani and Antonin Scalia, the Italians have a lot to answer for), but our identity as a nation did change. We tasted pizza and have never looked back.
The quotation contains the words of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, from a speech he delivered on the floor of the Senate on March 16, 1896. He made many statements previous to these averring the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. At the time, those remarks were considered learned but now seem silly and dated with the benefit of hindsight. Before the Italians, the Irish would be the death of us, and before the Irish, the Germans would take over. And let's not forget the Yellow Peril in the West: all those Chinese with their insidious laundries building our railroads.
As they feared then, so do we fear now. One would think we would have learned from history that all new immigrants need is work and school to become Americans in their own way, but no. Americans don't know much about history. Especially not our own.
ER, you especially will appreciate this irony: I located this speech in Vol. 12 of The Annals of America, a collection of primary sources that illustrate periods of American history. The article just previous to this one is another speech by Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, from February 20, 1896, entitled "For Intervention in Cuba".
*Lodge, Henry Cabot. "For Immigration Restrictions", Record, 54 Cong., 1 Sess., pp. 2817-2820. Reprinted in part in The Annals of America, Vol. 12: 1895-1904 Populism, Imperialism and Reform. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1968. pp. 88-92.