May 1, 2006
About Immigration Posted by Ellen Feldman at 07:20 PM EST On the issue of immigration, America is in a bind. We need the energy, vision, and willingness to work of immigrants, but we fear their otherness. The situation is not new. In the nineteenth century, we permitted Chinese laborers to build the railroads but believed they were so alien they were not capable of citizenship in the growing country. As more immigrants came to stay, the fear of unknown cultures and people escalated. Between 1890 and the 1920s, the nation’s population almost doubled, and nearly a third of this growth was the result of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The influx of these mysterious strangers led to a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, who turned their hatred on Catholics and Jews as well as African-Americans. By the 1920s, the Klan claimed five million members, but so many others shared their fears that in 1924 Congress practically cut off immigration. By the 1950s many of these earlier arrivals had assimilated so successfully that they were in a position to pull up the gangplank after them. Catholic Sen. Pat McCarran pushed through a restrictive immigration bill that his fellow Democrat, Sen. Estes Kefauver, warned was “motivated by bias, discrimination against certain racial stocks or religions and which violates our Democratic tradition.” The law also exposed the United States to ridicule, he said, because one section excluded professors from the class of aliens admissible regardless of quotas. McCarran feared Communists, but it is not farfetched to suggest that the intellectual elite has always scared Americans. There is, however, another aspect of the immigrant debate. We have all heard tales of those from other countries who came to these shores and went on to great success. Less is said of those who failed. In the early part of the
last century, life in America was so harsh for immigrants that, according to David Kennedy in Freedom From Fear, more than half the Greeks, Russian, Rumanians, and Bulgarians; almost half the Italians; and nearly a third of the Poles, Slovaks, and Croatians gave up and returned home. Life is no easier for current newcomers to the country. That
America is a land of immigrants is a truism. That we need to start paying attention to how we treat our newest arrivals is the real issue of the day.
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