May 2, 2006
The Immigration Debate Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:20 AM EST I couldn’t agree more with Ellen Feldman’s post in defense of a more open immigration policy. When I read the nativist screeds emanating from prominent conservative opponents of immigration like Rep. Tom Tancredo, or the alarmist anti-immigration tracts written by the likes of Samuel P. Huntington, whose most recent work, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, will sadly mar what was an otherwise serious and important career, I’m reminded of an earlier time when many ordinary Americans agreed that African-Americans and non-”Anglo-Saxon” immigrants were a menace to the nation’s racial and ethnic makeup. Back in the 1910s and 1920s, leading public figures sounded many of the same concerns that Huntington and others give voice to today, though the earlier nativists often invoked a cruder discourse. The outspoken segregationist Sen. Ben Tillman of South Carolina then complained, “We have admitted the dregs of Europe until America has been orientalized, Europeanized, Africanized, and mongrelized to that insidious degree that our genius, stability, and greatness, and promise of advancement and achievement are actually menaced.” His colleague Ira Hersey of Maine lamented that “we have thrown open wide our gates and through them have come other alien races, of alien blood, from Asia and southern Europe, the Malay, the Mongolian, the oriental with their strange and pagan rites, their babble of tongues.” Congressman Earl Michener of Michigan only echoed conventional wisdom when he argued, “the Nordic [race] laid the foundations of society in America,” and to compromise Nordic genius was pure race suicide. These ideas, also widely shared among American intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s, became increasingly unpopular in Depression-era America. The Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas, and his protégés Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, blasted away at the edifice of “race,” proving that human behavior and intelligence were products of environment, not blood. Nazi race policy further delegitimized racialist thinking, influencing works like Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, a celebrated volume that argued race was a scientifically “artificial” and “meaningless” invention. In 1938 the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association broke new ground in formally repudiating scientific racism. Other academic organizations followed, and ever since, scientists have steadfastly maintained that race and national distinction are, at best, a social phenomenon—at worst, a lie. It’s a shame, then, that we have to revisit the issue today. Historians of immigration know that today’s second-generation immigrants are learning English, becoming property owners and taxpayers, and forging stable communities and families at rates that actually exceed those of many of the earlier immigrants who arrived on America’s shores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In short, we’ve been here before. And we’ve gained far more than we’ve lost from a liberal immigration policy. Even if there are differences between yesteryear’s and today’s new arrivals, those differences may very well cut in favor of the new immigrants. Whereas earlier immigrant groups like Italians, Greeks, and Slavs had terrifically high repatriation rates, the millions of undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States clearly have an expressed desire to stay here, raise their families on American soil, and weave themselves into the social fabric of the nation. They are, in short, more loyal compatriots than many of the “birds of passage” who exercised immigration as a temporary economic strategy in the early twentieth century. Perhaps, in the coming weeks, a coalition of Democrats and principled conservative Republicans like John McCain and Sam Brownback can revive hopes for a sane immigration bill. There’s a lot riding on the outcome of such negotiations.
|
