May 3, 2006
Immigration: Answers to Two Questions Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 AM EST John Steele Gordon posed two questions yesterday—one to me, and one to Ellen Feldman. Though Ellen is more than capable of speaking for herself, I hope she won’t mind my addressing Mr. Gordon’s queries: First, when I hoped that “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,” I meant just what I wrote. Mr. Gordon is incorrect in his assertion that Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid, both Democrats, scuttled the bipartisan immigration bill. It was a group of conservative Republicans who scuttled it, by insisting on last-minute amendments that would essentially destroy the compromise ironed out by leading members of both parties, most notably, John McCain and Edward Kennedy. The Senate Democrats are united in supporting conditional amnesty for most illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States, along with stronger border-control measures. It’s the Republican party that’s deeply divided on this question. Half of the party supports conditional amnesty, on both pragmatic and deeply-felt religious grounds. The other half reflexively opposes immigration. Mr. Gordon and I have tangled before on political questions, but it would be a real stretch for him to spin this issue any other way. Democrats are in favor of liberal immigration policies; Republicans are divided on the question. That said, I should not have suggested that conservative Republican opponents of immigration are unprincipled. In fact, they’re quite principled. I just happen to find their principle highly objectionable. From his eloquent post in support of America’s historic relationship with immigration, I can only assume that Mr. Gordon is likewise turned off by those conservatives who fear the presence of newcomers in our midst. As far as the repatriation issue is concerned, I’d suggest John Bodnar’s excellent synthesis of American immigration history, The Transplanted. Bodnar draws on hundreds of historical monographs and articles to reach a number of conclusions about the nature of American immigration. Among his conclusions are an understanding that movement to the United States was just one part of a large-scale, global migration of capital and labor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Agricultural modernization, industrialization, and urbanization compelled tens of millions of people to move from farm to city (say, from rural Ireland to Liverpool), from one region to another (from small-town Poland to Paris), and from one continent to the next (Europe or Asia to America). Push and pull factors influenced the courses that migrants followed, but if America was a popular and logical destination many people, by no means was it a providential destination. For millions of migrants, coming to America was a temporary strategy. There, they earned and saved money, and either sent it home to help support family members in the old country or carried it home themselves, in order to buy property and realize a more stable economic existence in their homelands. Not surprisingly, Jewish immigrants had the lowest repatriation rates. They faced political and social disabilities in Eastern Europe that generally made life in America more attractive despite its many hardships and challenges.
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