Read the Introduction of Peter Schrag’s “Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America” from the module resources. (UPLOADED BELOW) Then reflect on the role of immigration in the United States today.
Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:
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1
Introduction
It’s long been said that America is a nation of immigrants. But for closely
connected reasons, it’s also been a nation of immigration restrictionists,
among them some of the nation’s most honored founders. Indeed it
would be nearly impossible to imagine the first without the second. And
since we were to be “a city upon a hill,” a beacon of human perfection
to the entire world, there were fundamental questions: Would America
be able to refine all the imperfect material that landed on our shores, or
would we have to determine what was not perfectible and shut it out?
And what would happen when the once-unpopulated continent that
badly required large numbers of settlers—unpopulated, that is, except
for the Indians—began to fill up?
Our contemporary immigration battles, and particularly the ideas
and proposals of latter-day nativists and immigration restrictionists,
resonate with the arguments of more than two centuries of that history.
Often, as most of us should know, the immigrants who were demeaned
by one generation were the parents and grandparents of the successes of
the next generation. Perhaps, not paradoxically, many of them, or their
children and grandchildren, later joined those who attacked and dispar-
aged the next arrivals, or would-be arrivals, with the same vehemence
that had been leveled against them or their forebears
As a German-Jewish refugee from Hitler, I’m personally familiar
with a slice of this story, having spent time on both sides of the nativ-
ist divide. In the late 1930s my parents and I were on the short end of
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2 Introduction
the nation’s immigration quotas. We narrowly escaped Nazi-occupied
Europe in 1941 and arrived in the United States on a transit visa (to
Mexico), later changed to a visitor’s visa. We didn’t formally immigrate
until 1947. In the first years after our arrival, I and my friends in New
York, several of us not yet citizens, endlessly lampooned people we
called Japs, wops, and guineas; told jokes about fairies; assumed, often
despite the protests of our anguished parents, that the Germany of our
grandparents had always been a place of boors absolutely bereft of cul-
ture. In wartime especially, denial or rejection of one’s heritage was the
price one proudly paid for assimilation.
Most Americans have long forgotten—if they ever knew—the his-
tory of the sweeps and detention of immigrants of the early decades
of the last century. Those sweeps were not terribly different from the
heavy-handed federal, state and local raids of recent years to round up,
deport, and too often imprison illegal immigrants, and sometimes legal
residents and citizens along with them. But it’s also well to remember
that nativism, xenophobia, and racism are hardly uniquely American
phenomena. What makes them significant in America is that they run
almost directly counter to the nation’s founding ideals. At least since
the enshrinement of Enlightenment ideas of equality and inclusiveness
in the founding documents of the new nation, to be a nativist in this
country was to be in conflict with its fundamental tenets.
This book grew out of more than two decades of writing about immi-
gration and the bitter battles that have been waged over immigration
law and policies since the mid-1980s. It seeks to trace the complex his-
tory linking nearly three centuries of ideas, uncertainties, and conflicts
about what America is, who belongs here, what the economy needs and
doesn’t need—who, indeed, is an American or is fit to be one—to our
contemporary controversies and ambivalence about immigration and
its many related questions. In that multigenerational process, nativism,
always an essential element in what one writer described as “the nation’s
self-image of innocence and exceptionalism in a decadent world,” has
had a long and, one might say with only a touch of irony, an honorable
history, going back to the very beginnings of British settlement.1
American exceptionalism echoes through colonial complaints about
the estimated forty thousand British convicts sentenced to transpor-
tation who were arriving on American shores in the eighteenth cen-
tury—“the dregs, the excrescence of England.” All of the colonials,
said Samuel Johnson, were “a race of convicts [who should] be content
with anything we allow them short of hanging.” In the same era came
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Introduction 3
Benjamin Franklin’s warning (in 1751) that Pennsylvania was becoming
“a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize
us instead of our Anglifying them and will never adopt our Language
or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”2 Later,
Jefferson worried about immigrants from foreign monarchies who “will
infuse into American legislation their spirit, warp and bias its direction,
and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”3
Although already fading into obscurity, one of the most vocal and
paradigmatic of latter-day immigration restrictionists, Colorado Repub-
lican Tom Tancredo, echoed much of that. Briefly a candidate for presi-
dent in 2008 and, until shortly before his retirement from the House of
Representatives that same year, leader of the Congressional Caucus on
Immigration Reform—meaning immigrant exclusion—Tancredo liked
to boast about his immigrant Sicilian grandfather. Tancredo forgot that
his grandfather belonged to a generation widely regarded by the WASP
establishment and many other Americans of the early 1900s, when
he arrived, as genetically and culturally unassimilable—ill-educated,
crime-prone, diseased. Yet Tancredo, like many of today’s immigration
restrictionists, echoed the same animosities. “What we’re doing here in
this immigration battle,” he said in one of the Republican presidential
debates in 2007, “is testing our willingness to actually hold together as
a nation or split apart into a lot of Balkanized pieces”—not so differ-
ent from Jefferson’s “heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”4 Like
other contemporary restrictionists, Tancredo’s portrayal of Mexican
immigrants was almost identical to the characterization of the Italians,
Jews, and Slavs of a century before, and of the Irish and Germans before
them, people not fit for our society.
If Franklin’s and Jefferson’s opinions turned out be of little prac-
tical consequence—Franklin later changed his mind; Jefferson in his
purchase of Louisiana gobbled up a whole foreign (mostly French) cul-
ture—the nineteenth century provided an endless chain of more sig-
nificant examples. Among them, Know-Nothingism and the anti-Irish,
anti-Catholic virulence that swept much of the nation in the 1850s,
waned briefly during and after the Civil War, and then flourished again
for more than half a century after 1870: “No Irish Need Apply” (later,
“No Wops Need Apply”), “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” and then
“The Chinese Must Go” and, as the ethnic Japanese on the West Coast
were interned after Pearl Harbor, “Japs Keep Moving.” The magazine
cartoonists’ pirates coming off the immigrant ships in the 1880s and
1890s were labeled “disease,” “socialism,” and “Mafia.” And always
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4 Introduction
there was the shadow of the Vatican, looming to take over American
democracy and, more ominously, seducing the nation’s schoolchildren.
In almost every generation, nativists portrayed new immigrants as
not fit to become real Americans: they were too infected by Catholi-
cism, monarchism, anarchism, Islam, criminal tendencies, defective genes,
mongrel bloodlines, or some other alien virus to become free men and
women in our democratic society. Again and again, the new immi-
grants or their children and grandchildren proved them wrong. The list
of great American scientists, engineers, writers, scholars, business and
labor leaders, actors, and artists who were immigrants or their children,
men and women on whom the nation’s greatness largely depended, is
legion. Now add to that the story of Barack Obama—who was not just
the nation’s first African American president, but also the first American
president who was the son of a father who was not a citizen—and the
argument becomes even less persuasive. Yet through each new wave of
nativism and immigration restriction, the opponents of immigration,
legal and illegal, tend to forget that history, just as Tancredo forgot that
his Sicilian grandfather (who he says arrived as a “legal immigrant”)
came at a time when—with the exception of the Chinese, most of whom
were categorically excluded beginning in 1882—there was no such
thing as an illegal immigrant.
• • •
The list of factors contributing to the surge of anger, xenophobia, and
imperial ambition in the two generations after 1880 is almost end-
less: the “closing” of the frontier and the western “safety-valve” in the
1890s;5 industrial expansion and depression-driven cycles of economic
fear; urban corruption and the rise of the big-city political machines.
Mostly Democratic, they patronized new immigrants more interested
in jobs, esteem, and protection—and were often more comfortable with
their values of personal and clan loyalty than with the abstract WASP
principles of good government and efficient management that fueled the
Progressive movement and that most of the nation’s respectable small-
town middle class grew up with.
Many Progressives, as the historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out,
joined moderate conservatives “in the cause of Americanizing the immi-
grant by acquainting him with English and giving him education and
civic instruction.” Still “the typical Progressive and the typical immigrant
were immensely different, and the gulf between them was not usually
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Introduction 5
bridged with much success in the Progressive era.”6 The Progressivism of
academics like the sociologist John R. Commons and the influential labor
economist Edward A. Ross, both close associates of Governor and later
Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, and the ethnic and cultural
beliefs of nativism grew from the same roots: good government was an
Anglo-Saxon legacy. Along with their confident sense of racial superior-
ity came the heightening fear, bordering on panic in some circles, of our
own immigrant-infected racial degeneration. It resounded through Ross’s
work, through Madison Grant’s influential Passing of the Great Race
(1916), through the writings of Alexander Graham Bell and countless
others in the first decades of the twentieth century, and in the hearings
and debates of Congress. In the face of the inferior, low-skill, low-wage
but high-fecundity classes from southern and eastern Europe, demoral-
ized Anglo-Saxons would bring fewer children into the world to face
that new competition.7 Grant’s theme of racial extinction would later be
picked up in books like Lothrop Stoddard’s very successful Rising Tide
of Color (1920) and would continue to echo through books like Rich-
ard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, published in 1994.
To this day, these ideas are circulated (and promoted and defended) by
the Virginia-based self-described “racialist” American Renaissance online
magazine, which offers reprints of Stoddard’s book for sale.8
But probably the most representative, and perhaps the most influ-
ential, voice for immigration restriction in the 1890s and the following
decade was that of Representative (later Senator) Henry Cabot Lodge
of Massachusetts, the paradigmatic Boston Brahmin, later leader of the
isolationists who kept the United States out of the League of Nations
in the 1920s. Lodge’s articles and speeches warning of the perils of the
rising tide of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—many of
them mere “birds of passage” who only came to make a little money
and then return to the old country; many more bringing crime, disease,
anarchism, and filth and competing with honest American workers—
drove the debate and presaged many later arguments against immigra-
tion. By 1926, in congressional testimony about restricting Mexican
immigration, Lodge’s bird had become a pigeon—a “homer” who “like
the pigeon . . . goes back to roost.”9 The late Harvard political scien-
tist Samuel Huntington’s restrictionist book, Who Are We? published in
2004, is shot through with Lodge-like fears.
There were countless reasons for the old patricians to be worried—
and they weren’t alone. The overcrowded tenements of the nation’s
big cities were incubators of disease and violence that put ever more
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6 Introduction
burdens on schools, the police, charities, and social agencies. And so,
in words and tones not so different from today’s, members of Congress
and other national leaders heard increasingly loud warnings about the
social strains and dangers the immigrants imposed. Similarly, check-
ing the rising political participation of the new urban immigrants and
the power of the big-city machines that challenged the Anglo-Saxon
establishment’s authority—and in the view of a whole generation of
muckraking reformers, corrupted democracy itself—was an obliga-
tion that the reformers were certain couldn’t be escaped. The same fear
had resonated through the Know-Nothings’ nativist platforms of
the 1850s, which, in calls for tighter voter requirements in elections,
continues to run through conservative American politics.10 As John
Higham characterized him in his seminal study, Strangers in the Land,
the nativist, “whether he was trembling at a Catholic menace to Ameri-
can liberty [or] fearing an invasion of pauper labor,” believed “that
some influence originating abroad threatened the very life of the nation
from within.”11 Higham, writing in the early 1960s, could just as well
have been writing now.
What’s striking is how many immigration restrictionists came, and
still come, from a Progressive or conservationist background. Madison
Grant was a trustee of New York’s American Museum of Natural His-
tory and active in the American Bison Society and the Save the Red-
woods League. David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford, a
respected ichthyologist and peace activist, along with a group of other
leading scholars and clergymen, was deeply involved in the race bet-
terment movement that aimed “To Create a New and Superior Race
thru Euthenics, or Personal and Public Hygiene and Eugenics, or Race
Hygiene . . . and create a race of human thoroughbreds such as
the world has never seen.”12 Like Hiram Johnson (the Progressive who
became governor of California in 1910) and the McClatchy family
(newspaper publishers in Sacramento and earnest backers of the initia-
tive process, civil service, and municipal ownership of public utilities),
many Progressives fiercely battled to forever exclude Asians from immi-
gration and landownership. Why let Asiatics immigrate when the Con-
stitution didn’t allow them to be naturalized? “Of all the races ineligible
to citizenship under our law,” said V. S. McClatchy in Senate testimony
in 1924, “the Japanese are the least assimilable and the most dangerous
to this country.”13
Again and again, as I hope this book will show, our history reflects
the national ambivalence between the demand for more immigrants to
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Introduction 7
do the nation’s work and the backlash against them. Again and again,
past debates presage our current immigration dilemmas. During and
immediately after the Civil War, many of the states—trying to settle
the prairies opened by the Homestead Act or to replace emancipated
slaves with cheap labor—created immigration commissions, adver-
tised abroad, and/or sent what were essentially recruiters. The states
negotiated low fares with the steamship companies and railroads that
brought newcomers, created information centers for new immigrants,
and arranged for housing until the new people could get settled. But
as backlash developed against what Americans began to regard as the
problems they associated with thousands of newcomers in their commu-
nities, rules were tightened. As early as 1858, less than a decade after the
discovery of gold, California passed an “act to prevent the further immi-
gration of Chinese or Mongolians to this state.”14 Some states enacted
legislation allowing for the interstate deportation of criminals, lunatics,
and other social misfits to the states they’d come from. In 1901, Mis-
souri prohibited the “importation of afflicted, indigent or vicious chil-
dren.” The states were in the immigration-management business in a big
way. One hundred and fifty years later, they would be again.
Almost inevitably the stresses, violence, and insecurity brought by
the shift from the agrarian economy and culture of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries to the industrial, urban nation that rapidly
replaced them were deeply associated with the immigrants who helped
build it and often became its most visible casualties. As industrializa-
tion, World War I, and the Russian Revolution drew the nation into
a globalized world we didn’t understand and that, in our founding,
we thought we had forever put behind us, they brought yet another
round of nationalism and xenophobia. With the war, Beethoven and
Bach became composers non grata in American concert halls. States all
through the Midwest stopped German-English bilingual education in
the public schools. Americans were supposed to eat “liberty cabbage”
instead of sauerkraut and their children suffered from “liberty measles.”
(Eighty years later, when Congress wanted to show the French what-for
after they challenged the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the side dish of choice in
the capital’s restaurants became freedom fries).
Shortly after Armistice came the wave of labor unrest that brought
the Red Scare of 1919 and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s round-
ups and deportation of suspected anarchists and Bolsheviks, many of
them immigrants. Although the Palmer Raids flamed out as quickly as
they’d begun, the Depression a decade later would bring the widespread
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8 Introduction
detention of Mexicans and other immigrants, not all of them illegal
entrants, whose labor had been desperately wanted during the war and
was now superfluous.
• • •
Just after the turn of the twentieth century, theories about the inferiority
of the new arrivals also began to be reinforced by eugenic “science” that
seemed to prove that virtually all the “new” immigrants—Slavs, Jews,
Italians, Asians, Turks, Greeks—who arrived in the two generations
after 1880 were intellectually, physically, and morally inferior. Henry
H. Goddard, one of the American pioneers of intelligence testing, found
that 40 percent of Ellis Island immigrants before World War I were
feebleminded and that 60 percent of Jews there “classify as morons.”15
Meanwhile, the eminent psychologists who IQ-tested army recruits dur-
ing the war, convinced that intelligence was a fixed quantity, concluded
that the average mental age of young American men was thirteen, that a
great many were “morons,” and that those from Nordic stocks—Brits,
Dutch, Canadians, Scandinavians, Scots—showed far higher intelligence
than Jews, Poles, Greeks, and the very inferior immigrants, like Grand-
father Tancredo, from southern Italy. “The intellectual superiority of
our Nordic group over the Alpine, Mediterranean and negro groups”
wrote Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham, who popularized the
army data after the war, “has been demonstrated.”16 Only “negroes”
were less intelligent than southern and eastern Europeans, a point made
again by Columbia University psychologist Henry Garrett, former presi-
dent of the American Psychological Association, when he cited the army
test results in his testimony against school desegregation in one of the
cases leading to the 1954 Brown decision.17 Despite the growing volume
of critical analyses debunking the racial theories and the shoddy science
of the eugenicists, the miasma of racialism lived on.
But in the long chain connecting the country’s historical nativism, the
eugenic “science” of the 1920s and 1930s, and its shifting immigration
restriction policies, past and present, it was Harry Laughlin who was far
and away the most prominent single link, both between eugenics and
immigration policy and between the nativist ideology in the immigra-
tion policies of the 1920s and the present. Laughlin, superintendent of
the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, New York,
from its founding in 1910 until 1939, was the author of such eugenic
treatises as the Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the
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Introduction 9
Best Practical Means to Cut Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Amer-
ican Population (1914).18 Laughlin was a major promoter—call him the
godfather—of eugenic sterilization in this country and the legitimization
it gave racist sterilization in Nazi Germany, whose eugenic policies he
lavishly praised. In 1921, Laughlin had also become the “expert eugen-
ics agent” and semiofficial scientific advisor to Representative Albert
Johnson’s House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, which
wrote the race-based national origins immigration laws of 1921 and
1924 that would be the basis of U.S. policy for the next forty years and,
in some respects, well after.
It took Johnson’s committee four years of fiddling to find the for-
mula that would achieve the desired ethnic immigration makeup with-
out blatantly confessing racism and thus (among other things) risking
diplomatic difficulties and too obviously trampling on the nation’s
founding ideals. The number of immigrants from any particular coun-
try, excepting Asians, who were already excluded, and people from the
Western Hemisphere (including Mexico) who were exempt from the
new quotas, was capped, first, at 2 percent of a country’s estimated
share of the foreign-born, not in 1910 or 1920, the most recent cen-
suses, but in 1890, when northern Europeans dominated the population
of foreign-born. In 1924, the formula was changed to make it cosmeti-
cally more defensible, but the proportions were nearly the same as is if
they’d been based on the 1890 numbers. Even when immigrants from
favored nations didn’t fill a given year’s quota, the quotas for other
countries would remain fixed. As late as 1965, John B. Trevor Jr., the
patrician New York lawyer who was the son of the man who devised
the national origins formula, would testify against repeal of the origins
quotas, warning that “a conglomeration of racial and ethnic elements”
would lead to “a serious culture decline.”19
Laughlin spent his thirty-year career at the Eugenics Record Office
reinforcing the belief, shared by legions of social reformers, Margaret
Sanger among them, that “vicious protoplasm” had to be bred out of
the native stock or, better yet, kept out of the country altogether.20 In
1937, while still at the ERO, Laughlin also became the cofounder and
first director of the Pioneer Fund, whose prime research interest has
been—and continues to be—race and racial purity. Arthur Jensen, the
Berkeley psychologist who caused an uproar in the late 1960s and early
1970s with work purporting to show that blacks were intellectually
inferior, and thus would never benefit from better schools, got more
than $1 million from the fund.21 Stanford physicist William Shockley’s
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10 Introduction
Foundation for Research and Education in Eugenics and Dysgenics got
$188,000 in Pioneer funding. Murray and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve,
which argued that group differences in IQ between blacks and whites
were primarily genetic, and which included a sympathetic discussion
of “dysgenic pressures” in contemporary America, some coming from
inferior immigrants, relied heavily on the work of researchers funded,
according to one estimate, with $3.5 million in Pioneer money.22 The
president of the fund in 2008 was J. Philippe Rushton, whose research
purports to show a hierarchical order in the development of races, with
Mongoloid (Asians) at the top, whites in the middle, and Negroid at the
bottom, all of it accompanied by an inverse correlation between intel-
ligence and the size of genitalia.
Through Laughlin and the Pioneer Fund particularly, the institu-
tional, personal, and ideological links and parallels run almost directly
from the eugenics and nativism of the first decades of the twentieth
century to the present. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, the
Pioneer Fund contributed roughly $1.5 million to the Federation for
American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the organization started by the
Michigan ophthalmologist John Tanton in 1979 that is probably the
most influential immigration restriction organization in America today.
FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies, and its sister organizations
have been essential sources of information for the radio and TV talkers,
the bloggers and the politicians leading the immigration restriction cam-
paign. They were also the primary generators of the millions of faxes
and e-mails that were major elements in the defeat of the comprehensive
immigration reform bill and the “shamnesty” of the Dream Act in 2007.
In Congress, both were accomplished with the threat of filibusters and
by putting the immigrant’s face on inchoate economic and social anx i-
eties—the flight of jobs overseas, the crisis in health care, the tightening
housing market, the growing income gaps between the very rich and the
middle class, and the shrinking return from rising productivity to labor.
We can’t see the jobs that no longer exist or that were shipped over-
seas, but we can see the crowded schools and the Latinos waiting for
day jobs in the parking lot at Home Depot. The descriptions of Mexi-
cans taking jobs away from American workers, renting houses meant
for small families, crowding them with twelve or fourteen people, and
jamming their driveways with junk cars were often true but inevitably
echoed the rhetoric of an earlier age. In 1900 also, “inferior” people
were brought in as scabs, crowding tenements, bringing disease, crime,
and anarchy (now become “terrorism”). The new arrivals of 2000, too,
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Introduction 11
endangered the nation and lowered living standards to what Edward
Ross a century ago called their own “pigsty mode of life.”23
• • •
To anyone who’s followed the latter-day arguments against immigra-
tion or the characterization of the hazards that immigrants, legal and
illegal, pose to the nation’s economy, culture, social stability, and sys-
tem of government—to any reader of Samuel Huntington’s book or
Hoover Institution historian Victor Davis Hanson’s Mexifornia, or any
reader of Pat Buchanan or watcher of Lou Dobbs on CNN or listener to
Rush Limbaugh or the scores of other radio talkers who’ve made illegal
immigration their prime issue—the warnings of the immigration restric-
tionists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have to be eerily
familiar. The nation is being “flooded”—another old metaphor—by
people from backward places that make them culturally or politically
unfit for assimilation. They are people (mostly men) who come here
only to make money to send back to the old country, have dismally low
levels of education, bring leprosy and other dangerous diseases, drive
up crime rates, and never have much interest in becoming Americans.
The “Palatine boors” who would Germanize Pennsylvania have become
Mexicans polluting the language with Spanglish. In recent years, the
use of the word illegal as a noun has itself carried overtones of—even
become a synonym for—Mexican.24
Like John Tanton, most of our contemporary immigration restric-
tionists vehemently deny that they are either nativists or racists. And
since both are fuzzy words, the defense is often hard to refute. In the age
of Obama, the overt, nearly ubiquitous racialism of the Victorian era,
like eugenic science, is largely passé and certainly no longer respectable.
Eugenic sterilization is gone. The race-based national origins immigra-
tion quotas of the 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration act have been for-
mally repealed. But modern arguments against immigration echo, often
to an astonishing degree, the theories and warnings of their nativist fore-
bears. In Tanton’s journal The Social Contract, the blatantly predatory
image of Rome that ran through nativist tracts in the nineteenth century
has been replaced by more subtly worded (and imaged) but equally
inflammatory renditions of the Vatican as the two-faced exploiter of
immigration to further its own imperious (and imperial) strategy.
Although few of the arguments are new, there’s not much awareness
of their long history. The gloomy warnings about the threat of Mexican
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12 Introduction
reconquista to what Huntington calls the “Anglo-Protestant culture that
has been central to American identity for three centuries” go back even
farther than the Progressive era: in Boston in the 1840s, Catholic priests
were alleged to be using young girls for their sexual pleasure and Rome
was conspiring with the Hapsburgs to take over the American West.
Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and countless others warned
about the foreign threat to Anglo-American culture at the turn of the
last century. And as early as 1928, sixty years before Huntington put pen
to paper, Harry Laughlin reported to Congress that “during the last few
years [the Mexican] has come here in such great numbers as almost to
reverse the essential consequences of the Mexican War. The recent Mexi-
can immigrants are making a reconquest of the Southwest more cer-
tainly . . . than America made the conquest of 1845, 1848 and 1853.”25
None of this is to say that the great numbers of undocumented immi-
grants—much less the total of all immigrants living in the United States,
at 14 percent roughly equal, as a percentage of the total population, to
the immigrant population in the peak years of a century ago—aren’t
a legitimate national policy concern, whether economically, culturally,
politically, or psychologically. How many immigrants, particularly low-
skilled immigrants, can the nation assimilate in what period of time?
How much is a society still dominated by non-Hispanic white voters
willing to tax itself to support generous services for people regarded
not merely as “others” but in many cases “others” who have no legal
right to be here? No developed society can tolerate totally uncontrolled
borders next to an underdeveloped nation—now a nation also battered
by drug-gang corruption and violence—and the unchecked immigration
of unskilled people that it produces. Conversely, in the coming decades,
when retiring American baby boomers are going to leave huge gaps in
the labor force, and when the proportion of Americans of working age
will decline precipitously even as the rank of retirees shoots up, who
will do the work or support the health and pension benefits of those
retirees? As a growing body of research is making clear, the answers to
these questions will almost certainly depend on multinational strategies,
not merely on fences, walls, and sweeps of fields and factories.
• • •
The politics of immigration restriction and American nativism from the
colonial era—and particularly since the mid–nineteenth century—to the
immigration battles of the twenty-first is one of the most complex and
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Introduction 13
confounding stories in U.S. history. As historians like the great Oscar
Handlin have pointed out, in many ways the narrative of immigration is
American history. But the immigration battles of the past also constitute
a great cautionary tale. Within eight years of the passage of the 1924
Johnson-Reed national origins quota immigration law, immigrants of the
prior four decades and their children, long spurned by Republicans and
often disengaged from national politics, were so closely attached to the
urban (Democratic) machines of New York, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago,
Cleveland, Philadelphia, and countless other cities that they became cen-
tral to the New Deal coalition that swept into office in 1932 and that
would control national politics for most of the following three decades.
The 2008 election of Barack Obama, in which so-called minorities
made the crucial difference, underlines the long-range consequences of
anti-immigrant politics. George W. Bush and his political “boy” genius
Karl Rove, for all their other political miscalculations, understood that,
which is why they pushed so hard for immigration reform. (“Some in
the party seem pleased,” said former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson
with prophetic accuracy, after the defeat of the comprehensive immigra-
tion reform bill in 2007. “They should be terrified.”)26 Our history seems
to tell us that nativism and a fierce backlash to immigration, however
harsh, are frequently rearguard tactics of groups that feel besieged. In a
healthy democracy—by definition—they rarely have a future. Obama’s
election in 2008, which would not have been possible without the over-
whelming voter support of African Americans and Latinos, should have
made that perfectly obvious.
As I hope this book makes clear, American nativism and our historic
ambivalence about immigration—at times vigorously seeking newcom-
ers from abroad, at other times shutting them out and/or deporting
them—is deeply entangled both in economic cycles and in the uncer-
tainties of our vision of ourselves as a nation. A self-proclaimed “city
upon a hill,” a shining model to the world, requires a certain kind of
people. But what kind? Do they have to be pure Anglo-Saxons, what-
ever that is, which is what many reformers at the turn of the twentieth
century believed? Or could it include Tom Tancredo’s grandfather and
all those “inferior” southern Italians, the Greeks, the Slavs, the Jews,
even finally, the Indians, Filipinos, the Chinese, and the dirty Japs of
1942? Did American democracy begin at Runnymede in 1215? Was the
frontier the great shaper of the American character, as Frederick Jack-
son Turner believed? Or was it formed by the Enlightenment English-
men who invented the country in 1787? Can America take the poor, the
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14 Introduction
“tempest-tost,” the “wretched refuse” “yearning to breathe free” and
make them a vital part of that city? If we began in perfection, how could
change ever be anything but for the worse?
As far back as the 1840s, even a sympathetic foreign observer like
Alexis de Tocqueville expressed concerns that American cities contained
“a multitude of Europeans [chiefly Irish] who have been driven to the
shores of the New World by their misfortunes or their misconduct; and
they bring to the United States all our greatest vices, without any of
those interests which counteract their baneful influence. As inhabitants
of a country where they have no civil rights, they are ready to turn all
the passions which agitate the community to their own advantage.” He
worried that the size of cities was “a real danger which threatens the
future security of the democratic republics of the New World” and that
might not be contained without a federal “armed force.”27
Conversely, it’s equally hard to ignore the unvarnished racial, religious,
and xenophobic bigotry that was so often laced through American nativ-
ism and sometimes still is. Among the other ironies of that history is that
immigration restriction in the twentieth century—along with World War
II—was probably a major contributor to the assimilation, and what some
historians call “the whitening,” of the millions of southern and eastern
European immigrants who had once been widely regarded as a serious
danger to the vigorous Nordic “germ-plasm” that had made the country
great. Low levels of immigration probably also made it easier to enact the
great New Deal and Great Society social programs of the 1930s, 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s, just as the existence of those programs today—welfare,
health, state and federal support for higher education—probably rein-
forces pressure to restrict immigration and drive out illegal aliens now.
Obama’s decision in the summer of 2009, when he was trying to enact a
major federal health-care program, to put off until 2010 the immigration
reform he’d promised during his campaign, may well have been partly
based on similar considerations. Putting undocumented immigrants on
the road to legalization even as a broad federal health program was being
negotiated would have been an explosive political mix.
Among the most frequently cited differences between the European
immigrants of a century ago and today’s mostly Latino and Asian immi-
grants is the relative ease of long-distance travel and the proximity of
the Mexican border, and thus the continuing effect of the Spanish lan-
guage and alien cultures. But similar arguments were made a century
ago—about lingering native languages and cultures and about people
just coming to earn money here and then returning to the old country
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Introduction 15
with no interest in, or loyalty to, America. Indeed, a great many did go
back, Italians and Poles in particular. In the modern case, according to
most research, efforts to tighten immigration enforcement at the Mex-
ican border in the past two decades—the quadrupling of the Border
Patrol, the fences, the electronic sensors and other technology, the sur-
veillance aircraft—paradoxically have increased the resident population
of illegal aliens. By making the crossing more expensive and danger-
ous, the stepped-up enforcement has discouraged seasonal north-south
migration. Instead, more and more workers simply stay in the United
States, send for their families, and become permanent de facto residents,
even when they began with—or in some cases still have—no intention
of becoming Americans.
The Herrnstein-Murray argument that modern immigration is easier
than at the turn of the twentieth century, when there were “no guaran-
tees, no safety nets” and “the immigrant had to make it on his own” and
thus made for “a crackerjack self-selection system” for attracting “brave,
hard working, imaginative, self-starting—and probably smart” men and
women, is as fatuous now as it was in 1994 when they published it.28
Nativists of a century ago also argued that the introduction of the steam-
ship and the groundwork of the early pioneers had made things too easy
for recent arrivals. Those early pioneers had been the true settlers, while
all who came after were mere immigrants. But ask any of the tens of
thousands of Latinos who’ve risked the Arizona desert or the mountains
beyond or extortion by the smugglers who brought them here, or those
who crossed the Pacific from China in sealed shipping containers, or the
Haitians who risked drowning in leaky boats off the Florida coast—ask
them how easy it was and what guarantees or safety nets they enjoyed.
• • •
This book is not about the history of immigration per se, but rather
about America’s twenty-first-century immigration debates in the context
of the politics, ideas, organizations, and movements that have sought
to restrict immigration since the mid–nineteenth century and in some
instances long before. It’s about the lessons we should have learned
from the past, written in the hope that as immigration policy is again
debated, as it must be, those lessons will finally be part of the conversa-
tion. Because ideas, groups, and in some cases individuals often defy
chronological classification—many of the ideas and ambiguities this
book is concerned with are woven through the generations—this story
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16 Introduction
itself sometimes transcends chronology. Questions about who belongs
here, dilemmas about race and citizenship—like questions about who
we are as Americans—resonated through American history even before
Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur’s classic attempt in 1782 at defining “this
new man [who] is either an European, or the descendant of an Euro-
pean,” yet who was also a creature of a process where “individuals of
all nations are melted into a new race of men.”29
Yet the controversies over immigrants and immigration policy can
nonetheless roughly (if somewhat arbitrarily) be divided into historical
periods. With one exception, the book’s chapters correspond to that
chronology.
Chapter 1 (A City upon a Hill): From the early settlements through
the adoption of the Constitution and the first naturalization laws when
only whites of “good moral character” could be naturalized, through
the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, and the xenophobia and anti-
Catholicism of Know-Nothingism to the Civil War.
Chapter 2 (“This Visible Act of Ingurgitation”): From the Civil War
through the turmoil of industrialization and urbanization, and the
accompanying waves of “new immigrants” from southern and east-
ern Europe, to World War I; Henry Cabot Lodge and the Immigration
Restriction League; the Chinese exclusion laws; Madison Grant’s Pass-
ing of the Great Race.
Chapter 3 (“Science” Makes Its Case): The interplay between intel-
ligence testing and eugenics, on the one hand, and preexisting beliefs
and prejudices about race and ethnicity on the other; their effects on
immigration policy.
Chapter 4 (Preserving the Race): The Red Scare of 1919 and the
roundups of radicals in the Palmer Raids that followed the war; the
individuals, ideas, and events that shaped the Johnson-Reed national
origins quota act in 1924 and other immigration policy in the 1920s.
Chapter 5 (The Great Awhitening): From 1924 through the Depres-
sion and the peak years of the Ku Klux Klan, the anti-Semitism of Father
Charles Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith, the growing movement to
exclude and deport Mexicans and other Hispanics, to the passage of the
Hart-Celler Act in 1965 repealing the national origins scheme; the effects
of immigration restriction on the success of the New Deal in enacting its
programs and in the Americanization of the once-unacceptable southern
and eastern European immigrants through hard times and World War II.
Chapter 6 (“They Keep Coming”): The backlash against the grow-
ing numbers of illegal immigrants; anti-immigrant laws in Texas and
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Introduction 17
California; the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; the fail-
ure of Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform in 2007;
the wave of state and local laws beginning in 2007 to drive illegal aliens
out, and the wave of federal raids on worksites and other places where
illegal aliens were concentrated.
Chapter 7 (A Border without Lines): Controlling immigration; our
current immigration controversies and the changed geographic, eco-
nomic, and political landscape that confounds the debate; the nation’s
latter-day anti-immigration organizations and the media figures who
retail their material; the possibility—perhaps the necessity—of creating
a North American community.
Epilogue: The lessons, ironies, and paradoxes of a complex immi-
gration history unfortunately too often forgotten in our contemporary
immigration debates.
Necessarily, this story touches on a great range of issues. Transgen-
erational ideas, institutional links, and controversies run through it. It’s
tied up with national expansion and nationalism itself, with intelligence
testing and eugenics, with foreign policy and economic cycles, with the
coming of the North American Free Trade Agreement, with globalism
and offshoring, with the growing diaspora of third-world immigrants
moving from California and the Southwest into the South and Midwest,
and with the contradictions inherent in advocating equal treatment for
immigrants on the one hand and ethnic-group rights and affirmative
action on the other.
In order to limit my scope, I’ve focused on the events, ideas, and poli-
tics that seem particularly relevant to and instructive for our contem-
porary controversies and dilemmas: questions about the assimilability
of different groups, about language and culture, about the capacity (or
needs) of the economy for foreign workers and the countervailing fear
of disease, terrorists (née Mafiosi and anarchists), and crime. Some of
this history has been told elegantly in other books and in other research
on which I partially rely and that I gratefully acknowledge elsewhere.
But to my knowledge, no one source has explicitly traced the more than
two centuries of ironically telling contradictions and historical currents
to our present immigration debates and to the greatly altered political
and economic landscape in which we will conduct these debates in the
future. These are the issues I hope to explore and the story I hope to tell.
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