Excerpts from Unguarded Gates - A History of America's Immigration Crisis
by Otis L. Graham, Jr.
Introduction
The American future is shaped by many complex forces. One of the most powerful - immigration - is, on balance, now taking America where it doesn't want to go-toward porous borders and uncontrolled entry, endless population growth, imported-worker competition with American labor, social fragmentation.
To understand how we have moved onto a road to a more troubled future we need to turn to our history.
This is so because our predicament finds us as a nation confused and misguided by our historical memories and myths, which tell us a flawed and misleading story, that immigration has always taken us where we wanted to go.
This is confusing because it is part of the truth, but only a part. Immigration of Europeans, Latin Americans, Asians, and others, as well as the forced immigration of many Africans, on balance and over the course of our colonial and national experience did advance economic development and nation-building, which was where we wanted to go. As a people we feel justifiably proud of this achievement (on the whole) and have long recognized that the Americans engaged in this nation-building were immensely aided by newcomers bringing renewed energy and their own cultural contributions.
On balance. The rest of the truth is that immigration's potential has a negative component, whose costs sometimes appear to exceed benefits. Immigration to the New World brought enormous injury to indigenous populations and the natural environment. In the nineteenth century immigration reached a scale and composition that brought or exacerbated substantial problems among Americans already here and seemed to many of them to actually threaten the unique national project of democratic nationbuilding. An extended period of such problematic immigration began in the decades before the Civil War, as a Great Wave of European immigration brought an unprecedented large number from Germany and Ireland. The flow of immigrants resumed after the war with source regions shifting to eastern and southern Europe. This era of mass immigration, substantial in numbers and also very different in cultural inheritances, generated in American political life a demand for control over this source of immense social change.
This book begins with the story of the process of moving from essentially an open-border policy and small-scale immigration to a new era in which the national government undertook to moderate and manage migrating human populations so that immigration would mesh with and promote our national purposes, rather than conflict with them. It then tells the modern story of how immigration, shaped by immigration policy, changed from bringing mostly positive to mostly negative contributions.
Regulation of immigration came slowly, because Americans always have been ambivalent about immigration. Between the 1880s and the 1920s a policy decision was finally reached. A system of national regulation of immigration was put in place, based on the national origins of the population of 1920 and aimed at greatly reduced numbers. With the help of external events such as world wars and economic depression worldwide, this system of regulation sharply lowered the incoming numbers and allowed the country to absorb and thus on the whole benefit by the large inflows of the First Great Wave.
Then in the 1960s a Second Great Wave began to surge across national borders, generated by global population growth, lowered transportation costs, and a widespread awareness of the wealth gap between developed and underdeveloped nations. Immigration policymakers, not recognizing this era of expanding immigration pressures, took a step toward expanding legal admissions. A reform of American immigration law and policy in 1965 was intended to bring important ethical improvements in the form of opening equal access to all nationalities, while having little practical effect. But the reforms of 1965 brought other, surprising effects of vast importance-a threefold expansion of legal immigrants, augmented by burgeoning numbers of illegal immigrants, and a radical shift in the source countries of American immigration. We are still sorting out the far-reaching impacts of this half-century (to date) experiment in porous borders between America and a world undergoing an unprecedented expansion of human population. Today, after four decades of Second Great Wave immigration, legal and illegal, the American government's performance in the task of managing immigration is at the top of any list of government failures. This was true well before the deadly September 11, 2001, acts of terrorism by foreigners commandeering American airliners after residing and training in the United States under various mixtures of legal and illegal entry and extended illegal residency. Americans for decades have sensed that we are now in a phase of our national life in which immigration is on balance taking America where it doesn't want to go. All public-opinion polls since large-scale immigration resumed in the 1960s have reported pluralities (in the 1960s) and thereafter majorities (in all ethnic groups) in favor of reducing immigration. These polls are one form of expression of a sustained and tenacious vote of no confidence in the government's gate tending.
And with good reason. The numbers of legal immigrants has hovered around one million for two decades, augmented by illegal immigration, always estimated by official bodies as lower than subsequently found. An internal population of nine to ten million illegal immigrants is acknowledged by the early years of the twenty-first century. On the legal side, these new Americans are selected by a system placing primary emphasis on kinship, which means family ties to recent immigrants, rather than on national needs.
The costs of this new mass immigration collect across the ledger. They include labor market competition with native workers, rising social service costs, nurturing of illegal trade in drugs and indentured labor, the immigration contribution (70 percent at the end of the century, and rising) to population growth with all the costs that come attached to it in this era of global ecocrisis, an intensifying intersection of mounting human numbers with an era of erratic global warming and other stresses of a global ecosphere mauled by more than six billion people in the process of expanding to or beyond ten billion. Other costs are more speculative, such as the concerns that the radical shift in immigrants' countries of origin from Europe to Latin America (especially Mexico), Asia, and the Middle East may overwhelm the nation's capacity for assimilation. A century later, the national question is being asked again-is our fundamental national cohesion and coherence being lost?
Against this are weighed immigration's benefits-cheap labor for harvest agriculture and urban menial tasks, relatively cheap skilled labor in certain industries, a more culturally diversified cuisine and society, and scattered stories of urban revitalization.
Assessing this complex picture of immigration impacts in the mid-1990s, a national commission led by former congresswoman Barbara Jordan confirmed that immigration patterns were not aligned with the national interest and urged reforms. The numbers coming in legally should be reduced by almost half, and selected with more emphasis on the needs of the American economy. Illegal entry should be firmly combated. By this time that part of the nation's public policy elite knowledgeable about immigration had reversed an earlier complacency and begun to frequently express the alarm long felt by the public. The Brookings Institution in 2000 gathered a panel of historians and political scientists to reflect on the federal government's greatest achievements and failures since World War II, and it ranked controlling immigration as second among the top five failures. In a 2001 review of the literature on immigration's impacts, one of the nation's most respected social scientists, Harvard's Christopher Jencks, confirmed this overall negative assessment of the costs imposed by the four-decade run of mass immigration. Alarmed at the environmental and demographic affects from a likely doubling of the U.S. population to 500 million by 2050, a doubling attributable almost entirely to immigration, Jencks joined many other end-of-century writers in questioning whether such a "vast social experiment" had been authorized by the American people or was in their best interest. The nation's policy-studies elite had finally caught up with the American public, which had been expressing the same convictions to pollsters since the early 1970s. On the one occasion when voters were allowed a direct vote on the immigration status quo-at least, on the illegal part of it-Californians by a wide margin in 1992 endorsed Proposition 187, which withheld social services from illegal immigrants. A broadly negative perception of the American immigration policy regime faced no serious intellectual challenge at the end of the century. Apologists for the mass immigration status quo were few and fell back on historical analogy, arguing that similar waves of mass immigration of a century earlier had also been met by objections but the nation had nonetheless prospered.
Yet U.S. policymakers ignored this critical appraisal of the immigration regime, and in the first year of the twenty-first century drifted toward further dismantling of controls. President George W. Bush in 2001 proposed a virtual open border with Mexico, and, incredibly, congressional policymakers seemed receptive.
This presents us with an enormous puzzle. The vast social experiment in the form of mass immigration rushes on, entering its fifth decade. It is a product of policymaking in the world's foremost democracy, yet it has from the first been unpopular with the public and viewed with increasing skepticism by policy analysts. The costs of America's porous borders were piled to even more stunning heights on the morning of September 11, 2001. That day's terrorist attacks harshly illuminated a defect that had not formerly been high on the list of flaws in immigration policy, that our porous borders and governmental abandonment of virtually all interior immigration controls allowed terrorists to glide easily in and out of the country, illegally and legally, for periods of their choosing, as they contemptuously trained and prepared for mass murder in this affable and wide-open society.
Perhaps the events of that day and the threat of more foreign-based terrorism will force a reconsideration of U.S. immigration policy, even one that goes beyond new antiterrorist filters to address the core flaws that the Jordan commission has already identified, and result in a turn toward lower numbers and selection criteria that advance national needs rather than kinship relations. But the sustaining forces that lie behind a national policy of virtually open borders are formidable, and two years after September 11 brought little real movement toward substantial reform of immigration policy, beyond the bureaucratic repositioning of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. If substantial immigration policy reform toward lower numbers and stricter enforcement eventually comes from the heightened concern over terrorism, then the "vast social experiment" in mass immigration to the United States will have lasted four decades. If not, the expansionist policy will extend into the future, taking America where the public, if not the elites, does not want to go.
Either way, the puzzle remains: How could this have happened? How could the United States for almost half a century have been steering into a future of intensifying environmental constraints with a population-expanding immigration policy that does not have public support? For understanding our situation we must follow history into the present, revisiting and rethinking the story of modern America's remarkable, turbulent, and unfinished encounter with that most emotional, difficult, and nation-changing of all public policy subjects-immigration.