For reasons of length, I will be posting the following piece
as a series. This first part provides some background.
The second part will appear tomorrow evening.
If you've been reading the news, or merely not living under a rock,
then you know that there has been considerable debate about the
millions of people in this country illegally. It seems the only thing
that everyone agrees on is that Something Must Be Done. For some
reason, this issue is more urgent than Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, the
Sudan, warrantless wiretapping, failing schools, rebuilding New
Orleans in such a way that it won't get destroyed during the next
hurricane season, or an impending avian flu pandemic. The only thing
that might be as important to the American people is who in Major
League Baseball is injecting steroids into their butts.
National priorities aside, there is a real problem, and it
has existed for many years. We can trace much of the current problem
to the Immigration
Act of 1924, which severely limited the number of aliens who could
legally immigrate to the United States. For many countries, their
nationals were completely excluded, since the Act limited immigration
to a fraction of that country's nationals who had already immigrated.
The Immigration
and Nationality Act of 1952 eased this restriction somewhat,
providing for a minimum quota of 100 immigrants from any country.
This did not, however, substantially change the fact that 1924 marked
the year in which America effectively declared itself no longer a
nation that welcomes immigrants seeking a better life.
America remained prosperous, however, making it an attractive place for
would-be immigrants, who might not have heard about the change in
its attitude.
Indeed, we have retained the Statue of Liberty as a national symbol, with
its words of welcome:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
[from "The New Colossus", Emma Lazarus, 1883]
In truth, it was this spirit of welcoming that
made
America prosperous, and has infused us continuously with creativity,
ingenuity, and industry.
The fact that immigration issues have come to a head recently,
when Latin American populations are becoming more predominant
in many areas and a majority in some, raises suspicions of
racism in immigration policy.
If this is true, it is certainly nothing new in the politics of American
immigration law.
Consider, for example, this speech given to the House of Representatives
by Rep. Thomas Fitch of Nevada on May 27, 1870, as recorded
in the Appendix to the Congressional Globe (the predecessor
of the Congressional Record):
With so much of the speech of the gentleman from California
[Mr. Johnson] as expresses unfriendliness to the encouragement of
Chinese immigration I earnestly concur. I do not believe in the
cheap labor which supplants contented and well-paid toil, nor in
that social theory which would force the Caucasian to rival the
domestic economy of the Asiatic. I do not believe in the policy of
introducing extensively into this country a race who have a
distinct civilization, religion, habits, and language of their own;
a race who are alike incapable and unworthy of assimilation with
ours; a race with whom polygamy is a practice and female chastity
is not a virtue; a race who are thrifty in habit yet slothful in
thought, apt yet retrogressive, educated yet without newspapers,
courageous yet without self-respect, honest in monetary affairs yet
without moral principle, faithful to obligations yet utterly
destitute of any regard for the truth; a race which rears no
families and acquires no landed property among us, possesses no
past and hopes for no future in common with our civilization, and
whose members are of their own will perpetual strangers in this
land, where they never design to remain, and from which they
contract to have even their dead bodies exported.
A longer tirade appears in
the January 25th
Congressional Globe of the same year, given by the Hon. James A. Johnson of
California.
We can, perhaps, see echoes of this in recent speeches, such as
this one given by Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri on April 27, 2005,
regarding the Emergency Immigration Workload Reduction and Homeland
Security Enhancement Act of 2005:
Mr. Speaker, I rise today still afraid for our nation's
security. Not because of terror alerts, but because our borders
remain porous. The enforcement of our immigration policy is
impotent, resulting in a continued flood of illegal immigrants
across our borders.
It is time for the federal government to stop letting unchecked
mass immigration undermine the wages, safety, and benefits in one
occupation after another. It is time for the federal government to
moderate immigration and to treat American workers, citizen and
immigrant, with the respect they deserve.
Our constituents did not elect us to help cheapen the quality of
their lives by importing foreign workers at six to eight times the
historical average. There is no getting around the fact that when
we cheapen labor with unchecked illegal immigration, we cheapen
our neighbors, both citizens and immigrants alike.
I do not mean to imply that the Hon. Mr. Graves holds the sort of
repugnant racial views of Mr. Fitch, nor that he opposes immigration.
A critical point to observe is that Mr. Graves is discussing illegal
aliens, not legal immigration against which Mr. Fitch spoke.
The protectionist arguments regarding American workers are, however,
similar.
In the second part of this series, I will discuss illegal aliens
in this country, and how we might grant them legal status in
an equitable manner.
