Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future (5 page)

Immigrants have contributed to their new country in so many significant, positive ways. They have made American society and culture richer. As the sixty-nine-year-old, Indian-born novelist Bharati Mukherjee, who came to the United States in her twenties, said, “America has transformed me. It does not end until I show that I (along with the hundreds of thousands of immigrants like me) am minute by minute transforming America. The transformation is a two-way process: It affects both the individual and the national-cultural identity.”
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Many of today’s immigrants arrive already prepared to contribute to a global economy. They are frequently the best and brightest (if not also the most motivated) from their countries, and they come possessing the risk-taking personality of the entrepreneur.

Peter Linder, second-generation Austrian immigrant, whose parents fled Vienna near the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power, is a successful entrepreneur and investor. In Philadelphia, he started three companies, two of them successful.

He says, “The mold of Jews coming here was that parents believed education was the most important thing. For a lot of cultures, education is very, very important, but it’s not so important for people in this country.” 

Still, these virtues were and unfortunately are not always recognized, particularly in times of national tension or economic stress, when reactionary forces place obstacles to block the immigrants’ path toward assimilation and success.

Yet as Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” Particularly in times of political tension or economic stress, immigrants have been the most responsive to change. Despite the obstacles, immigrants adapt and keep moving forward.

If we look at some of the statistics on immigrants in our society, we begin to recognize patterns. While the number of immigrants according to the 2010 Census is almost four times what it was in 1910, the percentage of immigrants with respect to the total U.S. population is not at an all-time high.

Foreign-Born Population and Foreign-Born as Percentage of the Total U.S. Population, 1850 to 2010

Elizabeth M. Grieco, Edward Trevelyan, Luke Larsen, Yesenia D. Acosta, Christine Gambino, Patricia de la Cruz, Tom Gryn, and Nathan Walters, U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division,
The Size, Place of Birth, and Geographic Distribution of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 1960 to 2010
. Annual Meetings of the Population Association of America, San Francisco, CA, May 3–5, 2012.

Some of the misconceptions about immigration have to do with its effects on the economy, and immigrants are easily singled out as exacerbating our economic woes. In particular, mass immigration and illegal immigration are the focus of much concern and anxiety, while much less attention is given to immigrants who enter legally.

“The Founding Immigrants”—a
New York Times
op-ed by Kenneth C. Davis

Often, the disdain for the foreign was influenced by religion. Boston’s Puritans hanged several Friends after a Bay Colony ban on Quakerism. In Virginia, the Anglicans arrested Baptists.

But the greatest scorn was generally reserved for Catholics—usually meaning Irish, Spanish, and Italians. Generations of white American Protestants resented newly arriving “Papists,” and even in colonial Maryland, a supposed haven for them. Roman Catholics were nonetheless forbidden to vote and hold public office.

Once independent, the new nation began to carve its views on immigrants into law. In considering New York’s constitution, for instance, John Jay—later to become the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, suggested erecting a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.” 
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During the boom economic years in the last quarter of the last century and the coinciding period of deregulation, the undocumented immigrant population grew from less than one million in 1980 to a peak of nearly twelve million in 1996. Between 2007 and 2009, however, the undocumented population declined by one million, coinciding with the economic downturn. The current estimate of the undocumented population is 10.8 million: approximately 19 percent entered the United States prior to the 1990s; 44 percent entered during the 1990s; and another 37 percent entered since 2000. All told, undocumented immigrants (adults and children) only make up approximately 4 percent of the total U.S. population.

A host of opinions about immigration today is based on a set of beliefs about this country’s past. Yet these opinions are most likely distorted because they are based upon a sanitized version of our nation’s history. We believe our country was founded on the principle of equal rights, and while we acknowledge that these rights were gradually expanded to include new groups of people (Native Americans, African Americans, and women, for example), we believe that we have finally achieved this high ideal.

As we can see by the incremental inclusion of these new groups, however, each generation had rationales for maintaining legal inequality; so, too, we have our own rationale for excluding non-native residents from equal rights. Our individual lenses color the way we see things that are really black-and-white.

A Chinese student studying at Penn State University remarked, “I did not know what discrimination based on race was until I came to the United States.”

IMMIGRATION LAWS

Ignorance and racism guided the nation’s first law regulating immigration. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” and to people of “good moral character.”

Africans and Asians, as well as free blacks and indentured servants, were left out. Despite several appeals of the law, racial barriers remained in place and were not removed until 1870 for Africans and 1952 for East and South Asians.

Perhaps the most egregious of statutes regulating immigration came about after an economic boom in the western United States, when fortunes and jobs dried up at the end of the Gold Rush and work on the transcontinental railroad in the mid-1800s ceased.

The tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants mining gold and laying rails across the great expanse were tolerated during those flush years, but when the rare metal’s vein was tapped, the Chinese were forced from the mines. They resettled in cities, working in laundries and restaurants.

As the post–Civil War economy declined, public sentiment in West Coast states turned against the Chinese. In 1882, Congress passed and President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which kept out “skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese mining employees.” It was the nation’s first law to restrict free immigration.

Ironically, according to historian David Hackett Fischer, Congress passed the law “while Chinese laborers were actually at work on Bedloe’s Island, helping build the pedestal for America’s great icon of liberty. Saum Song Bo wrote angrily in 1885, ‘The word liberty makes me think of the fact that this country is the land of liberty for men of all nations except the Chinese. I consider it as an insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute toward building in this land a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.’” Fischer further wrote, “Saum Song Bo wondered whether this
statute
against the Chinese or the Statue to Liberty will be the more lasting monument.”
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The Exclusion Act went even further by restricting any Chinese from becoming citizens, making their status as immigrants permanent and intending to prevent their assimilation into society and culture. The law essentially created a nation within a nation, attempting to exclude any Chinese from the opportunity to share in American prosperity.

That same year, Congress also banned “any convict, lunatic, idiot, criminals, or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge” under the 1882 Immigration Act.

From this point onward, for more than forty years, the United States continued to impose restrictions. Eventually, even white Europeans, who since the nation’s founding immigrated freely, felt restrictions, but not like what Asians and Africans felt.

In 1917, the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917 (also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act) with an overwhelming majority. This act added to the number of undesirables banned from entering the country, including but not limited to “homosexuals,” “idiots,” “feeble-minded persons,” “criminals,” “epileptics,” “insane persons,” “alcoholics,” “professional beggars,” all persons “mentally or physically defective,” polygamists, and anarchists. Furthermore, it barred all immigrants over the age of sixteen who were illiterate. The most controversial part of the law was the section that designated an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” a region that included much of Asia and the Pacific Islands from which people could not immigrate. Previously, only the Chinese had been excluded from admission to the country.

Then, the Immigration Act of 1924 excluded all classes of Chinese immigrants as well as Asians in general. It limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The law was aimed at further restricting the southern and eastern Europeans, mainly Jews fleeing persecution in Poland and Russia, who were immigrating in large numbers starting in the 1890s, as well as prohibiting the immigration of Middle Easterners, East Asians, and Indians. Congressional opposition was minimal.

It was not until 1943 that Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Certainly the specter of what had started in 1941 with Hitler’s “Final Solution” played into the change in U.S. immigration policy. However, by this time tens of thousands of Japanese Americans, many U.S. citizens by birth, had been confined to internment camps because the United States was at war with Japan.

They sought to have their citizenship restored but were denied and almost sent back to Japan. A Justice Department official, reading their case and their reason for wanting their citizenship, allowed them to remain in the United States. However, they did not have their citizenship restored until 1968.

Itaru and Shizuko Ina were both born in the United States, yet in 1941 they were among the many Japanese Americans who lost their homes and businesses. They were rounded up and shipped to what the government termed
internment
camps but what Japanese Americans, and even President Roosevelt, called
concentration
camps.

Shizuko was four months pregnant when she and Itaru boarded a Greyhound bus that took them to Topaz. They were first taken to a horse race track for processing, where they were forced to live in a stall. By the time they reached Topaz, where the arid and dusty climate made noses bleed, Itaru had become indignant at their treatment.

He began to fight for his and his family’s civil rights and made a speech, arguing the military took the internees’ constitutional rights based on discrimination. “We should be treated equal to the free people,” he said. That branded Itaru a troublemaker.

Feeling that their country had betrayed them and not wanting to cut ties to their ancestral country, the Inas’ refused to swear undivided loyalty to the United States in a survey all internees were given. They then renounced their citizenship.

When camp authorities demanded to know why he refused, Itaru told them he bought war bonds, registered for civil defense, and always voted, yet his country decided he was a threat based solely on his ethnic appearance. He now no longer believed he and his family had a future in the United States because of their ethnicity.

For speaking out in protest and refusing to swear loyalty, Itaru was charged with sedition, and in 1944, he was separated from his family and sent to a U.S. Justice Department camp. The camp, actually a military fort, had been converted to detain German prisoners of war, and Americans of Japanese decent were deemed enemies.

At war’s end in 1945, Japan was in ruin, firebombing raids had devastated its cities and industry, and two atomic bombs had leveled two major cities. Reports back to the camps convinced the Inas there was nothing for them or their children to return to in Japan. 

Japanese Americans were treated more harshly because of their appearance. The country was at war with Germany and Italy, too, but the Americanized citizens and immigrants from those countries had only to pledge a loyalty oath. As a group, the government may have monitored them, but they were not imprisoned.

The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, only revised the quota formula assigned to each country of origin. Countries could send one-sixth of 1 percent of each nationality’s population in the United States in 1920. Because the law was based on U.S. population percentages, immigrants during this period were primarily from Western Europe. McCarran and Walter were afraid the United States could face communist infiltration through immigration and were concerned about national security. Thus, their solution was selective immigration, which did not take economics and, to a certain extent, foreign policy into account. Although the law technically ended Asian exclusion by allotting each Asian nation a minimum quota of one hundred visas each year and allowing Asians to become naturalized American citizens, the law ensured low immigration numbers from Asian countries. President Truman vetoed the law because he believed it to be discriminatory, but it was passed with the support of Congress.