Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future (6 page)

By the early 1960s, calls to reform U.S. immigration policy had mounted, thanks in no small part to the growing strength of the civil rights movement. The movement’s focus on equal treatment regardless of race or nationality led many to view the quota system as backward and discriminatory. With the passing of the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 to end overt discrimination within the nation, the next logical step was to purge it of its external discriminatory policies toward the rest of the world as embodied in its prevailing immigration policies.

In particular, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese, and Italians—of whom increasing numbers were seeking to enter the United States—claimed the quota system discriminated against them in favor of Northern Europeans. At that time, 70 percent of all immigrant slots were allotted to natives of just three countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany. These slots went mostly unused, while there were long waiting lists for the small number of visas available to those born elsewhere in eastern and southern Europe.

The resulting Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 was as much a manifestation of civil rights policy as it was an instrument of immigration reform. It marked a dramatic break with past immigration policy and had an immediate and lasting impact. In place of the national-origins quota system, the act provided for preferences to be made according to categories, such as relatives of U.S. citizens or permanent residents, those with skills deemed useful to the United States, or refugees of violence or unrest. Though it abolished quotas per se, the system did place caps on per-country and total immigration, as well as caps on each category. As in the past, family reunification was a major goal, and the new immigration policy increasingly allowed entire families to uproot themselves from other countries and to reestablish their lives in the United States.

In 1965, nearly twenty-five years after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress finally completely abolished immigration restrictions on Asians and also eliminated the federal policy of discrimination based on race, place of birth, sex, and residence. In 1976, it went on to eliminate preferential treatment for people from the Western Hemisphere.

A similar story of the United States using and then limiting the immigration of a group of foreigners can also be found in Mexican immigration to America. When the United States entered World War I, the country had a great need for Mexican labor so that American workers could fight overseas. Consequently, the Mexican government exported Mexican workers to America as contract laborers. However, after the war ended, a nativistic United States wanted to cut back the flow of Mexicans and created the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924. Economic demand for unskilled laborers did not end with the creation of the Border Patrol, so Mexicans continued to immigrate to America both legally and illegally.

In the 1930s, as a result of the Great Depression, Mexican workers were deported en masse. In
Beyond Smoke and Mirrors
, Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone point out, “Mexicans were accused, paradoxically, of both ‘taking away jobs from Americans’ and ‘living off public relief.’”
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World War II brought back another surge in demand for Mexican immigrants. While Americans were away at war, braceros, Mexican farm laborers, helped to run the American economy. The Bracero Program continued even after the war ended, but the number of legal braceros allowed could not fulfill the demand for workers. As a result, growers recruited undocumented workers. The cycle continued with the government needing workers and then shutting them out.

In 1986, the next significant change in policy came about with the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This required employers to attest to their employees’ immigration status, made it illegal to knowingly hire or recruit unauthorized immigrants, granted amnesty to certain seasonal agricultural illegal immigrants, and granted amnesty to illegal immigrants who entered the United States before 1982 and had since resided in the United States. In all, 2.3 million Mexican illegal immigrants were granted amnesty. However, IRCA also began a process of border fortification and militarization. Besides the military, the U.S. Border Patrol is the largest arms-bearing branch of the U.S. government. Intended to keep illegal immigrants out, the border fortification instead kept illegal immigrants in. According to Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, “From 1965 to 1985, 85 percent of undocumented entries from Mexico were offset by departures and the net increase in the undocumented population was small. The build-up of enforcement resources at the border has not decreased the entry of migrants so much as discouraged their return home.”
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Current immigration policy then shifted after the enactment of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) became part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The department’s new U.S. Citizenship and U.S. Immigration Services (USCIS) handles U.S. immigration services and benefits, including citizenship, applications for permanent residence, nonimmigrant applications, asylum, and refugee services.

Unlike most other federal agencies, USCIS is funded almost entirely by user fees. Under President George W. Bush’s fiscal year 2008 budget request, direct congressional appropriations made up about 1 percent of the USCIS budget, and about 99 percent of the budget was funded through fees. The total USCIS fiscal year 2008 budget was projected to be $2.6 billion.

In President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal, the total USCIS budget of $3.8 billion for immigration enforcement remained a priority. USCIS remains a mostly fee-dependent agency, as there was no request for additional appropriations from Congress to cover the costs of processing refugees and asylees. As usual, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) budget dwarfed the USCIS’s budget. Even within USCIS’s budget, there were proposed increases for enforcement in the form of an expanded E-Verify program.

All in all, education and human capital do not figure prominently in the eligibility criteria for most immigrants in the United States. Since 1965, U.S. immigration policy has been built around family unification, and two-thirds of permanent immigrants to the United States are now admitted on the basis of family ties (two-fifths as the spouses of U.S. citizens, and the rest as the children, siblings, or parents of U.S. citizens or as the spouses of permanent residents). My own mother and father (and subsequently his second wife and their child) and I became U.S. citizens thanks to my sister being born here.

TODAY’S PARIAHS

We would like to believe that 1965 marked the year that discriminatory immigration laws were abolished; however, this is not truly the case. Both Arab Americans and Iranian Americans have excelled in the United States, and in an array of fields, from academics and politics to entertainment and science. Although they have been welcomed to this country for decades, Middle Eastern people—like Japanese Americans sixty years earlier—have found after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, how harsh America can be toward someone who is nonwhite and professes a faith other than one based upon Judeo-Christian beliefs.

The history of Middle Eastern immigration to the United States dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. For decades, Middle Easterners came into the country at various rates, but after the United States defeated its foes in the Pacific and Europe, assumed superpower status, and locked horns with communist Russia, immigrants began to flood in.

The first wave from the Middle East occurred between the late 1800s and 1910, when approximately sixty thousand Arabs arrived on American shores, mostly from what was then Greater Syria (present-day Lebanon), and they were overwhelmingly Christian. They were by and large unskilled men intent on making money and then returning home to live in prosperity.

The second wave occurred in the 1950s. The bulk of this group was comprised of professionals and university students who sought citizenship and permanent residency in the United States, which was transforming itself into the world’s largest economy with an expanding middle class.

Whereas the early Arab immigrants were mainly uneducated and relatively poor, the new arrivals included large numbers of relatively well off, highly educated professionals: lawyers, professors, teachers, engineers, and doctors. Many of the new immigrants began as students at American universities and then decided to stay, often as a result of lack of employment opportunities back home or because of the unstable political conditions in their homelands—conditions that often threatened imprisonment or death for returnees.

The third wave began in the mid-1960s and continues today, with an estimated 3.7 million Arab Americans living in the United States.
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Most reside in and around the larger cities, such as Detroit and Los Angeles, according to the Arab American Institute.

The reasons for the third wave of Middle Eastern immigration differ from the reasons for the second wave. In addition to economic need and the attraction of a major industrial society, immigrants from the third wave often are driven out of their homes as a result of regional conflicts or as a consequence of major social and political changes in the homeland that make life difficult, especially for the wealthy or the middle classes. The search for a democratic haven, where it is possible to live in freedom without political or economic harassment and suppression by the government, was a strong motivation, even more so than during the earlier period.

These later immigrants come from all parts of the Arab world, but especially from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen. Arab Americans represent twenty-two different Arab countries. To many people’s surprise, only 25 percent of Arab Americans are Muslim, even though most Arabs are Muslim. And although most Muslim Arab immigrants have been Sunni (reflecting the population in the region), there is a substantial Shi’a minority, as well. Some 65 percent of the remaining Arab Americans are Christian, and 10 percent profess other faiths. Arab Americans are generally more educated than the average U.S. citizen, with 45 percent having a bachelor’s degree compared to 28 percent of Americans. Further, 18 percent of Arab Americans hold a postgraduate degree, while 10 percent of Americans can say the same.

Excluded from this group are the Iranian Americans, whose numbers are believed to be between one and two million. It is not clear how many Iranian Americans there really are because Census data has historically underrepresented the number of Iranian Americans in the country. After the Iranian hostage crisis, Iranian Americans took a low profile due to political tensions and hesitated in participating in civic activities. Extrapolated Census data and independent surveys performed by Iranian Americans estimated there to be one million Iranian Americans in the United States in 2009.
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They tend to concentrate in certain areas, such as Los Angeles, New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. A Zogby International survey found that around 40 percent of Iranian Americans identify as Muslims, around 40 percent are not religious, and the remainder is split among Christians, Jews, Bahais, and Zoroastrians.
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Thus, an Iranian American is more likely to be Muslim, but less likely to be Christian, than an Arab American. Over 25 percent of Iranian Americans hold a postgraduate degree, according to research conducted by the Iranian Studies Group, an independent academic organization at MIT. Iranian Americans are truly some of the most educated people in the country.

Today, Iranians are often denied visas without an ounce of evidence under the claim they may engage in espionage, sabotage, or the prohibited export of sensitive information. In 2012, Bloomberg News found that some Iranian engineering graduate students, who were planning on attending American universities, could not come because they were denied their visas under the accusation of potential espionage.
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Iranians have immigrated to the United States for decades and have greatly contributed to its economy through profitable businesses and well-educated students, but current political tensions between Iran and the United States are spilling out of the political arena into academics and ultimately into economics.

Nonetheless, in July 2012, President Obama signed a piece of legislation that ordered the secretary of state to deny visas to any Iranians who wanted to take coursework that could help Iran’s energy industry.

IMMIGRATION REFORM

It is estimated that there are around eleven million undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States. These undocumented immigrants are largely from Mexico and Central America. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security estimated that Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala were the three greatest contributors of illegal immigrants to America. Mexico represented the most with 6.8 million, while El Salvador and Guatemala each have over half a million.
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According to the Center on Foreign Relations, “A January 2013 Gallup poll found that only 36 percent of Americans are satisfied with the current level of immigration to the United States.”
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Because of this dissatisfaction, the general public widely favors immigration reform.

In early 2013, four Republicans and four Democrats were able to come together to draft an immigration reform bill, which advocates for a thirteen-year pathway for undocumented persons to gain legal status, among other stipulations. In late June, with a vote of 68–32, the Senate passed the bill.
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This bill also provides stricter guidelines to control future immigration—an aspect the general American public would support. As shown through a Rasmussen poll, “66 percent of likely voters say that gaining control of the border is more important than amnesty for illegal aliens.”
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