Sam Smith
It is taken as a given
in the immigration debate that our current system for dealing with the
issue has some sort of historical logic. It doesn't. The story of
immigration in the U.S. is a mishmash of hospitality and hatred,
encouragement and restriction.
The Naturalization Act
of 1790, for example, said that "any alien, being a free white person,
may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States." Blacks,
indentured servants, and most women couldn't be citizens no matter where
they came from, but the underlying approach to immigration would boggle
the mind of today's strict constructionists. If you were a free white
male, you came, you saw, and you signed up. As the Citizenship and
Immigration Services describes it, "the law required a set period of
residence in the United States prior to naturalization, specifically two
years in the country and one year in the state of residence when
applying for citizenship. When those requirements were met, an immigrant
could file a Petition for Naturalization with "any common law court of
record" having jurisdiction over his residence asking to be naturalized.
Once convinced of the applicant’s good moral character, the court would
administer an oath of allegiance to support the Constitution of the
United States."
The essence of immigration as we know
it today - i.e. the restriction of immigration - didn't become a major
issue until the Chinese exclusion Act of 1882, hardly something of which
Americans should be proud. This was the period of the great
post-reconstruction counter-revolution during which corporations gained
enormous power but the rest of America and its citizens lost it.
The
counter-revolution was not only an attack on would-be immigrants, it
was aimed at American ethnic groups who had proved far too successful at
adding to their political clout in places like Boston and New York
City.
Richard Croker, a tough 19th century county boss
of Tammany Hall, grew almost lyrical when he spoke of his party's duty
to immigrants:
"They do not speak our language, they do
not know our laws, they are the raw material with which we have to
build up the state . . . There is no denying the service which Tammany
has rendered to the republic. There is no such organization for taking
hold of the untrained, friendless man and converting him into a citizen.
Who else would do it if we did not? . . . [Tammany] looks after them
for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes
citizens of them."
Alexander B. Callow Jr. of the
University of California has written that Boston pol Martin Lomansey
even met every new immigrant ship and "helped the newcomers find lodging
or guided them to relatives. James Michael Curley set up
nationalization classes to prepare newcomers for the citizenship
examination . . . Friendly judges, anticipating election day, converted
their courts into naturalization mills, grinding out a thousand new
Americans a day. . . . Flags were waved, prose turned purple,
celebrations were wild on national holidays. . . . Patriotism became a
means for the newcomer to prove himself worthy."
By
1891 the federal government had assumed control of admitting or
rejecting all immigrants and one year later Ellis island opened. By 1903
we had a law restricting Mexican laborers and during and after World I,
laws were expanded greatly including a ban on all Asians save the
Japanese.
We did not have the equivalent of a green
card until 1940 and the actual card of that name only came in during the
anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. What we think of as our
immigration system is in no small part a leftover from the McCarthy era.
It
is common today to discuss immigration as though it were primarily an
employment and economic matter. The trouble with this claim is that many
of the people who are most anti-immigration are the same who have
caused infinitely more economic harm to the country through
globalization and outsourcing.
In truth, what really
scares the exclusionists is the politics of immigrants, potentially more
progressive than they would like. From Nordic populists in the northern
middle west to European socialists, to the right immigration has meant
left.
This, of course, isn't always true as in the case
of Cuba but it helps to make the debate a bit clearer to understand
what it is about.
In the end, we don't really have an
immigration policy but an exclusion policy, outsourcing our prejudices
by not letting their targets enter the country.
This article originally appeared in the Progressive Review in 2006
