Immigration: The Lessons of History

The country of immigrants has long tried to put restrictions on newcomers to keep the nation’s culture from changing. It has never worked

 

This is the year that leaders in Congress and President George W. Bush vowed to pass comprehensive immigration reform, addressing the problems for both low-skill and high-skill workers. But so far the effort has seen nothing but setbacks. After introducing a bipartisan proposal in the Senate in May, Senator Edward Kennedy (D – Mass.) saw the legislation get pulled in early June before it could get a full vote. The biggest sticking point is what to do about the illegal immigrants already in the country, estimated at 12 million. While Kennedy’s legislation would allow most of those people the ability to become citizens, anti-immigrant forces have attacked the proposal as “amnesty” for those who have broken American laws.

Now, a crackdown on undocumented workers is set to begin. Michael Chertoff, secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, announced on Aug. 10 that the federal government would soon start a nationwide effort to penalize companies that hire illegal immigrants. The drive is expected to hit businesses hardest in labor-intensive industries, such as construction, agriculture, cleaning, and maintenance.

History offers lessons for the present. For nearly 150 years, the U.S. was truly a country of immigrants, letting in almost everyone who wanted to find their future in the land of opportunity. But in the 1920s, the U.S. passed several laws restricting the number of new arrivals, and for decades afterward, an explicit goal was to make sure that immigrants didn’t change the culture of the country. "The history of America is always around trying to control groups that are deemed unfit," says John Carson, a history professor at the University of Michigan.

It never worked. Whether they were Irish or Italian, Russian or Chinese, the newcomers always ended up changing the country, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The same is true today, as immigrants arrive from Mexico, India, and elsewhere. Yet the fundamental character of the U.S. has remained amazingly resilient. The country has grown more diverse in language, food, and customs, but the core principles of freedom, opportunity, and individual rights are unchanged.

 

1875

 

After several states pushed to control immigration, the Supreme Court declared that regulation of the issue is the responsibility of the federal government.

 

1882

 

The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed into law in May, 1882, prohibited Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. for 10 years. The proposal gained support as large numbers of Chinese arrived in the country, particularly in the West, to work on the railroads and participate in the gold rush.

 

1921

 

With the Emergency Quota Act, the U.S. set for the first time in its nearly 150-year history a limit on the number of new immigrants who could come to the country. The U.S. population was 108 million, and 800,000 immigrants arrived that year.