Sentiment and the U.S. Immigration Policy

...The common denominators in all of this theatrical history are unearned moralistic posturing, wooden plotting, pompous set speeches, and a failure to render as action issues potentially at stake in a parMelvin E. Bradford is professor of English at the University of Dallas, a member of the Board o f Foreign Scholarships, and vice-president of the Philadelphia Society...

...Since the crossing of that watershed, what a failure of nerve we have seen...

...Hospitality is an expression of the selfesteem, the spirit of noblesse oblige, to be found among a proud people...

...Yet this law as finally drawn, with its abolition of separate ceilings for certain regions, was little more than an admission that our future problems were going to occur as a result of population pressure coming from the West Indies, Central America, and (especially) Mexico--which by itself provided o~e-third of the legal influx from the Western Hemisphere in the years 1967-1976 inclusive...

...IMMIGRATION POLICY The case against amnesty...

...For where there is no connection but in appetite there can be no limit upon it...

...S I )ince 1971 Congress and a series of Presidents have been occupied with devising a formula which recognizes that the illegal or undocumented alien, not the size of our legal increase, is the immigration problem of our national future, one which embodies this recognition in language that does not excite the racial sensitivities of any of our minority groups who have rights within the civil bond...

...In that same summer, on July 20, men walked on the moon, probably one of the preeminent spiritual climaxes of modern civilization, compelling wonder and jubilation everywhere (even Gina Lollobrigida remarked, "Nothing in show business will ever top what I saw on television today...

...I am thinking in particular of the English "heroic drama" of the seventeenth century, of eighteenthcentury "weeping comedy," and of nineteenth-century American melodrama, the standard fare of showboat entertainment more recently revived and made familiar to us in television documentaries and "biographies" of the heroes o f the Left...

...It was followed by statutes forbidding overseas recruiting of contract labor and related practices...

...In this one instance (if in no other) we should follow Paine's example--appreciate the value of an incorporated, civil condition, and shape our laws to enhance it, including our laws concerning immigration, naturalization, and illegal entry...

...In the Quota Act of 1921 and the momentous Immigration Act of May 26, 1924, these concerns translated into a quota by national origins and an overall limit on annual admissions...

...One of the first signs of a shift in the nation's attitude toward the large-scale movement of populations in this direction occurred with the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882...

...And to the debate the federal courts have contributed nothing but aggravation--as in the June 15, 1982 ruling of the U.S...

...The amnesty provision is of course the worst feature of Simpson-Mazzoli, and was included there in part to attract the supporting votes of legislators who can imagine importing a docile majority to foster their ambitions, presently frustrated by the good sense of the American people...

...Most certainly we must not make this mistake at the suggestion of those loud voices (South and North American) for whom hatred of the United States is axiomatic, the [lesire for its destruction a daily dream, and the flood of undocumented Mexican workers pouring into our Southwest a kind o f reconquista...

...In the rhetorical atmosphere created by coneach national quota was reserved to the well-educated or specially trained candidates from a particular background...

...That's the difference between feeling the big chill and having the right stuff...

...Other laws required the prospective immigrant to be literate in some language...

...The 1952 law was rightly described by the historian Robert Divine as "in essence an act of conservatism rather than of intolerance...

...For belief that the secular religion of natural rights requires the United States to accept eight million of them--for a starter--is tantamount to the mistake in logic that maintains the authority of the same religion to risk a war in order to free the slaves in Siberia...

...Yet this influx in numbers and change in percentage of Roman Catholic citizens did disturb the public peace of the regime and spawned an exclusionist political party, the Know Nothings...

...In the years 1840-1860 almost 4,400,000 aliens crossed the seas to become Americans...

...Which is to say nothing of the status of the undocumented alien...

...With this vast throng we filled our vacant spaces, lowered the price of our labor, increased the value of our public land and private real estate, expanded our industries, made use of our resources, and closed the frontier...

...Then the 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 flood began...

...Nature, and human nature, being what they are, we may as well accept the implication that both of them, untamed, are unmitigated evils, and civilized man's unpleasant lot is to struggle against them with the imperfect institutions he has and somehow, in the long run, triumph a little...

...It stood for man's everlasting struggle to tame nature and himself and come out just a little bit triumphant...

...All of this exclusionary legislation pointed toward a realization by the Congress that its first priority in regulating future naturalization would have to be the long-term stability and survival (as itself) of the United States, not asylum as the self-satisfying myth of our unlimited welcome or our desire for internal development as an industrial nation...

...And Virgil's Dido welcomed Aeneas when the storm drove him to Carthage...

...By cherishing among ourselves the elements and dynamic of a society these predecessors could recognize as rightfully their handiwork we will contribute to our own ever-continuing maturation, and be better armed to assist friendly peoples in preserving a homeland of their own...

...And it was to the status of citizen that they always aspired, not to a local application of the doctrine of the rights of man...

...The offenders must die, if respect for the comity of men and nations is to survive...

...For the stranger might always be something more than he appeared to be--like Mentor in Homer's Odyssey or the angels in Genesis 18 who announce to Abraham and Sarah that they will have a son...

...Another big movie was released around the same time as The Big Chill...

...Their appeals for a place in our company have always been addressed to the generosity of a sovereign American people, a nation that has offered its citizenship as a free gift to more immigrants than have been received by any other modern state...

...For by practicing such love for mankind in the abstract, as represented by those ostensibly distressed in their place of residence, it violates Burke's maxim that "to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections...

...Any goal contrary to the common good of the corporate "we" which endangers the future of the whole, and sets one of its components or part of its value system so far ahead of the rest as to threaten all, is, in essence, sentimental: indicative of an emotion out of proportion to the context in which it appears...

...With the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 much of this accumulated wisdom was repealed and, in a context created by the struggle over the role of government in enlarging the civil rights of minorities, replaced by a law which no one expected to see enforced: a law which had for its foundation an overcooked mush of natural rights imperatives which was certain to boil over into a demand for less and less restriction on the movement of nonwhite and distressed persons toward our borders...

...toward a pluralist society that has, with difficulty, negotiated an internal peace on the basis of its present composition...

...The Fathers read this lesson in civics into the history of the Punic Wars and into events in British history like the Glorious Revolution...

...The danger of being flooded by European refugees following World War I had been avoided...

...Nor prior to that time would one of our erstwhile statesmen have declared that our borders cannot be closed, that illegal aliens cannot be expelled from our midst, or that the rights of American citizens, their values and needs, cannot be preserved against claims from the outside created by the economy, the political atmosphere, and the exploding population of our sister republics immediately to the south...

...And though no barrier is thrown up against the inhabitants of neighboring countries in the Western Hemisphere, it was well understood that the status of unskilled Latin American labor in our society would discourage it from pouring into the states bordering Mexico in flict with Nazi Germany, we ceased to explain our quotas with reference to a scientific theory of race...

...There were few civil-rights laws of any importance protecting the Mexican-American who was a citizen...

...But much of the lobbying and contemporary emotion in favor of this amnesty has its source in something more worthy than a plan to assemble and then vote a class of perpetual dependents...

...That these immigration bills of the 1920s were not demonstrations of progressive opinion on the questions of human equality and the priority of the rights of man over the dictates of prudence is not difficult to prove...

...The two decades of 1820-1840 saw the flow increase as the nation's population absorbed another 750,000...

...The philosophers of natural rights prefer to conceive of a polity defined by commit nent to propositional statements concerning humanus genum, the species at large--ignoring the evidence that most high civilizations have emerged out of a combination of the ties of blood and friendship, of common religious faith and cooperation in business, politics, war, and art, not from generalizations that discourage such cohesion...

...And deserve their fate...

...An~l the prospect is that this amnesty,, covering covert and unauthorized immigrants arriving in this country before January 31, 1982, will be only the first in a series of similar acts, each legitimizing the status as legal permanent or legal temporary residents of the United States of another group of illegal aliens, making them candidates for membership in our body politic, and thus defrauding those who seek to become fellow citizens among us according to our laws...

...On the other hand, if we take seriously the role of cit~en then we will compel our elected representatives to recall their prior obligation to the compact between the iiving, dead, and yet unborn: our prescription from those wise spirits who established among us a general approach to the question of immigration which has allowed us to live together in peace and prosperity...

...or, finally, any country of our own...

...And therefore, for the first time, established a ceiling of 120,000 per year as a maximum from those sources: a ceiling without the per country limit or preference system emphasizing skills and relationships still applied to the rest of the world...

...If not quite insisting that the "golden doors" be opened to all comers, they nonetheless invoke the doctrine of universal "human rights" as an authority which, in given instances of distress, supersedes all naturalization laws--especially those of prosperous countries where a majority of the population is white--and thus demand a more and more inclusive "amnesty" provision as a part of Simpson-Mazzoli, a conversion of seven or eight million illegal inhabitants of the United States into a special class: criminals rewarded for having committed a crime in violation of our integrity as a sovereign political entity...

...Other straws in the wind were the 1875 provisions banning the entry of prostitutes and criminals, the 1882 provisions excluding the diseased, the socially undesirable, paupers without resource, and the mentally defective...

...They have insulted his family, attempted to kill his son, corrupted his servants, and consumed his substance...

...To the contrary, the problem is that no branch of government has been willing to act out its valid perception of dangers to come by enforcing the law as it stands: to perform, with the political version of character, "an act of conservatism rather than of intolerance...

...Like Milton's Adam in preferring Eve to the will of God...

...The Greek gods put a special curse on such violations of privilege...

...For they base the quotas which they propose on the ratio of white persons from a particular national background to be found in 1920 in the total population of the United States...

...Between 1840 and 1943 illegal immigration from across the Rio Grande into our Southwest was not widespread...

...That any of our countrymen would think themselves abused because illegal immigrants with a background like their own were not politically protected from the natural consequences of their crimes and allowed to compound them by bringing in more illegal immigrants, their relatives, to join them in their immunities here, would not have occurred as a reasonable cause for concern for any previous generation of American leaders...

...The rest of that quota was utilized to reunite families of citizens or citizensto-be, as an observation o f their claims upon the commonweal...

...Yet they held the stage--and, in their modern versions, continue to find an audience wherever propaganda stands in the place of art...

...As Ames expressed their purpose in preventing an amendment to the bill that would have excluded from citizenship immigrants bringing their slaves with them as property, the proper question to be answered in drafting such laws concerned the "tranquility and safety" of the United States, not the aboriginal equality of men...

...Peleus had given shelter to Phoenix, who became the tutor of his son Achilles in the Iliad...

...Thus when our most refined moralists insist that, in questions involving immigration, borders be ignored and distinctions of citizenship set aside, they are repeating the old error of Jean Jacques Rousseau: assuming the Superiority of a uniform, deadlevel "state of nature" to civil communities which maintain their own institutions and identities, generated by their own respective histories...

...ticular combination of characters, setting, and circumstance...

...To specify our firmness on this question we should attach a penalty more severe than mere repatriation to repeated illegal crossings of our border, or offer an award for the identification ot" interlopers...

...For the first law of every society, even the condition of its gestures of generosity, is that it put the needs of its own members ahead of the needs of outsiders...

...But they reserved the right to keep the process under their control, given the prospect of changes in the national interests of the United States...

...Those who understand what is at stake in these proposals would be amused by the spectacle were the matter of it less serious...

...They translated it into the American myth of the citizen-soldier...

...The 1965 revision of our immigration laws took note of the great increase in volume of immigration from nonquota countries, our neighbors in this hemisphere, during the period 1952-1965...

...But the "natural origins" formula was retained as, in the language of the 1952 Senate Judiciary Committee, a "rational and logical method of numerically restricting immigration in such a manner as to best preserve the sociological and cultural balance of the United States...

...If we thus persist, our children in generations to come will marvel at this circuitous sentimentality--and then pay the price of the cowardice which lies at its source...

...In other words, we will have precisely the sort of situation which the advocates of amnesty insist that they so much deplore out of a conviction that "there are no longer strangers and sojourners," but only citizens of the global community...

...That the greater human family can be thought of as fulfilling its composite nature only as it subdivides into "little platoons" and tribes and nations--in its repudiation of the presocial isolation of individuals who are "citizens of the world"--the Fathers of the Republic understood clearly, as may be easily determined from an examination of their approach to questions of admission and naturalization of such aliens as desired to settle among them...

...Seventeen months later the Jacobins thought him not radical enough, confined him at Luxembourg and sharpened the guillotine...

...But if, to the contrary, we would prefer to mean by the word "homeland" something more than a memory, a discursive concept, and a segment of geography (thanks to immigration, all that the Romans understood by patria long before their city fell), then the first order of our business will be to drain the rhetoric of natural rights out of our discussion of what immigration policy we should adopt and enforce...

...An alien has in the strict sense of the term no civil rights, nor any obligation to protect the cives to which he does not belong...

...Yet most of these early recruits to the American Dream came from Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Germany...

...For in the longer period of 1865-1915 immigration brought about 30,000,000 additions to the general population--this time coming not so much from Northern Europe as from Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece, the Balkans, and the Austrian Empire...

...But no one denied that immigrants would have to be naturalized, that their admission should be dependent upon the best interests of this country, or that some should be excluded, if they posed a threat to the commonweal...

...But that was before we began to make such ado about human rights, and in the process reached a point where we could not sustain any policy--however legal, just, or well-advised it might b e - - i f there was an objection to it that could be made as a special consideration to one of our minority populations...

...Or worse than sentimental, following from that error which the ancient theologians called cupidity: putting a greater ahead of a lesser good, with all done in the name of love...

...Only fanatics, poseurs, and Puritans deepest interests of the Republic will be neglected and, to its very grave peril, set aside for the sake of an opportunity of moralistic (i.e., selfrighteous) self-congratulation...

...1510---two versions of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill--we come closer and closer to a drastic redefinition of the immigration policy of the United States...

...We want an easy solution to the immigration problems that we face, one which makes everyone happy, concerning which no one will complain of racial and/or cultural bias...

...And the scale of appropriations necessary if the Immigration and Naturalization Service is expected to enforce them...

...Such an order of priorities is part of what we mean by the "social contract": the commitment to certain persons by the terms of which we are precluded from establishing an equivalent bond with others...

...Moreover, once supplemented by the Refugee Relief Act of August 7, 1953, and related legislation, it provided for a generous increase in the numbers which we received legally, especially from countries under Communist domination...

...We cannot bring ourselves to repatriate millions of alien criminals or to punish employers who hire them or to require others to carry identification proving that they are rightfully a part of our society--positive provisions of Simpson-Mazzoli...

...Ecgtheow, father of Beowulf, had been protected by Hrothgar, the Danish king later assisted by his son...

...While reserving authority over the legal process of naturalization to the Congress, all of the Framers clearly expected that it would be Europeans who were presenting themselves for "membership" here...

...These are laws for bringing us a few useful white people, not a paraphrase of Emma Lazarus...

...The Immigration and Nationality Act of June 27, 1952, the McCarranWalter Act, was not so much a departure from as a refinement of the immigration laws in force since 1924...

...The visitors in the Odyssey have abused the house of Odysseus...

...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984...

...As a Citizen of the World and a Girondian, in 1792 he allowed himself to be elected to the National Convention...

...The error was compounded in the Refugee Act of 1980, which redefined the category according to the vapidities of the United Nations protocol on the subject: a person who is unwilling or unable to return to his country of nationality or habitual residence because of "fear" and "political opinion...

...Instead our focus should be on the ideas of public virtue and citizenship, of what prospective citizens might bring to their country, and what harm they might do it...

...If unchecked, more and more illegal immigrants will come from Latin America, Asia, and (eventually) other parts of the world--come by the millions, swamp our system of social services, aggravate our unemployment problems, subvert our political stability, and thereby stir among us the fires of racial hatred which are heating now in Britain and Germany, France and Sweden, and are a danger in most of the world's developed nations, except Japan...

...No one confused citizen and guest or countryman and interloper, and all agreed with Gouverneur Morris of (at that time) Pennsylvania when he observed on August 9, 1787, that "every society from a great nation down to a club had the right of declaring the condition on which new members should be admitted...

...A January 29, 1795 revision of that original law required five years of residence in the United States, two in the place or region of application, and also insisted that the prospective citizen renounce allegiance to all other powers at least three yeb, rs before presenting himself for citizenship here...

...This much he can assert in the name of civilization because, as he adds elsewhere, "we begin our public affections in our families...

...And, in the process, also diminished our need for immigrant masses "yearning to be free...

...They were pleased (as would be any civilized person) to reconcile their obligations as republican magistrates and legislators to the ancient virtue of hospitality and the aspirations of restless and unfortunate people...

...Any principle that might result in the exclusion or expulsion of any persons not citizens who desire to reside in our midst they find repugnant...

...The human tidal wave flowing in this direction was stemmed in the late 1920s and 30s, following an influx of almost 14,600,000 in the decades 1900-1920...

...After the War Between the States, however, economic necessity overcame xenophobic uneasiness...

...For with civil rights go duties, and an obligation to defend the corporate good...

...On this question, on how the illegals may be excluded or expelled, they cannot agree...

...For that rhetoric is appropriate only to an argument from definition, and to a world where God hath not made nations of men, nor appointed "the bounds of their habitation...

...The 1882 Immigration Act was a landmark in that it looked toward repatriation of numerous unwanted aliens presenting themselves for admission through a regular process...

...Add to these ingredients a little weeping on cue when unlikely conversions occur or problems resolve as pundits require and you have a composite analogy to the sober proceedings of the world's greatest legislature on the subject of the rights of citizenship and the integrity of our national borders...

...Even as all of Troy must be destroyed because of its after-the-fact complicity in the crime of Paris, a prince of that great city and its representative, against his Spartan host, King Menelaus...

...And, may still see, as Speaker O'Neill announces that the House of Representatives cannot for the time act on Simpson-Mazzoli, mentions the opposition of eleven members, and then attempts to blame the paralysis over which he presides on the secret opposition of the President of the United States to a measure he publicly supports...

...Any society that, out of a gratuitous benevolence, destroys its own capacity to protect its members or to assist legitimate friends outside the compact which defines its limits is, in a collective sense, guilty of cupidity...

...Only if natural rights have priority over the circumstantial objection that, damaged or destroyed, we can protect and liberate no one will we find our first duty so far away from home...

...Both parts of this policy were obviously calculated to reflect the interests of the United States, and certainly suggested no preoccupation with the "wretched refuse" of any "teeming shore...

...We must not, in a period of low employment and social tension, make the mistake of many advanced societies and bring in (or accept once here illegally) a large population of aliens without a clear plan of how we may absorb and utilize them, without a conviction that they will learn English, accept our culture, our institutions, and follow our ways...

...Even in the most ancient literature of the West, hospitality to travelers and visitors is recognized as the virtue which distinguishes civilized men, those who fear the gods and keep their laws...

...We have no social connection with any man if we have the same obligations to all...

...That we put first, as prior to other questions, the survival of the homeland should not be a question open to discussion among its sons and daughters--that is, unless the conditions of its survival are shameful...

...The great problem with the people both inside and outside of government whose efforts make fair to ruin the proposed immigration law revisions is that they deny the validity of distinctions separating as categories guest, ever really liked these plays--such as confuse the aesthetic satisfactions of verisimilitude with the confirmation of prejudice which comes of reducing all human history to a Manichean struggle between a special definition of the darkness and the light...

...Yet even in 1965, or in the following years, Congress was not willing to declare as unimportant the problems which come of large increases in the labor force in times of unemployment...

...Between the end of the American Revolution and 1820, the year when we began to keep records of incoming population, something like 250,000 immigrants arrived on these shores...

...Throughout this period important American political figures announced that they were eager to welcome to these shores hosts of immigrants w~o would help them to develop the potential of the country...

...But self-respect has nothing to do with a suicidal passion to "open the gates and let them all come in...

...Some spoke of what immigrants had done for the country during the Revolution...

...And particularly Americans who, like the writer, reside in one of the states along the southern border of their country...

...numbers greater than what we could use for agricultural or (later) industrial purposes...

...I speak now of our honorable disposition to be a THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 19 hospitable people, ready to receive guests and to giv6 shelter to those who endure exile from their patria for the sake of principle...

...His old father, Laertes, has been driven into the fields...

...Now we have come so far as to be uncomfortable in defending a way of life which derived its essential properties from the careful and heroic labor of earlier Americans of European ancestry--even if those ancestors were our forefathers...

...Melvin E. Bradford SENTIMENT AND THE U.S...

...We admitted some exiles and persons threatened by persecution...

...In or before 1965, few of our public men dared to argue that the distress of immigrants would, by reason of our national identity, our political inheritance, oblige us to receive them, regardless of the preferences of an overwhelming majority of American citizens...

...Something of the kind could also be said concerning blacks who came hither from British Honduras, Barbados, the Bahamas, and Jamaica...

...Which is to say nothing of illegal increase...

...Then Congress might give up on evasion, farce, and melodrama, eschew posturing and sentimentality, and provide, through laws which we clearly require, for the survival of the Republic...

...They threatened established cultural patterns and the established mix only with reference to religion...

...And if "physical relat i o n s . . , are the elements of the commonwealth," no man who neglects hearth and rooftree will ever rise to "higher and more large regards," to a proper version of "love to our country, and to mankind...

...Immigration legislation continued in this pattern throughout most of the first century of our national existence...

...No cold relation is a zealous citizen...

...Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia went further, wondering whether immigration to this country had more than a "problematical" value for its development...

...Though we gave help to displaced persons and those otherwise distressed, we would not take the risk of being engulfed in our own place...

...But the citizen has behind him the honor of his countrymen (and some of their resources) when threatened by indignities while beyond the nation's borders...

...According to the teaching, to offer the wanderer safe harbor is to deserve the same, should exile ever be our misfortune...

...By and large, Asians and Africans are out of the question...

...As to the character and judgment of politicians who would create a proletariat where at present not much of one exists I can add little to the verdict of history upon all their kind...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 21 Supreme Court in the case of Plyler v. Doe, in which illegal aliens are granted rights denied legal (temporary and permanent) guests of the country...

...The Right Stuff is also about a group of men and women, but it represents another set of values, another world...

...All over the world, even in Russia, men took pride in the achievement, because Neff Armstrong stood for all mankind and the struggle and triumph of the astronauts stood for something more than the conquest of space...

...Or to assert that the influx of too many of a given heritage into an established mix of marly elements, kept at peace by the proportions of their influence over a national whole defined by their balance, could not rupture the social bonds which preserve us as a nation...

...Others warned about extending political "privileges" to those who had not yet formed "attachments" here-foreigners resident in the United States, deserving our citizenship but not yet one with us in spirit...

...It was safer to enter with a worker's permit or as a bracero than to try some surreptitious method...

...Therefore the original March 26, 1790 "'Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization" provided only for absorption of "any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years," on condition of his application to a common law court in a state where he has resided for at least one yearP/fhe can give proof of good character, and if he has affirmed by oath his loyalty to our Constitution...

...All of them, that is, except for that noisy radical, Thomas Paine, who went from his role in our Revolution into a very different atmosphere in the France of Danton and Robespierre...

...In the summer of 1969 almost half a million young people spent a weekend at Woodstock, making love not war, and experiencing a symbolic climax of one of the primary spiritual values of the sixties--escape from the pinch of reality and scruples into the refuge of communion...

...But the old writings also tell us that the law of hospitality is a coin with two faces...

...Eventually they are all devoured by monsters they have made...

...Further legislation in 1978 finally abolished all distinction between Eastern and Western Hemispheres, leaving in force a worldwide quota of 290,000 and a single preference system, exclusive of refugees...

...Fifty percent of No branch of government has been willing to act out its valid perception of dangers to come by enforcing the law as it stands...

...And after World War II we did more of the same, eventually under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948...

...Finally, in attempting to revive among our brethren some notion of the great value once attached to American citizenship, we should recall that foreign-born aspirants to that privileged estate have never been confused on that subject...

...In 1976 the formula was revised in the direction o'f international uniformity and freedom from prejudice in favor of European antecedents...

...The memory of two wars with Mexico was, in those regions, still hanging in the air...

...Said another way, any act of choosing is an act of exclusion as well as of inclusion...

...Instead, it pointed back to the very beginnings of an American doctrine concerning naturalization, as modified to suit our national circumstances in the 1950s...

...Of course, as the forthcoming debate of the Congress predictably degenerates into lofty generalizations concerning the "rights of man" or the narrowness of nationalism and the familiar allegorical conflict between the wicked "haves" and certain rhetorically selected and well-scrubbed representatives of that intrinsically "noble" multitude who have not, the citizen, and interloper...

...It is not a measure of self-interest but of sentiment--reflecting a powerful sense of security and grace...

...Without a job waitiqg, it was not worth the trouble or ~ae risk...

...As the Congress lumbers with all the hesitancy of an elephant surrounded by mice toward final consideration of S. 529/H.R...

...But I rather think that our sensations in contemplating prospects to come are more complex and can be better compared to those engendered by some of the worst plays of the last three hundred years...

...Thus, in the end, we may have no immigration policy at all: or any perception of the difference between guest, interloper, and citizen...

...At that point Thomas Paine rediscovered the value of American citizenship and-in violation of his earlier universalism, to the amusement of our ambassador in Paris, Gouverneur Morris--claimed its protection...

...If seen as an interloper intruding himself upon communities which expected everyone to speak English and to "naturalize" in other ways, such an immigrant could anticipate great difficulty...

...Like Fisher Ames of Massachusetts in the debates preceding the passage of the 1795 revision, the statesmen of the early Republic were careful to keep questions of"'abstract rights" out of their deliberations on the subject of immigration...

...This is not the lesson of The Big Chill...

...I n the Great Convention of 1787 the Framers of the United States Constitution had a good bit to say on the subject of immigration...