The fear of foreigners

...At the core of their arguments is not a concern for those the poet Emma Lazarus described as "huddled masses yearning to be free" but the very opposite—a belief that by turning to immigrants we can bypass the worst problems the underclass poses to the economy...

...With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides") go unchallenged...

...Finally, there is the question of illegal immigrants and the education of their children...

...In a tight economy in which affirmative action is increasingly a zero-sum game, the competition for affirmative action slots has become fierce—especially among blacks and Latinos— and with the Supreme Court narrowing the scope of affirmative action still further with its 1995 Adarand decision, the immigrant question isn't only a practical one...

...There is no credible way to talk about compassion for those living beyond our borders when we have so little regard for the needs of our own poor...

...It's unfair when people like you are working hard," the voiceover in one of the governor's ads reminded voters...

...It is not clear on what basis recent minority immigrants have a claim on benefits designed for those who have been the historic victims of American injustice...

...What is the future of an "American underclass" unable to come up with the cash or credit to open stores of their own...

...But in a state that voted for Proposition 187 by a 3-to-2 margin, it was not just anxious white voters who took Wilson seriously...

...In just a decade they have increased fivefold, from 91,900 in 1982 to 440,000 today...

...Up to twenty thousand people could come in any year from a single nation...

...In 1994 the Urban Institute estimated that it cost the seven states with the highest number of immigrants $3.1 billion to educate 641,000 undocumented children, and in California the numbers were particularly high, with the state being forced to educate an estimated 300,000...

...But equally problematic these days is the larger issue of whether there are constitutional grounds for insisting, as the Court did, that educating the children of illegal aliens is required so as to avoid penalizing minors for the wrongdoing of the adults responsible for them...

...In insisting that Congress was right to exclude immigrants from a series of welfare benefits, Republican E. Clay Shaw of Florida pointed out that the legislators were only following past patterns...

...It's all scientific stuff, it's been proved...

...The aim of the Civil Rights Act 40 • DISSENT American Questions of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was to undo legalized racism...

...The Johnson administration and the Kennedys failed to anticipate the consequences that would follow from a loophole in the 1965 law, which allowed the parents, spouse, and minor children of any adult American citizen to enter the country without being subject to numerical restrictions...

...Commission on Civil Rights during the Reagan years and currently president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, begins her essay by celebrating the accomplishments of recent immigrants...

...Tom's getting very profound," she observes sarcastically...

...But there are grounds for being concerned about others as well and fearing that taxpayers are being asked to compensate for a lifetime of substandard income in a foreign country...

...But seventy years later his fears are alive and well in America...

...Does not any limit on benefits for children of illegal aliens penalize them for the sins of their parents...

...Even a mother who is here illegally is rewarded with citizenship for her child and residence for herself and her family if she gives birth on American soil...

...It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or power...

...It assumes that we are collectively better off if an inner-city neighborhood is "reclaimed"—even if that means its native-born inhabitants are made still more irrelevant to the economy around them...

...The immigration tide that from 1880 to 1920 brought 23.5 million people to America was over...

...But for Chavez and the conservatives, it is not just the immigrants' successes that are important...

...cards when applying for a job or a government benefit) was enough to provide the basis for a come-from-behind victory over popular Secretary of State Kathleen Brown...

...His brother Robert, while attorney general, was also upbeat, assuring a House Subcommittee worried over an influx of Asian immigrants, that their number "would be approximately five thousand a year" at the start and then drop off to a much lower figure...

...Such a backlash was unforeseen by those responsible for liberalizing America's immigration laws three decades ago...

...They have "transformed urban America over the last decade, from Korean grocers in New York, to Salvadoran busboys and janitors in Washington, Mexican babysitters and construction workers in Los Angeles, Cambodian doughnut shop owners in Long Beach, Haitian cooks in Miami, Russian taxi drivers in Philadelphia, and Filipino nurses and Indian doctors in public hospitals practically everywhere," Chavez writes...

...As Lyndon Johnson put it in a speech at Howard University's 1965 commencement, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all others' and still justly believe you have been completely fair...

...In the 1990s they have become its most influential proponents, and they have ensured that the immigration debate will continue to be a divisive one for years to come...

...This is not a departure from traditional immigration policy," Shaw declared, "because we have always required that people come here because they can get ahead through hard work, not because they can go on welfare...

...At the other end of the age scale, the problems are just as great...

...Senator Barbara Boxer advocated using the National Guard to help with Border Patrol work and increasing the penalties for the forgery of immigration documents...

...But what really rouses Unz's enthusiasm and that of most pro-immigration conservatives is the idea that newcomers will do—cheaply and efficiently— what native American workers will not...

...Chavez and the pro-immigration conservatives of the nineties never say...

...WE CAN STOP THE ILLEGAL ALIEN INVASION NOW...

...Passed over the veto of President Harry Truman, who wanted a more liberal immigration law, the McCarran-Walter Act retained most of the quota preferences of 1924...

...Are they to be pushed to still more neglected neighborhoods...

...Senator Dianne Feinstein argued for more Border Patrol agents and a $1-per-person bordercrossing fee to pay for them...

...Speaking for the Court's 5-to-4 majority, Justice William Brennan held, "There is no evidence in the record suggesting that illegal entrants pose any significant burden on the State's economy...

...Between 1971 and 1980, 4.5 million immigrants were admitted to the United States...

...In no area has this difference been more dramatic than that of affirmative action...

...Under the proposed bill the present level of immigration remains substantially the same," he told critics...

...All a pregnant Mexican woman need do is take a taxi across the international bridge and legally give birth in Texas to a U.S...

...For Governor Pete Wilson, seemingly headed for defeat when the election began, a pro-Proposition 187 stance (combined with a recommendation that all Californians be required to carry I.D...

...Passed at a time when anti-immigration fever was running high, the Immigration Act of 1924 set a yearly limit of 150,000 on immigrants from outside the Western Hemisphere and then divided the 150,000 into quotas based on a country's share of the total American population of 1920...

...The popular rock group Guns N' Roses didn't hurt itself with fans when it cut a record that declared Immigrants and faggots They make no sense to me They come to our country— And think they'll do as they please Like start some mini-Iran Or spread some fuckin' disease Nor have archconservatives like Thomas Fleming, the editor of Chronicles, the Rockford Institute's monthly magazine, had to pay a political price for saying, "More fruit pickers we do not need...

...When a Los Angeles Times headline hailed the 1924 law as a "Nordic Victory," it was not mistaken...

...Between 1920 and 1930 immigration dropped to just over four million...

...Michael Lind is not guilty of hyperbole when he charges, "From the point of view of business-class conservatives, the labor supply can never be too large and wages too low...

...Cut off the welfare payments and we shall be surprised at how many agricultural workers are living right now in Chicago and NewYork...

...One doesn't wish to be unkind, but cultural pluralism is not the most attractive legacy we can leave to our children...

...The scam itself gave the INS the basis for a clear line of prosecution, but what it also revealed was how easily U.S...

...As Asian and Latin immigrants with large extended families replaced European immigrants, the immigration multiplier—the number of admittances attributable to one immigrant— began to rise dramatically...

...In Los Angeles, the vast majority of hotel and restaurant employees are hardworking Hispanic immigrants, most here illegally, and anyone who believes that these unpleasant jobs would otherwise be filled by nativeborn blacks or whites is living in a fantasy world," Unz writes...

...As a television commercial argued, the only proper way for a struggling Californian to look on an illegal immigrant was as a leech: "Three hundred thousand illegal immigrant children in public schools...

...It is that they have triumphed while long-term innercity residents continue to fail...

...Brimelow speaks for an America that has become increasingly worried about the arrival of a million-plus immigrants annually to its shores and increasingly cynical about the arguments for continuing immigration at that rate...

...Chinese, as a result of extensions of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (it would not be repealed until 1943) were already barred, and Japanese, as a result of a provision in the 1924 act, were also effectively kept out...

...Eighty percent of the numerically limited visas were for close relatives of American citizens or residents...

...But Fitzgerald doesn't let Tom's remarks (which parallel Calvin Coolidge's 1921 observation, "Biological laws tell us . . . Nordics propogate themselves successfully...

...For high-tech industries what this means, Ron K. Unz, the CEO of Wall Street Analytics, writes in the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, is skilled labor they don't have to train...

...It neither satisfies a national need nor accomplishes an international purpose," he declared...

...Republican Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania was even harsher: "In part this is a fund-raising measure," Santorum observed of the Republican welfare bill, "but if you look at the targets of the proposed cuts, we are saying that the kind of immigrants we want are people who will take responsibility for themselves and not rely on the federal government...

...Chavez puts the matter very delicately when she writes, "As they have always done, immigrants still take the difficult, often dirty, low-paying, thankless jobs that other Americans shun...

...Similar concerns arise with regard to citizenship and birth on American soil...

...To the contrary, the available evidence suggests that illegal aliens underutilize public services, while contributing their labor to the local economy and tax money to the state...

...Tom Buchanan doesn't talk about race or immigration again...

...Immigrants, the conservative argument goes, promise a virtually painless cure for everything from the aging of our work force to our short-term labor shortages...

...How could it be otherwise...

...For the conservatives, this comparison suggests that the revival of our inner cities now depends on immigrants...

...law Mexican residents can easily obtain temporary visas for shopping or visiting family provided they do not travel more than Alain McLaughlin/IMPACT VISUALS WINTER • 1996 • 41 American Questions twenty-five miles across the border...

...In the Rio Grande area of Texas as well as in California, this has meant thousands of such "American" babies being born each year...

...In the Great Depression years of the 1930s it was barely half a million, and in the 1940s, despite special legislation that paved the way for hundreds of thousands of displaced World War II refugees to come to America, immigration only reached a million...

...But as the debate over Proposition 187 heated up, the distinctions it drew between legal and illegal immigrants became increasingly marginal...

...A 1993 Yankelovich poll reflects the depth of the resentment...

...Unz stops short of celebrating the return of the sweatshop, and he never goes as far as University of Maryland economist Julian Simon, who calls for an updated version of the old bracero or guest worker program that from 1942 to 1964 supplied most of the labor for California agriculture...

...It was not, however, only the size and scope of contemporary immigration that the supporters of the 1965 amendments failed to anticipate...

...As soon as Tom stops speaking, his wife, Daisy, Nick's cousin, answers him back...

...citizen...

...While our own citizens and legal residents go wanting, those who choose to enter our country ILLEGALLY get royal treatment at the expense of the California taxpayer," one ballot description read...

...From 1951 to 1960, only 2.5 million immigrants came to the United States...

...Unz and most pro-immigration conservatives are more candid in talking about the kind of work immigrants will do...

...The national-origins system favored the descendants of those who had been here the longest— the British and Northern Europeans...

...Is there any obligation to help them...

...Save our State) initiative...

...To see them in action, we need look no further than Peter Brimelow's 1995 polemic Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster...

...A third of all the engineers and microchip designers here are foreign born, and if they left or their future inflow were cut off, America's computer industry would probably go with them...

...It does not affect the lives of millions...

...As Peter Salins of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research puts it, "Wherever they have settled, immigrants have reclaimed inner-city neighborhoods that had fallen into a state of advanced decay...

...Silicon Valley, home to my own software company, is absolutely dependent upon immigrant professionals to maintain its technological edge," Unz notes...

...Then in the 1980s the numbers climbed to a peak they had not reached since the turn of the century, and since then, our current immigration pattern of a million or more immigrants per year has become the norm...

...At a time when wages are falling and welfare is being cut to the bone, the traditional justifications for immigration—America is a land of opportunity, a place of asylum—ring hollow...

...The result is that thirty years after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 it has become very difficult, once one moves beyond the realm of scapegoating, to distinguish between the opponents of immigration whose arguments deserve to be heard and those whose objections are rooted in nativism...

...card, and 65 percent want the government to spend more money to tighten the border between the United States and Mexico...

...Chavez, the head of the U.S...

...Just 10 percent of elderly United States citizens are enrolled in SSI...

...The fifth preference of the new law, one that placed brothers and sisters high on the quota list, accelerated the process still more...

...The McCarran-Walter Immigration and NaWINTER • 1996 • 39 American Questions tionality Act of 1952 did little to change this pattern...

...Senator Edward Kennedy, the bill's floor manager, was equally sanguine about its future...

...If he were no more than a lone voice defending the WASP values Tom Buchanan and Calvin Coolidge saw threatened in the 1920s, Peter Brimelow would be an interesting case...

...The dominating principle was now family reunification...

...Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually...

...The Supplemental Security Income program was established in 1972 to help elderly retirees who did not in their lifetimes earn enough under Social Security to support themselves after they stopped working...

...It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation...

...In Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, her one-woman play about the Los Angeles riots, Anna Deveare Smith quotes Paul Parker, the chairman of the Free the LA Four Plus Defense Committee, on the virtue of burning down Korean stores...

...Seventy-three percent of the nation want strict limits on immigration, 50 percent want all U.S...

...In proposing the new legislation, President John F. Kennedy emphasized the importance of doing away with the old quota system...

...Welfare, medical, and educational benefits are the magnets that draw ILLEGAL ALIENS," it declared...

...Missing from Chavez's essay and the conservative defense of immigration is any sense that something is wrong when newcomers can find the wherewithal and energy to revitalize a neighborhood that those born into it have given up on...

...According to the economist George Borj as, a third of their decline in wages during the 1980s was a result of immigration...

...immigration law can be circumvented...

...They also failed to anticipate the problems that immigration would pose for an America no longer shaped by the prosperity of the 1960s...

...But in his belief that the time has come for a halt in immigration to America, Brimelow is no mere holdover from the Gatsby era, when nativist tracts like Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color were respectable reading...

...As a Los Angeles Times exit poll showed, Proposition 187 got 47 percent of the black vote, 47 percent of the Asian vote, and 23 percent of the Latino vote...

...For the English-born Brimelow, a senior editor at Forbes, the current mass immigration from predominantly non-European countries threatens not only "the racial hegemony of white Americans" but the ethnic balance responsible for our social cohesion as a nation...

...What is most revealing about the anti-immigrant mood is, however, the assumptions that have come to dominate mainstream discussion...

...We've got to beat them down," she adds with a wink that summarizes her opinion of Tom's fears...

...The opponents of immigration now include trade unionists who see their collective bargaining power being weakened still further, archconservatives who want to put troops on our border with Mexico, congressional representatives who favor a computer registry with the names of everyone eligible to work in the United States, Zero-Population Growth advocates frightened by Census Bureau estimates that our population in 2050 will be eighty-two million greater than it would have been if immigration had ended in 1991, and black workers-73 percent of whom believe, according to a 1992 BusiWINTER • 1996 • 37 American Questions ness Week/Harris poll, that businesses would rather hire immigrants than African Americans...

...Long before the 1994 elections, California officials at all levels made a point of calling for tougher sanctions on immigrants...

...They see themselves as immune from the day-to-day chaos mass immigration can cause...

...If such logic is to be the standard, why, as legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen argues, stop at education...

...It is a putdown that works in The Great Gatsby...

...The contrast between the immigrant poor and the American underclass is especially striking," Chavez goes on to argue...

...Asians could now enter America as immigrants, but their numbers, like those of Southern Europeans, were kept low...

...This is Economics 101...

...The former often provide cover for the latter...

...Such open viciousness toward immigrants remains unacceptable, but in the 1990s it is where the boundary lies...

...For the pro-immigration conservatives, such questions don't in the long run matter...

...We must not—we will not—surrender our borders to those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice," President Clinton declared in the summer of 1993 when he sent before Congress a $172.5 million proposal to beef up the Border Patrol and crack down on visa fraud and false asylum claims...

...They dismiss as utopian the idea that hotels and restaurants ought to pay their workers a living wage, just as they ignore the devastating impact the presence of large numbers of immigrants has had on unskilled native-born workers, particularly high school dropouts...

...It has become a basic, rather than a supplemental, retirement program for men and women who never worked or worked for only a year or two in America...

...The amendments of 1965 were designed to undo this pattern...

...Wilson was not, moreover, alone among California politicians...

...An embarrassed Nick says nothing...

...But for the rest of the country, especially anyone who can't find an entrylevel job, such questions do matter, and more often than not the response they elicit is a brutal and self-serving one...

...Even liberal politicians understood that in the California of the 1990s, being called soft on immigration was the equivalent of being called soft on communism during the cold war...

...The most dramatic example of such anti-immigrant fears overwhelming all other considerations and changing the political climate occurred in California during the 1994 midterm elections, when voters were presented with Proposition 187, an initiative designed to cut virtually all state aid, except emergency hospital care, to illegal aliens...

...In 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments that led to the mass immigration of the last decade and a half were enacted, the amendments' supporters assumed that a new era of social justice was beginning...

...But as the law now operates, its message is that membership in a designated group, rather than actual victimization, entitles any entrant to America to special benefits...

...But at a time when they are doing their best to keep down the minimum wage and reduce welfare, their silence speaks volumes...

...The only means of making a job as a WINTER • 1996 • 43 American Questions restaurant busboy even remotely attractive to a native-born American would be to raise the wage to $10 or $12 an hour, at which level the job would cease to exist...

...The literature handed out along with the initiative was even blunter in its appeals to resentment and its reluctance to concede that immigrants coming to California were driven by a sense of desperation and a willingness to take almost any job...

...Among pro-immigration conservatives, the same kind of thinking is true on an even grander scale when it comes to jobs...

...What is really being celebrated by them is the rebirth of an urban peasant economy, filled by legal and illegal immigrants willing to work for wages that can barely keep body and soul together...

...Again, what the pro-immigration conservatives won't say is instructive...

...The aim of affirmative action as it was understood in 1965 was to make sure that those who had been hurt by Jim Crow were in a position to compete on the new level playing field that had been created...

...It is also one of principle...

...For the previous forty-one years, immigration to America had been reduced dramatically by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924...

...At the core of the Congressional debate were not only the doubts about immigration that the Yankelovich poll of 1993 had picked up but a sense that the immigrants of today are unequal to those of the past and should be judged accordingly...

...The result is that we have crossed a threshold on what can be said in public about the dangers of immigration...

...Continued unchecked immigration, Brimelow argues, promises to put America in the same position the Western Roman Empire faced during the fifth century when it was overrun by the Germanic tribes of Europe...

...A generous law has become an invitation for exploitation...

...By 1994, when the Senate and the House began debating proposals to bar legal immigrants from federal programs ranging from Medicaid to school lunches, the rhetoric had escalated to the point where Clinton's remarks of a year earlier seemed conciliatory...

...What is really at work these days in the immigration backlash and the culture of meanness it has helped foster is more than a fear of newcomers...

...Under U.S...

...Long before the November elections, what Proposition 187 was really about was signaled by its supporters when they began calling it the S.O.S...

...Equally important, voters want the government to take steps to combat immigration...

...The Koreans was like the Jews in the day and we put them in check," Parker 38 • DISSENT American Questions gleefully tells Smith...

...What neither Unz nor they are interested in asking is, What happens after those working at substandard wages become sufficiently Americanized to want more...

...In 1965, the year the Immigration and Nationality Amendments became law, there was no sense that newcomers to America might qualify for affirmative action...

...Another hammered home the laziness of the newcomers...

...Among leading Republicans it was now all right to speak of new immigrants with the same suspicion once reserved for welfare recipients...

...Sixty-four percent of those polled think most immigrants enter the United States illegally, 64 percent believe they take jobs from Americans, and 59 percent believe they add to the crime problem...

...In turn does not Plyer v. Doe as it stands invite wholesale violation of the law by illegal immigrant parents concerned with helping their children get a better start in life...

...Missing was any notion that today's immigrants might resemble those of the past in their character and ambition...

...In an age of interdependence among nations, such a system is an anachronism, for it discriminates among applicants for admission to the United States on the basis of accident of birth...

...As the 1990s have progressed, California's mood has become the nation's...

...It is a lifeboat ethics that says we aren't making it as a nation and that taking on even more people can only make our problems worse...

...So do recent immigrants...

...To make matters worse, there is the stance taken on behalf of immigration by its conservative defenders...

...Or do we keep them here and simply replace them with newer, more desperate immigrants...

...The surveys in which a majority of the public speaks favorably about past immigration and critically about current immigration (4.5 million between 1990 and 1994) only begin to tell the story...

...In a state in which government officials put the cost to taxpayers of illegal aliens and their U. S. born children at $3 billion annually—$1.1 billion in education, $950 million in health care, and $500 million each in welfare and prison costs—the questions raised by Proposition 187 were in themselves crucial...

...With elderly immigrants, particularly those brought over by their children at an advanced age, SSI has taken on a very different quality...

...By contrast more than a quarter of all immigrants over the age of sixty-five now receive SSI, at a cost of $2 billion annually, and their numbers are growing...

...It is not only the historic victims of racial and sexual discrimination who qualify for affirmative action...

...Do we send them back to the countries from which they came...

...citizens to be required to carry a national I.D...

...The question is, should they...

...The bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill," the president emphasized in his signing ceremony speech...

...q 44 • DISSENT Julio EtChart/IMPACT VISUALS 46 • DISSENT...

...The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged," Tom Buchanan tells the narrator, Nick Carraway...

...The new immigration bill, the President said, repairs "a deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice...

...The new amendments put a limit on immigration from the Western Hemisphere for the first time, but in every other respect they were revolutionary...

...Enacted at the peak of the civil rights revolution, they reflected the optimism of the Great Society and the views of the coalition of Jews, Catholics, and liberals who had fought for years against the biases of the 1924 law...

...They had, they thought, achieved a legislative victory that would not cause them future political problems...

...and they keep coming...

...We propose a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders," the Wall Street Journal has declared...

...A classic case emerged in 1995 when Immigration and Naturalization Service agents arrested a group of midwives along the Rio Grande border in Texas for a birth-certificate scam in which they charged Mexican mothers $800 to $1,200 for making up documents saying that their children were born in America and were therefore American citizens, eligible for a variety of benefits from AFDC payments to the eventual right to obtain legal residency for their parents...

...At what point does it make sense to say that these elderly new arrivals should not receive SSI...

...Under the terms of the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Plyer v. Doe, the individual states are obliged to pay for the education of these children...

...The new law abandoned all efforts to distinguish among immigrants on the basis of their race or their historical links to America...

...For the president and the immigration bill's supporters, there was, however, a second reason for optimism...

...The same applies to nearly all the traditional lower-rung working-class jobs in Southern California, including the nannies and gardeners whose widespread employment occasionally embarrasses the upper-middle-class Zoe Bairds of this world, even as it enables their professional careers by freeing them from domestic chores...

...A decade later, Justice Brennan's economic analysis no longer applies...

...If the mother is indigent, the government will even pay for her hospitalization and medical care...

...This view is epitomized by Linda Chavez's 1995 Commentary essay "What To Do About Im42 • DISSENT American Questions migration...

...But the difference between Unz's position and that of the more radical pro-immigration conservatives is purely technical...

...Two years later at the Liberty Island signing ceremony for the bill, Lyndon Johnson returned to the same themes in language reminiscent of that which he had used in signing the Voting Rights Act months earlier...

...In the 1990s all that has changed...

...For the 20 percent living in families with incomes of $50,000 a year, the cutoff is clear...

...In cities like Los Angeles and Washington, where American blacks and Latino immigrants inhabit the same poor neighborhoods, the despair of the former seems all the more intense by comparison to the striving of the latter—as if one group had given up on America even as the other was proving the continued existence of opportunity...