Aristide R. Zolberg's A Nation by Design

...Against these imperatives, states are depicted either as irrelevant or as relatively ineffective instruments for shaping immigrant flows, a point of view that has become increasingly widespread during our current age of global finance, trade, and manufacturing...

...THIRD, PARALYSIS at the national level has elevated the importance of local and state level actors throughout the country...

...The racial barriers to membership were also by design, the beginning of a systematic effort to render certain kinds of immigrants ineligible for citizenship: first Africans (a prohibition that ended in 1870) and then East and South Asians, the latter formally barred from citizenship until 1952...

...The reverse was also true: economic populists and trade unionists realized that their biggest constituency, other than native-born workers themselves, might be cultural conservatives, who, despite their opposition to organized labor, were important allies in the battle for immigration restriction...

...In the case of major immigration reform packages that have passed Congress, peripheral legislative provisions have sometimes generated unanticipated consequences that have been difficult to undo...

...Zolberg identifies two very different kinds of considerations that, he believes, have informed debates on immigration from the 1790s until today...

...But defeats, we also learn from Zolberg, rarely quieted the proponents of restriction for long...

...the Literacy Act of 1917...

...humanitarians and immigrant advocacy groups in the Democratic Party...

...And stalemates sometimes allowed various kinds of more narrowly defined interest groups to jump-start the immigration debate again and, in the process, to gain influence disproportionate to their numbers or economic clout...

...In its sweep, erudition, conceptual precision, and analytic acuity, it may be the most important book on the history of immigration policy published in twenty-five years...

...First, and most obviously, people disagree, often strenuously, on issues pertaining to the immigrant presence...

...Immigrants have gained important allies since that time, especially among religious groups, which have begun to insist that illegal aliens are individuals with God-given human rights that no nation may ignore...

...One consideration has been economic: was immigraDISSENT / Winter 2007.1 I 5 BOOKS tion good or bad for the economy...

...By the terms of the Westphalian state system and mercantilist economic doctrine that dominated eighteenthcentury Europe, states claimed complete and permanent sovereignty over their subjects, reserving the right to control their movement within state territory and their freedom to move BOOKS beyond it...

...Zolberg is among the first to show that Britain's rejection of the colonists' new rules was an important factor impelling the American Revolution...

...the anti-immigrant policy proposals that emerged from the KnowNothing movement in the 1850s...

...economy...

...But Zolberg's writing is always crisp...

...Subjects who did move to another state were required to give allegiance to their original state or monarch for their entire lives...

...Sometimes these strange bedfellows have worked together successfully, as when cultural conservatives and pro-labor groups combined to push through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924...

...Hybridization that yields a cultural mix that is genuinely new and multiracial and that draws on the cultures of all America's groups...

...This may seem like a logical focus for immigration scholarship except that, among immigration social scientists in particular, it not been...

...In barring Asians and southern and eastern Europeans from entering the United States and in establishing, for the first time, an overall ceiling on the number of immigrants to be admitted in any single year, these laws succeeded in turning the United States away from its historic commitment to the open door...

...Even as subsequent Congresses made naturalization more difficult, by mandating waiting periods stretching to five years and, at some points, longer, America continued to distinguish itself by the ease with which European immigrants could gain U.S...

...At other times, the strange bedfellows requirement shaping successful coalitions for immigration reform has made the task of passing comprehensive reform packages particularly tough...

...What does interest Zolberg is how Americans across the last two hundred years have debated questions about the kind and volume of immigration that were desirable and what sorts of political movements for reform and restriction these debates produced...

...economy...

...Finally (and also in ways that parallel efforts at tax reform), those who wish to bring new ideas to the table find it difficult to escape the iron grip of past policy and of the interest groups that those past policies have generated...

...The failure of immigration legislation, then, has, in several key instances, resulted in America's gates remaining open and the country remaining true, if only by default, to its original promise: that it would be a different kind of nation, one that would welcome a substantial portion of the world's peoples to its shores and make it easy for them to become full rights-bearing members of its republican polity...

...In subsequent centuries, character clauses would be used to prevent immigrant communists, anarchists, prostitutes, polygamists, and homosexuals either from entering the United States or from gaining citizenship...

...Because the strength of a state or monarchy was measured in numbers—the more people a sovereign could claim as subjects, the mightier the realm—rulers were reluctant to permit their subjects to emigrate, unless the latter were paupers, criminals, or some other class of undesirables...

...Responses have ranged across a wide spectrum, with industrialists, at one end, typically wanting cheap labor from abroad and trade unionists, at the other end, insisting on the restriction of the immigrant labor supply and the raising of wage rates...

...Zolberg's starting point for understanding the American state is the eighteenth-century struggle by North American colonists to separate from Great Britain...

...FORTUNATELY, WE now have a guide to these important and perplexing matters...

...But A Nation by Design exposes the foolishness of discounting the significance of what nations do and don't do to police their borders and to organize the rules governing membership...

...In relative terms, the density of the foreign-born population is approaching the peaks reached in the two previous waves of immigration, the 1830s to the 1850s and the 1880s to the 1920s...

...and the major immigration reform packages of 1952, 1965, 1986, and 1996...

...For this reason, immigration, in demographic terms, is arguably more of a national phenomenon today than at any other point in U.S...

...These exclusions seem paradoxical in a nation consecrated to freedom and liberty, a subject that, in regard to slavery and other forms of exclusion and subordination in the United States, has drawn extensive commentary from scholars...

...In between, Zolberg analyzes virtually every critical moment and development in American immigration policy: the first naturalization law in 1790...

...Aristide R. Zolberg's A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America is an extraordinary achievement...

...state deployed to forbid the admission of paupers and felons...

...Indeed, some churches have begun to offer themselves as sanctuaries to those faced with deportation, an intervention whose significance may become hugely important if anti-immigrant forces succeed in their efforts to pass laws decreeing that illegals are to be expelled...

...On the other side are the immigrants themselves, who are committed to making their voices heard in new and bold ways...

...Reform failure or periods of policy paralysis at the national level then ensued...

...Both were major 116 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 achievements for the forces of restriction...

...On the one side are anti-immigrant groups ranging from the vigilantes who have taken it upon themselves to interdict Mexicans who have illegally crossed the Southwest border to the local elected officials in numerous cities and towns who are struggling with the burdens that high concentrations of immigrants, legal and illegal, are placing on law enforcement, schools, and social services in their communities...

...Given that America's original posture toward immigration, as codified in the naturalization law of 1790, was so liberal, in terms of the ease with which newcomers could enter the United States and become citizens, "reform" more often than not has meant restricting foreigners' access to America...

...East and South Asia...

...It reaches back into the eighteenthcentury origins of the American nation and forward to the post–September 11, 2001, country we now inhabit...

...government could not find the political will to save even a small percentage of European Jewry by implementing an emergency short-term refugee program...

...What has made immigration politics so complex and so bewildering, Zolberg demonstrates, is the frequency with which conservatives on the economic spectrum (industrialists wanting cheap labor) discovered that their best allies might be radicals on the cultural-political spectrum (humanitarians demanding that America receive the world's dispossessed...

...Full consideration of these many legislative debates, laws, and policy consequences requires extensive narration and analysis...

...And translating these sentiments into coherent public policy is an exceedingly difficult enterprise...

...In considering the significance of these peripheral provisions, we come up against a paradox that Zolberg does not do enough to elucidate: if America has been a nation by design, it has often ended up with a design that many Americans have not wanted...

...Cultural conservatives have insisted on the importance of national cohesion, racial purity, Anglo-Protestant values, Nordic supremacy, and "English only...

...Such long periods of gestation for new immigration regimes have meant that the immigration designs already in place, even those widely regarded as obsolete or as no longer serving America's interests, have lived on longer than anyone had anticipated they would...

...and, to a lesser extent, Africa...

...Ingeniously pointing us to the grievances expressed in the Declaration of Independence about British controls on flows of people to the colonies, Zolberg proceeds to show how the American revolutionaries created a radically different approach to immigration and citizenship than what prevailed at the time in Europe...

...It has to be made central to them...

...Second, the 1965 act made it a priority to reassemble on U.S...

...The longer the national legislative paralysis lasts, the more local groups and institutions will have the opportunity to shape national debate...

...THE CONSEQUENCES of such lags between a desire for change and the actual implementation of reforms have sometimes been grim, as they were in the 1930s when the U.S...

...the Caribbean...

...But the lags have not always produced catastrophic, or even negative, results...

...ALTHOUGH ZOLBERG finished his book prior to the great immigration debate of 2005-2006, his analysis can guide us to an understanding of how that debate has unfolded...

...This second principle, embodied in the naturalization law of 1790, made that statute the most radically inclusive measure of its kind in the eighteenth-century world—a judgment that holds, in Zolberg's opinion, even if we take into account the racial restriction for which this law, in recent scholarship, has become so well known (making nonwhite immigrants ineligible for citizenship...

...The latter's desire to keep America "for Americans" meant closing the door to cheap foreign labor...

...A key interpretive position guides Zolberg's analysis: namely, that America has always been a nation "by design," in the sense that its leaders have invariably used the powers bestowed on them by the federal and state governments to give this nation the kind of population mix they believed it ought to have...

...GARY GERSTLE is professor of history at Vanderbilt University...

...This was part of the revolutionary settlement...

...Here we find the roots of the current illegal alien problem, a development that almost no one involved in the legislative debates of the 1960s foresaw...

...That act secured a "back door" to immigrants from Latin America even as all the headlines focused on the act's success in closing the main gate to eastern and southern European immigrants...

...And he inserts into his analysis revelations about policy both large and small, along with meditations of the most profound sort about what kind of nation we have been in regard to immigration—and what kind 114 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 of nation we ought to be...

...social conservatives in the Republican Party and economic populists vs...

...First, the split between internationalists and social conservatives in the Republican Party was probably the most important factor causing the national paralysis on immigration issues in the summer of 2006...

...Historically, both groups have favored the open door...

...Across the last forty years, Zolberg makes clear, this commitment to family reunification has done more to increase the number of immigrants coming to the United States than any other element in the 1965 act...

...0 NCE INDEPENDENT, the United States delivered on its promise of establishing a different kind of nation by making two principles cornerstones of its republican polity: first, that people would be free to enter and leave the new nation as they desired...

...Do immigrants become ardent patriots with a keen sense of the freedoms that America can offer or do they dull the popular sense of liberty by not knowing or caring much about the country's republican inheritance...

...But Zolberg is less interested in this paradox than in the fact that both the inclusions and exclusions written into America's earliest immigrant laws were, by design, meant to "stimulate the entry of immigrants deemed valuable while deterring those considered undesirable...

...the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798...

...For a past example of one such peripheral provision, Zolberg turns our attention to the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act...

...In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the United States became a magnet for immigrants...

...citizen after a very brief period of residence (two years) in the country...

...Third, the immigration legislation that Congress has passed since 1965 now rivals tax legislation in DISSENT / Winter 2007E113 BOOKS its complexity and its loopholes...

...If they want some kind of legislation to emerge from Congress in 2007, they will probably have to compromise by agreeing to accept the "road to citizenship" provisions advocated by Republican internationalists, Democratic humanitarians, and pro-immigration groups...

...Zolberg does not deny the importance of world capitalism to immigration...

...European rulers found themselves and their theories increasingly challenged by the British colonists in North America, among whom the appetite for settlers from all parts of Europe had become insatiable...

...Instead, these social scientists have emphasized the imperatives of a world capitalist system and, in particular, factors of labor supply and demand, in determining international migration...

...Immigration should cause us to reflect on some of the most basic questions we can ask about ourselves as a nation: Does immigration strengthen the United States by providing it with fresh streams of young workers eager to pursue and, in some cases, to revive the American dream of opportunity for the common man and woman...

...Thus, Zolberg argues, the study of immigration requires a "politics-centered" or "state-centered" approach that systematically examines the debates, coalitions, and laws regarding immigration policy...

...Second, the liberal-conservative, DemocratRepublican opposition that shapes so much of our political life turns out to be a poor mechanism for clarifying policy choices or for figuring out how to assemble the kind of legislative majority one needs to produce effective proimmigrant or anti-immigrant laws...

...Anti-immigrant, economic populist forces still exist in the Democratic Party among African Americans, Reagan Democrats who have returned to the fold (such as newly elected Virginia senator Jim Webb), and other constituencies, but at present none of these groups or individuals has the influence that organized labor once wielded...

...Republican social conservatives, hemmed in by internationalists in their own party and deprived of erstwhile allies among the Democrats, thus have not been able to push through Congress the harsh anti-immigrant legislation that they have so desired...

...Indeed, even prior to the 1770s, the colonists had begun to develop rules for membership that were based on residence, consent, and voluntary loyalty rather than on birth, descent, and perpetual subjecthood...

...The second consideration has been culturalpolitical: What kind of nation do we seek to be...

...Zolberg also directs our attention to two of the least remarked upon provisions of the Immigration Act of 1965, which is best known for liberalizing America's immigration regime (by expanding the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States each year and making people from every part of the world equally eligible for entry...

...history...

...Or a pluralist society characterized by the maintenance of broad cultural differences among America's peoples...

...Indeed, the thoroughness and nuance of Zolberg's history allow us to see, for the first time, that the story of immigration legislation in the United States is as much one of defeat or stalemate as of success...

...the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882...

...First, the act mandated that immigrants from Western Hemispheric countries be counted, as they had not been before, against the annual quota of those allowed to enter the United States...

...Finally, it is the most "illegal" wave of immigration in the country's history, in the sense that as many as eleven million immigrants, representing about 15 percent to 25 percent of the total immigrant population, have entered the United States without a valid passport, visa, or green card...

...118 n DISSENT / Winter 2007...

...For these and other reasons, understanding the politics of immigration and following the ways in which particular debates unfold—including how a battle can sometimes tear through the political landscape like a tornado, as it did in the winter and spring of 2005-2006, and then just as quickly vanish—can be difficult to do...

...This efDISSENT / Winter 2007 n 117 BOOKS fectively reduced the legal access to the United States of certain groups, such as Mexicans, who had been accustomed to crossing the border freely and in large numbers...

...soil the family members— spouses, children, parents, and siblings—of legal immigrants who already resided here...

...the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924...

...Indeed, with its more than six hundred pages of text and notes, this book is not for the faint of heart...

...And in these states and, indeed, throughout the country, immigrants have distributed themselves to secondtier cities and even small towns to a far greater degree than ever before...

...citizenship for themselves...

...Gary Gerstle A NATION BY DESIGN: IMMIGRATION POLICY IN THE FASHIONING OF AMERICA by Aristide R. Zolberg Russell Sage and Harvard University Press, 2006 658 pp $39.95 IN ABSOLUTE TERMS, the number of immigrants residing in the United States—approximately thirty-five million—is at an all-time high...

...Indeed, the breadth, intensity, and public militancy of the immigrant rights movement of spring 2006—as manifested in demonstrations of tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their descendants in cities as different as Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York—have no precedent in American history...

...claim to being a nation of immigrants was grounded not just in ideology but in state action, specifically, radically new rules governing membership passed by the First Congress...

...Current immigrants also constitute the most diverse group of foreign born ever to come to the United States, and they are the first to be majority nonwhite, with most coming from Latin America...

...Political parties found themselves unable to impose discipline on their own warring factions: free trade apostles vs...

...Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Arizona, and Colorado now have large immigrant populations...

...The very uncertainty of the legislative process and outcomes, Zolberg insists, is what has made the politics of immigration reform so important and so deserving of systematic study...

...At other times, however, the strain of making unconventional alliances became too great...

...Responses to this question have been similarly divergent...

...Zolberg recognizes the value of that original promise and, in his concluding pages, asks the United States to live up to it...

...The U.S...

...Second, the forces of immigration restriction in the Democratic Party have become more inchoate across the last twenty years as the labor movement has lost political clout while also turning away from its restrictionist past in its bid to appeal to Latinos and other groups of immigrant workers...

...Moreover, the current wave, which began in the late 1960s, has spread far beyond the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, the three areas of the country in which most immigrants of earlier times had concentrated...

...Packages that have been successful have often taken a generation or more to put into place...

...Cultural liberals and radicals, in contrast, have trumpeted the virtues of hybridity (the melting pot), pluralism, multiculturalism, diversity, and humanitarianism...

...And because this commitment is so important to immigrants themselves and to social conservatives committed to "family values"—another example of the strange bedfellows principle—it has proven to be the section of the act most impervious to change, even in the face of strong arguments that some of those family slots ought to be reallocated either to political and economic refugees or to individuals whose skills would benefit the U.S...

...Or does it make life harder for all of America's poor, native-born and foreign born alike, by keeping wages low and straining the welfare state...

...This occurred first in the 1850s, then in the early years of the twentieth century, and then again in the 1990s...

...the Passenger Acts of the antebellum period (through which states tried to regulate immigration by stipulating passenger/tonnage ratios...

...The 1790 law also contained a "satisfactory character" clause that the U.S...

...This provision was added to gain the support of Southwestern agricultural interests who wanted to maintain their supply of cheap Latino labor, and it made possible the immigration of millions of Mexicans into the United States during the four decades (1924-1965) when America's gates were allegedly closed...

...Simply put, the draconian anti-immigration bill that socially conservative Republicans rammed through the House of Representatives in late 2005 was unacceptable to the many and BOOKS powerful Republicans in the Senate who are invested in the benefits that cheap immigrant labor provides to the U.S...

...This fascinating set of political divides and allegiances leads Zolberg to proclaim what he labels his "strange bedfellow" principle and what we might call his iron law of immigration reform: that almost every law passed by Congress to restrict or increase immigrant access to the United States has required alliances between groups who, in most respects, do not like each other and who often inhabit different ideological universes (and different political parties...

...In part for that reason, and in part because of the rapidly rising number of Latino voters in electoral contests, the Democratic Party currently leans more heavily than it did in the past toward its humanitarian-immigrant rights pole...

...Three insights deriving from his book seem particularly important...

...As Zolberg notes, the United States extended full citizenship to Catholics a half century before Great Britain and to Jews before the French revolutionaries had done so...

...Whether one agrees with that disposition or not, one can find no better book than his to understand the role of immigration and immigration policy in the making of America...

...and second, that any free European male immigrant— regardless of nationality, language, or religion—could become a U.S...

...The state, Zolberg insists, not only has to be brought back into discussions about immigration...

...That influence may manifest itself in the central sections of legislation that emerges from Congress or in "peripheral" provisions whose importance only becomes apparent later on...

...If you pose these questions to family members, fellow workers, local merchants, or cab drivers, you're likely to get strong, even passionate, responses...

...Questions about immigrant access required debate in the first instance because the revolutionary settlement had included no law, paralleling the 1790 citizenship statute, stipulating the number and nationalities of immigrants to be admitted annually to the United States...

...debates during the 1930s about whether to open America's gates to Nazism's victims...

...And, finally, what cultural outcome do we desire as the end point of immigration: Assimilation into an America that remains recognizably white and European...