Uneven Flow
ZOLBERG, ARISTIDE R.
Uneven Flow Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 By Roger Daniels Hill and Wang. 344 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Aristide R. Zolberg Professor of...
...Consequently, the issue of language continued to be fought out in the schoolhouse until well into the 20th century...
...The most puzzling question is why, in contrast with the 1920s, was the restrictionist camp unsuccessful in the 1990s...
...Second, Latinos, who constitute the largest component of the new immigration, and in particular Mexican Americans, gained unanticipated political clout because of their concentration in states crucial to Presidential contests, notably Texas and California...
...More important, the architects of the 1965 reform did not intend the massive immigration that ensued, let alone that it would encompass the entire world...
...Morse acentury and a half ago about Buchanan's own Irish Catholic ancestors...
...The then overwhelmingly Protestant Americans saw Catholicism as a threat to their identity—somewhat the way Europeans today see the recent arrival of Islam in their midst by way of immigrants from South Asia, North Africa and Turkey...
...Even before it was federalized in 1882, immigration policy was shaped by two powerful thrusts that often acted in contradictory ways, making it difficult to locate neatly on a "liberalconservative" continuum: Immigration has a strong impact on the receiving society's economy, but also on its identity...
...There were sustained efforts to restrict immigration from the 1830s onward until the Civil War, but they came to nought...
...It remained on top three decades later, but was now followed by China, the Philippines, India, and Vietnam...
...In addition, Mexicans were not cowed by the law and vastly exceeded the cap for their country...
...They were finally approved by Congress after Kennedy's death and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a memorable ceremony at the foot of the Statue of Liberty in 1965...
...But then the average rose to 740,000 in the 1980s and 910,000 in the 1990s...
...Insisted upon by House Immigration Subcommittee Chairman Peter W. Rodino Jr...
...Meanwhile American employers in the West and Southwest, having been denied Asians, turned to Mexico...
...First, as Daniels recounts, in the late 20th century organized labor shifted from the restrictionist to the immigrationist side...
...Overthe years, many ofthose Daniels calls "illegal" managed to become legalized, and a comprehensive "amnesty" was enacted in 1986...
...Moreover, as Daniels points out in an Epilogue, contrary to what many believe, the new security concerns after 9/11 have had a much greater impact on travel than on immigration proper...
...The target was not only Mexicans but also West Indians, whom Southerners viewed as undesirables...
...Begun by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was continued by President Harry S. Truman and sustained by President Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...At the time of the Founding, for example, immigrants were desirable as a source of demand for land, as producers of agricultural commodities, and as workers for budding industries who would reduce labor scarcity and hence reduce wages, or at least keep them down...
...author of the forthcoming "A Nation by Design" Over the last 30 years the United States has been turning once again into a nation of immigrants...
...Overall, however, Mexico was the leading country of origination...
...After World War I, when conservatives worried about identity issues successfully deprived industries of their ongoing supply of Southern and Eastern Europeans, they looked to the vast African American labor reserve hitherto confined to the South...
...And like other liberal historians he dismisses it as a manifestation of the U. S. brand of xenophobia termed "nativism...
...Once naturalized as American citizens, these people contribute powerfully to the chaining effect as well...
...Typically, the arrival of a large wave of newcomers who differed from their predecessors generated widespread uneasiness, prompting vigorous attempts to stem the flow...
...Every early major wave of immigrationin our history arose when acute'"push" conditions in some region abroad coincided with a perceived need for additional population by American entrepreneurs in a position to shape policy...
...citizens...
...As a pioneer historian of the antiJapanese movement that swept California in the early 20th century, Roger Daniels is especially sensitive to the role of race and ethnicity in shaping American immigration policy...
...At the national level, the door was kept open to a significant degree by the struggle over slavery...
...Daniels duly records the first serious anti-immigrant agitation in the late 1830s, largely directed at Irish Catholics...
...The reorientation of American policy actually started two decades earlier, largely in response to foreign policy imperatives imposed by World War II and later the Cold War, plus pressure from agribusiness...
...Nonetheless, it is worth noting exactly what it was about Catholicism that generated such furor, not to mention why the door was not shut...
...In 1970 less than 5 per cent of the U. S. population was foreign-born, the lowest proportion since records began to be kept in 1850...
...The states did attempt to act, mostly by trying to regulate shipping and imposing head taxes on immigrants to cover the growing costs of relief and health facilities...
...The phenomenon, referred to inside the Beltway as the "brothers and sisters act," reflected the immigration preference granted to siblings of U.S...
...In fact, to secure the Southern Democrats' support party reformers agreed to place a cap on annual immigration from the Western Hemisphere for the first time ever...
...but being land promoters, they understandably refrained from passing up an opportunity to expand demand for their product...
...But the outcome has been quite different than it was in the 1920s because two important elements have changed...
...The increase in annual admissions, the abolition of national origin quotas and of the anti-Asian provisions, the story goes on, were Democratic initiatives...
...That is why, while Calvin Coolidge spoke neither Polish nor Italian, George W. Bush does speak Spanish...
...So willy-nilly the U.S...
...Thanks to the cap, immigration was projected to rise only slightly above the 1960s level of 330,000 ayear, and in the 1970s it did indeed only average 450,000...
...and eventually to Puerto Rico...
...The tension between economic considerations that foster on balance a positive assessment of immigration, and identity preoccupations that inspire a skeptical or decidedly negative assessment, has also shaped the course of immigration policy in recent decades...
...The European component had declined drastically, its main source becoming the former Soviet Union...
...In 1970 most of the legally admitted immigrants came from Western and Southern Europe, headed by Italy...
...As Daniels notes, Benjamin Franklin and other Founders were particularly concerned over the challenge Germans posed to their vision of America as an Anglophone nation...
...Although these vast domestic demographic shifts do not figure in the history of immigration, they very much affected subsequent policy...
...Perhaps even more surprising is the practically complete change of origins...
...The gates were narrowed in the 1920s for Europeans as well, and drawn still tighter during the Depression, with particularly dire consequences for persecuted Jews and others in desperate need of asylum...
...Uncontrolled immigration," Patrick J. Buchanan warned in his 2002 bestseller Death of the West, "threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common...
...An adequate answer requires assessing the experience of the 1990s in the context of U. S. history...
...of New Jersey on behalf of his Italian constituents, it gave the 1965 law a "chaining effect," because the immigration of the brothers' and sisters' spouses transmitted the preference to new families...
...Absorbing the mostly destitute newcomers also entailed considerable adjustment costs that were borne by charitable organizations, and by local and state governments that therefore sought to regulate immigration or restrict it outright...
...But by the turn of the millennium they made up 11 per cent of the population—their number had nearly tripled, from 9.6 million to 28.4 million, and showed no sign of abating...
...acquired a substantial Catholic minority...
...Daniels does not provide a systematic account of how the unanticipated surge came about...
...One major factor he does acknowledge is U.S...
...But those measures were steadfastly opposed by the shipping companies, whose profits were based on the export of American products and the import of immigrants as return ballast...
...Thus the reopening of the door, and especially the ascent of Asians to the rank of "model minority," constituted an amazing reversal...
...The South was determined to prevent the Federal government from moving into the sphere of "police powers" over persons...
...the polls Daniels cites indicate clearly that a growing majority opposed immigration...
...The commonly told story— both by those wishing to take credit and those seeking to assign blame—is that John F. Kennedy signaled a "new deal" for immigration at the outset of his Presidential campaign when he attached his name to "A Nation of Immigrants," a pamphlet prepared by historian Arthur Mann for the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith...
...Reviewed by Aristide R. Zolberg Professor of political science, New School University...
...But as Daniels points out, that is a gross historical distortion...
...The lack of sympathy from their European brethren fostered a growing isolation from the international labor movement...
...After the Civil War, industrialists took the lead in promoting immigration, while nascent American unionists viewed it as a grave obstacle to attaining tolerable working conditions...
...foreign policy, which led to the admission of large numbers of refugees from the Communist world, notably Cuba and Vietnam...
...Ignored, though, is the work of sociologists and economists who have effectively demonstrated that immigration inevitably generates more immigration...
...He was apparently oblivious to the fact that his admonitions echoed those of Samuel F.B...
...This resulted in recurrent challenges to the established boundaries of American identity...
...True, the 1996 immigration law denied legal immigrants a range of welfare benefits, but the gates were not tightened...
...One of the great merits of Guarding the Golden Door, his comprehensive yet accessible overview of that policy since 1882, is its giving appropriate attention to unrelenting efforts to keep out Asians, culminating in their near-total exclusion in 1924...
...It certainly did not lack public support...
...The desire for immigrants repeatedly led American recruiters to tap new reservoirs of manpower—in China in the 1860s, and subsequently in Eastern and Southern Europe as well as Japan...
...But the same grounds fostered the formation of an anti-immigrant movement by native workers (or established immigrants) fearful of competition and wage loss...
Vol. 86 • November 2003 • No. 6
