Immigration: A Historical Perspective

It was an immigrant who asked it first, and perhaps he asked it best: “What then is the American, this new man?” wrote John Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in 1782 in Letters from an American Farmer. He optimistically declared that the American would cast off all the prejudices of his homeland and form a new race of man.

Crevecoeur, himself a French immigrant, failed to anticipate what, even in his time, would become one of the most polarizing concerns in defining American identity. Today, the issue has become such an influential part of the national debate that some presidential candidates are staking their entire campaigns around immigration. However, immigration as a wedge issue is nothing new.

2008 presidential candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) has made the immigration “phenomenon” the key concern of his campaign. In his statement announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination, Tancredo cited “valid concerns” about “the survival of our national heritage.”

“Tom Tancredo is the only candidate who represents the American people,” said Craig Halverson, a volunteer with the Tancredo campaign. “Did you know that in Nebraska they’re starting to do the hard-core curriculum half a day in Spanish? You can see our country’s changing.”

Today’s fears about the “new” immigrants’ ability to assimilate have their antecedent in the first days of the nation. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson shared the concern that the new wave of German immigrants wouldn’t be able to integrate with English-speaking Americans.

In the “grievance” section of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson asserts that immigration restriction presented a virtual chokehold on American agricultural economy. America wanted immigrant workers, even needed them. Just not those immigrants.

“There’s a contradiction between economic benefits and identity issues,” said Aristide R. Zolberg, director of the International Center for Migration Ethnicity and Citizenship at New School University. “This was the case with immigrant workers. They were wanted, but not welcome.”

African slaves were the first imported workers who were used only for labor but were not deemed fit for participation in American society. Asian immigrants also were not considered worthy of being Americans; in 1895, laws were put in place to prevent the immigration of Chinese women in order to effectively prevent the birth of Chinese-American citizens.

In the past, guest-worker programs were a method of fulfilling a labor need, while quelling fears of nativists who believed that the American identity was threatened by widespread immigration.

Current plans for a guest-worker program would be a type of revival of past initiatives, such as the Bracero Program, instituted during World War II to fill labor shortages caused by the war.

“All these programs propose to do is use [immigrants] for their cheap labor and return them,” said Rosa Rosales, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino political advocacy group. “The other alternative is to have a path to citizenship for guest workers.”

Although guest-worker programs may alleviate fears about changing American identity, they do not address the other traditional concern of anti-immigration activists: the fear that increased immigration threatens jobs of American citizens.

"[Immigrants] work for slave wages where Americans will work for real wages,” said Robert Goldsborough, president of Americans for Immigration Control, an advocacy group that supports increased border security, enforcement of current immigration quotas, and the end of bilingual education, among other policies. “There are so many Americans living below the poverty line. Charity begins at home. We have an obligation to help Americans first.”

Anti-immigration groups argue that this wave of immigration has no historical precedent. By their reasoning, the refrain that America is a nation of immigrants is a non-sequitur, and is not proof that the current crop of immigrants will successfully assimilate.

“Mexico is right next door and they encourage [illegal immigrants] to come across the border,” Goldsborough said. “We didn’t have that with nations in Europe. When our population was half the size it is today, we absorbed them [immigrants] in an orderly fashion. A massive influx of one culture invading another culture, that’s a concern of many people today.”

The only seemingly new concern arising in the present immigration debate stems from fears about national security, grown more acute in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11.

“As a former professor I’m very much opposed to student visas,” said Arthur Yagoda, a lifelong Democrat who became a Republican in the last 10 years. “From the early 70s through the 80s, I saw hundreds of students from the Middle East, most of whom were much older and clearly did not have academic qualifications to be college students.”

One of the Sept. 11 hijackers was here on a student visa, he notes. His concerns are similar to those of several presidential candidates, including Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who favor increased border security as a means of ensuring homeland security.

Attitudes towards immigrants have often reflected the political issues of the day. After World War I, partly in response to the perceived Communist threat, the National Origins Act was passed. The act distinguished between “new” and “old” immigrants, favoring immigrants from Western Europe and discriminating against immigrants from Southern and Eastern European countries.

What remains to be seen is how the next president will balance the two nationalist mindsets: the one that respects the history of the United States as a nation of immigrants, and the one that fears those immigrants as a threat to the country's identity.