When debating current issues, it’s helpful to avoid inaccurate depictions of past policy, especially on immigration, in which both opponents and advocates of President Donald Trump’s policies have views based on not altogether accurate renditions of the past.
Many opponents of Trump’s policies seem to believe the president wants to cut off legal immigration altogether: shut America’s gates. But in recent times, around 800,000 people have taken the oath to become American citizens. In addition, about 1 million people have been granted green cards each year, making them eligible for citizenship. That’s not a closed gate.
You may argue that we should open the gate wider. I’m inclined to take that view, with the proviso that we reduce the number of extended family members eligible and increase the number of skill-based slots.
You may also argue, as some Trump backers do, that we should reduce legal immigration, with some even calling for cutting it down to zero. But I’m not aware that there’s any realistic prospect for drastic reductions even with a Republican-controlled Congress. Current debate revolves around how, or if, to enforce the law against those not legally here.
One error made by critics on both sides is to say that the United States, until the passage of the restrictive immigration act of 1924, had open borders. And that the bulk of immigrants in those years were, in the words of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed in the base of the Statue of Liberty, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
Lazarus’s poem was published posthumously. It was an earnest attempt by an affluent New Yorker to seek tolerance for her fellow Jews and for other immigrants that accounted for the vast and apparently unanticipated flow of immigration in the years after the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886 and the opening of the Ellis Island screening station in 1892.
But as Vincent Cannato points out in American Passage, his definitive history of Ellis Island, America had never had unrestricted immigration even before the federal government took over the function from inspecting states in the 19th century.
State and then federal authorities inspected arrivals for infectious disease, particularly tuberculosis, and for being unable to be self-supporting — in the language of the day, “likely to become public charges.” After Ellis Island opened in 1892, Cannato writes, Congress’s “list of reasons immigrants could be excluded at the nation’s gates [grew] longer as the years passed.” Policy became marginally more restrictive even before 1924.
Even so, the large majority of those arriving were admitted. The main reason: the steamship companies refused to carry those who couldn’t afford steerage fares and refused to board those who appeared likely to be rejected on arrival, because rejectees would have to be returned to home port free of charge. The same principle obtains today: Airline gate agents demand to see your passport and visa before allowing you on a flight to destinations requiring visas.
How this worked out in practice is depicted vividly in Steven Ujifusa’s recently published The Last Ships From Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I. This tells the story of Albert Ballin, himself Jewish, who rose to become managing director of the Hamburg-American Line and became a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Under Ballin’s leadership, the company set up an inspection station of its own in Brest, on the western border of czarist Russia, even as that regime was sanctioning violent pogroms against Jews. Those who passed Hamburg-American’s standards were sent by rail to the busy port of Hamburg and then to New York.
Jews were just part of the flow of immigrants from the multiethnic Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires in the Ellis Island era from 1892 to 1914. Interestingly, that flow included relatively few ethnic Russians, Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians, but vast numbers of people who, in an era of rising nationalist sentiment, were from minority ethnic groups — Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats.
One of the things that attracted these second-class people to America was the civic equality it promised and largely practiced, at least in the North — almost no immigrants settled in the racially segregated South. These were people, it turned out, who were eager to work, ready to learn English, sought not to undermine American culture but adapt to it and to participate in America’s sometimes rough-and-ready civic politics.
NET NEGATIVE MIGRATION IS HARMFUL TO THE ECONOMY, ECONOMISTS SAY
Many immigration restrictionists claim that the 1924 immigration law, which virtually cut off inflow from eastern and southern Europe, provided for a needed pause that enabled the newcomers to assimilate. I think they were assimilating rapidly anyway and that, in any case, the 1930s depression would have cut off immigration anyway, except for refugees of Nazi persecution whom we would have done well to accept. Even if the 1924 act had not been passed, we would still have experienced the profound assimilative effect, described in Thomas Bruscino’s A Nation Forged in War, of a world war which put 16 million men in a country of 131 million into uniform, bringing together immigrant and native, North and South, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish.
It’s a fair question whether the bulk of immigrants today have the assimilative impulse of the Ellis Islanders or the adversary impulse of the handful of revolutionaries in their ranks. My own sense is that the poisonous dogma that America’s history is a continuing epic of vicious oppressors inflicting violent on virtuous victims is a product more of our elite colleges and universities rather than of the Latin, Asian and African cultures that supply most current legal immigrants, and that in the future as perhaps in the past we have more to fear from internal rot than from foreign infection.
