by Tom Rosenthau (Newsweek August 9, 1993)
Few Americans remember Israel Zangwill, but he was a transatlantic celebrity in the years before World War I. Poet, novelist, dramatist and political activist, He knew Theodore Roosevelt, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and he was a prolific, if preachy, writer. Here is a bit of dialogue from Zangwill's greatest hit, a four‑act melodrama that opened in Washington in 1908. The speaker is David, a young composer:
America is God's Crucible, the great Melting‑Pot where all the
races of Europe are melting and re‑forming... Germans and Frenchmen,
Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians ‑ into the Crucible with you
all! God is making the American!
The imagery comes from steelmaking, which was state‑of‑the‑art
technology then. The play is "The Melting‑Pot," a phrase that
has lived ever since. Zangwill, despondent at the eclipse of many of his
political ideals, suffered a nervous breakdown and died in England in 1926.
America had already turned its back on his optimism and, in an orgy of blatant
racism, virtually cut off immigration. Two generations later, immigration is
running full blast ‑ and Americans once again are asking fundamental
questions about the desirability of accepting so many newcomers and the very
idea of the Melting Pot. They believe, with some justice, that the nation has
lost control of its borders. They are frightened about the long‑term
prospects for the U.S. economy and worried about their jobs. They think,
erroneously, that immigrants are flooding the welfare rolls and are heavily
involved in crime. And they are clearly uncomfortable with the fact that almost
all the New Immigrants come from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. The
latest Newsweek Poll reveals the public's sharply shifting attitudes. Fully 60
percent of all Americans see current levels of immigration as bad; 59 percent
think immigration in the past was good. Fifty‑nine percent also say
"many" immigrants wind up on welfare, and only 20 percent think
America is still a melting pot.
All this ‑ an incendiary mixture of fact, fear and myth ‑ is
now making its way into politics. The trend is most obvious in California,
where immigration is already a hot‑button issue, and it is surfacing in
Washington. Recent events like the World Trade Center bombing, ... have revived
the 10‑year‑old controversy about illegal immigration. "We
must not ‑ we will not ‑ surrender our borders to those who wish to
exploit our history of compassion and justice," Bill Clinton said last
week, announcing a $172.5 million proposal to beef up the U.S. Border Patrol
and crack down on visa fraud and phony asylum claims. On Capitol Hill, the
revival of an issue that many had thought dead is shaking both political
parties... "Some of the people who opposed me totally 10 years ago are now
saying, 'What's happening to our country? We gotta do something!' " said
Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, a perennial advocate of tougher
immigration enforcement. "It's ironic beyond belief. Attitudes have
shifted dramatically, and it's coming from the citizens."
This is not the 1920s ‑ a time when most Americans regarded dark‑skinned
people as inherently inferior, when the Ku Klux Klan marched through Washington
in a brazen display of bigotry and when the president of the United States
could tell an Italian‑American congressman, in writing, that Italians are
"predominantly our murderers and bootleggers ... foreign spawn [who] do
not appreciate this country " (The president was Herbert Hoover and the
congressman was Fiorello La Guardia.) The civil‑rights revolution changed
everything: it gradually made overt expressions of any ethnic prejudice into a
cultural taboo. Almost acciden‑ tally, the moral awakening of the 1960s
also gave the nation an immigration law that reopened the Golden Door. This
law, passed in 1965 with the firm backing of Robert Kennedy, Edward Kennedy and
Lyndon Johnson, has slowly led to a level of sustained immigration that is at
least as large as that of 1900‑1920. It inadvertently but totally
reversed the bias in US law toward immigration from Europe, and it created a
policy so complicated that almost no one understands it. The policy, in fact,
is a mess ...
Bill Clinton's goal, like that of most defenders of continued large‑scale
immigration, is to drive home the distinction between legal immigration (good)
and illegal immigration (very, very bad). Illegal immigration is undeniably out
of control. Congress tried to stop it in 1986 with a law called IRCA, the
Immigration Reform and Control Act, which was based on a two‑pronged
strategy. IRCA offered amnesty and eventual citizenship to an estimated 8.7
million illegal aliens and, at the same time, aimed at shutting down the U.S.
job market by making it illegal for employers to hire undocumented aliens. The
act has failed. Despite the amnesty the estimated number of illegals has once
again risen to between 2 million and 4 million people. ... Fuchs concedes that
as many as 500,000 illegals now enter this country each year, though he admits
it is impossible to know for sure.
The concern over illegal immigration is fueled, in part, by two
conflicting fears. Illegals are vulnerable to exploitation by employers and are
often victimized ‑ extorted, kidnapped, raped, tortured and sometimes
killed ‑ by criminals and smugglers. At the other extreme, in cities like
Los Angeles, they flood the labor market and set bitter competition with
American workers. and legal immigrants for jobs.
But the real problem is the subversion of U.S. law and policy, and that
creates two dilemmas for the federal government. The first is what to do about
the undocumented aliens who have made their way into this country since IRCA:
another amnesty, obviously, would only encourage more illegal immigration. The
second dilemma is worse. There is no particular reason to believe that the
current influx of illegals cannot rise from 500,000 a year to 600,000 a year or
even beyond. This is conjectural but not necessarily alarmist: as Fuchs says,
the word is out. Looking around the world, "one can't find the natural
forces that will bring down the flow," says Harvard University sociologist
Nathan Glazer. "The first impact of prosperity will be to increase it....
As people learn how to run a business, they say to themselves, 'Why not go to
the United States and do even better?'" ...
... Much as Americans tend to regard the new immigrants as poor,
uneducated and less skilled, the vast majority are surely enterprising. What
they seek is opportunity ‑ the opportunity to hold two jobs that no
Americans want, to buy a television set and a beat‑up car, to start a
family and invest in the next generation. Immigration is for the young: it
takes courage, stamina and determination to pull up your roots, say goodbye to
all that is dear and familiar, and hit the long and difficult trail to El
Norte. Illegal immigration, with all its hazards, is for the truly daring: the
Latino men who wait on Los Angeles street corners, hoping for daywork, have
faced more risk than most Americans will ever know.
You can argue, then, that the distinction between legal and illegal
immigration is nearly meaningless. Immigrants are immigrants: how they got here
is a detail. And, in fact, the arcane system of regulation created by the 1965
law, together with its amendments and adjustments since, implicitly accepts
this argument. The law recognizes three reasons to award immigrant visas ‑
job skills, especially those that somehow match the needs of the U.S. economy;
a demonstrable reason to seek refuge from war or political persecution, and
kinship to an American citizen or a legal alien. This triad of goals replaced
the national‑origin quota system of 1924, which heavily favored
immigrants from Northern and Western Europe and severely restricted immigration
from everywhere else. It is a matter of lasting national shame that Congress
throughout the 193Os and even after World War II, refused to adjust the law to
admit the victims of the Holocaust... But all three of these goals have been
steadily distorted ‑ chipped at, twisted out of shape ‑ by the
realities of immigration since 1965. Kinship to U.S. citizens, known as the
"family‑reunification policy," has become the overwhelming
favorite of visa seekers and the primary reason the pattern of immigration has
shifted so hugely to the Third World. It was never intended to be: given the
fact that most immigration to the United States had always been from Europe,
those who voted for the act of 1965 generally assumed that family‑reunification
visas would be used by Europeans. They also assumed that there would be no
large increase in immigration to the United States. "Our cities will not
be flooded with a million immigrants annually," Sen. Edward Kennedy told a
subcommittee hearing. "Under the proposed bill, the present level of
immigration [about 300,000 a year] remains substantially the same..."
That is not what happened. Immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean
and Asia, a trickle in 1965, has steadily widened so that it now comprises
about 90 percent of the total. Legal immigration from 1971 to 1990 was 10.5
million people ‑ but if 3 million illegals are (conservatively) added in,
the total is pretty much the same as 1900‑1920, the peak years in
American history. Owing partly to a further liberalization of the law in 1990
and partly to the IRCA amnesty, the United States now accepts more immigrants
than all other industrialized nations combined. (Upwards of 80 percent are
persons of color: so much for the myth that U.S. policy is racist.) Proponents
of further immigration argue that the current influx is actually lower than the
1900‑1920 peak when considered as a percentage of the U.S. population.
They are right: it was 1 percent of the population then and about one third of
1 percent now. But it is still a lot of people.
And the law is full of holes. A majority of those who get family‑reunification
visas (235,484 in 1992) come in with no numerical restriction at all: for them
at least, immigration is a form of entitlement program. Others game the system
by forging documents, faking job histories and hiring smart American lawyers to
get them eligible for resident visa and green cards. This is known in federal
jargon as "adjusting status," and in most years it works for more
than 200,000 immigrants. The asylum hustle is the newest wrinkle. By claiming
political asylum would‑be immigrants circumvent the normal rules and,
because the jails are full, are usually freed to stay and work. Many simply
vanish into the underground economy "We didn't [expect] the asylum
problem," says Lawrence Fuchs. "We thought of it as the ballerina in
the tutu saying, 'I defect, I defect'."
Immigration policy is simultaneously a statement of America's
relationship with the rest of the world and a design for the national future:
it is, and probably should be, a mixture of altruism and self interest. Current
U.S. policy contains elements, of both ... A purely selfish policy would accept
only immigrants who could contribute to economic or social progress. But this
idea ‑ awarding visas on the basis of talent or skill ‑ has always
been opposed by organized labor and other groups, and it is a minor feature of
today's law, totaling about 140,000 out of 810,000 visas annually. Conversely,
providing a haven for refugees is in the best tradition of the American
conscience, and the United States has taken a lot of refugees since 1970 ‑
1.5 million Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Cubans, Russians and other
oppressed nationalities.
But the vast majority of those who get here are ordinary folks pursuing
a better life ‑ and although this, too, is part of the American
tradition, the question can and should be asked: What's in it for us? What does
all this immigration do for America and Americans? Julian Simon, a University
of Maryland economist, says he knows the answer: more immigration means more
economic growth ‑ more wealth and more progress for all Americans,
period. Pat Buchanan, the talk‑show host and erstwhile presidential
candidate, has a different answer: more immigrants mean more social friction
and the slow erosion of the English‑speaking, hybrid European culture we
call "American."
There is a third issue as well: how many people, really, can the
territorial United States support? Immigration now produces about a third of
U.S. population growth, and projections for the future range from a population
of about 383 million in 2050 to 436 million by the year 2090. All of these
projections are shaky ‑ based on complex assumptions about birth and
death rates as well as immigration policy. Some environmentalists (and many
Californians) think the United States should immediately halt immigration to
protect the ecosystem and the quality of life. Fuchs says his commission has
consulted environmentalists and population experts. "They persuaded us
that the population growth is terribly serious on a planetary scale, but not in
the United States," he says. "So migration to the United States
perhaps has a beneficial effect on the global environmental problem."
Still, Congress took no notice of this question when it voted to increase
immigration in 1990 ‑ and given the wide disparity of current views,
picking the "right" number of future Americans is ultimately a
combination of taste and guesswork.
The further question is one that troubles Pat Buchanan and many others:
can America absorb so many people with different languages, different cultures,
different backgrounds? The answer, broadly, is yes ‑ which does not mean
there will be no ethnic friction and does not mean that assimilation is easy
for anyone. Assimilation is a generational thing. The first generation ‑
the immigrants themselves ‑ are always strangers in the land. The second
generation is halfway between or (kids will be kids) rejects the immigrant
culture. The third generation is hyphenated American; like everybody else, and
begins the search for Roots. The tricky part, which worries Fuchs considerably,
is that America's "civic culture" is unique in all the world. It is
the belief, as embodied in the Constitution and our political tradition, "that
it is individual rights, not group rights, that hold this country together. So
here is the question for all of us, native‑born and immigrant alike. At
what point do policies like affirmative action and minority voting rights stop
being temporary remedies for past injustices and start being permanent features
of the system? The whole concept of group rights, as Fuchs says, is tribalism ‑
the road to Bosnia, not East L.A. And that, surely, is not what Israel Zangwill
had in mind when he described America as the crucible of a new civilization.