About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the twenty-first century
Apparently, in 2015, immigration is a hot button issue. All the candidates, and there are a lot of them, have a position paper on immigration.
Oddly, the multiple positions differ only slightly, if at all, from positions taken between 1798 and 1965.
Immigration laws are by definition exclusionary. There is no need for a “come one come all” immigration law.
On June 25, 1798, when the new country was barely out of diapers, the first immigration law was passed. It excluded “any immigrant dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.”
A few days later, the second immigration law authorized the apprehension and deportation of any immigrant whose home country was at war with the United States. Neither law had a sunset provision so both laws remain on the books today.
In 1875, there were fines and jail sentences for those who attempted to bring people into the country “for the purpose of holding them to a term of service…without their free and voluntary consent.” Post-Civil War slave labor was frowned upon. Further, the 1875 law excluded “those considered undesirable.” The broader term gave greater discretion.
Seven years later, we as a nation, passed an immigration law that excluded an entire ethnic group. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 restricted immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. It demanded proof that they were qualified to immigrate, and prohibited the naturalization of Chinese who did. In an afterthought, it also banned criminals, lunatics, idiots, and any person likely to become a public charge (indigent).
It meant to keep Asians and especially the Chinese out of America. What it did was spawn the first real wave of illegal immigration. The history of immigration law is the story of the intended and unintended consequences of each law. Chinese who wanted to live and work here, closed out by laws, entered illegally.
A string of events further enabled illegal immigration. In 1891 the first comprehensive immigration law was passed. It established an Immigration Bureau directed to deport all illegal aliens and otherwise enforce immigration laws. In 1898 a case before the Supreme Court established that a child born in the United States, not the child of diplomats and with a permanent domicile, was at the time of birth a citizen of the United States.
So Chinese could not immigrate and if they did they could not be naturalized, but if born here, they were citizens. Then the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 created the opportunity for the first major wave of illegal immigration. With the records destroyed, a huge number of Chinese entered the U.S. illegally and claimed they were born in San Francisco prior to 1906 but the records were destroyed.
In 1920 The Emergency Quota Act intended to stem the tide of immigration did the opposite. Those who wanted to come here simply went to Canada or Mexico instead and from there slipped over the border into this country.
In 1924 the first extensive national origin quota system was instituted. In the 1930s and post-WW II, every new immigration law was intended to limit the number of immigrants in general, and specifically to limit those who were not white, protestant, and European.
Appeals by newcomers to be protected under the Bill of Rights were rebuffed.
“The Bill of Rights is a futile authority for the alien seeking admission” the Supreme Court ruled in 1952. “Once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country he becomes invested with those rights [not before].”
Immigration may be a comedy of errors and a tale of unintended consequences, but by whatever process, immigration has formed and will continue to form the face of America. In the not-too-distant future, “wasps” will be a plurality but no longer a majority. It is the most humorous and yet most significant of the immigration laws that created our new face.
In 1965 in an effort to keep America white and European an amendment was added to the immigration laws. Called the INA Amendments, among other things, it required that anyone who wished to immigrate must have a relative in this country.
“That ought to do it,” the legislators thought. After all, at that time most Americans were white, protestant, and of European descent. Well, it did something but that something was the opposite of what was intended.
In the next 10 years about 2.5 million illegal immigrants entered the country and once here – according to the law — brought their relatives. The growth was exponential.
One can argue whether the original goals of immigration laws have ever been fair or just or right. However, the bigger story is, regardless of the worth of the goal, how infrequently the laws accomplished that goal. So read carefully what the dozen candidates are saying about immigration. Compare it to the decisions made in the past and the outcomes of those decisions. Are any of the many making sense or are they all just making noise?
