The Immigration Problem

      When I first met FooLing in Hell on Earth, a love story, I thought he was just another Chinese immigrant who had come to America to make his mark as a mystical holy man. I had no idea he was a renegade angel. That’s the way it has always been with immigration. There’s always more there than you initially realize if you just give it a chance.

 

      In discussing the current immigration problem the general consensus is that legal immigration—like we had in the good old days—is all right but that illegal immigration like we have today is a big problem.

Why can’t Hispanics immigrate to this country the right way—the way many of our parents and grandparents did when they arrived on steamers, signed in on Ellis Island, and then went to live with relatives in the heartland where they learned English and practiced trades. That was the right way to do it and if today’s immigrants only did it this way there would be no immigration problem because America is a nation that welcomes immigrants with open arms.

Except that there would still be an immigration problem because Americans—Americans who live in the greatest nation on earth—seem to possess an almost irrepressible urge to complain about almost everything. Blame it on our forefathers. They insisted that Americans be free from day one to assemble anywhere and everywhere and to pretty much say whatever we want.  In an environment where we can talk about anything in the world that strikes our fancy, most Americans when they get together chose to complain.

We do it in the barbershop and the grocery store, the doctor’s office and the workroom floor. We do it in traffic in the heat of rush hour and by our pools in the shade of the old oak tree. In China one can be jailed for voicing an opinion against the government. In this country if you’re not complaining about the government people think you’re not paying attention. And one of the things we chose to complain about the most is the “Immigration Problem.”

I was reading the March 1904 issue of Political Science Quarterly the other day. I’m finally getting caught up on a backlog of magazines I’ve been setting aside for way too long now and an article by R.P. Falkner, a rather prolific writer at the turn of the last century who has seemingly faded into obscurity, caught my eye. Entitled, “The Immigration Problem,” it dealt with—well obviously you know what it dealt with.

He had a lot to say about American acceptance of those immigrants who were coming over here the right way, the legal way, so to speak. In short, Americans weren’t happy. There was, many observed, unwillingness on the part of the immigrants to discard their foreign habits. In other words you could tell the Italians from the Poles from the Germans from the Jews by the way they spoke, dressed, ate and danced. But most of all you could tell they weren’t American and a lot of Americans didn’t like that.

Another complaint about the immigrants making the rounds was defining them as a class of people eager to profit by our standard of wages but unwilling to adapt to our lifestyles. Proof of this was the large number of single males—men with nothing to lose by expatriation and little to offer in the form of intellectual attainment or industrial skill. In short they were just here for the money—shoveling coal into giant furnaces that could have easily been done by strapping young American men.

If all this wasn’t enough to cause Americans to complain about the immigration problem, many of these immigrants were illiterate or even worse ignorant. That’s right, I said ignorant, which means it fell upon American schools to teach them.

In spite of all the points Mr. Falkner talked about, he was quick to point out that what bothered people the most at the time was that there was a shift taking place—a new breed of immigrant was showing up.

Americans were pretty much okay with the large influx of British coming to America in the 1820’s and 1830’s. Not so much with the Irish invasion in the 1840’s. When we concluded the Mexican War in 1848 about 70,000 Mexicans became instant American citizens but no one cared because they pretty much stayed where they were—New Mexico and California.

But when the Chinese started coming Americans started getting nervous again and Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to limit Chinese immigration, and then renewed it in 1892 and 1902 just to show them they were not fooling.

But in the period between 1880 and 1924 all hell broke loose. Immigrants were coming from every corner of the globe—and apparently a globe has more corners than a cube because there were a lot of them but for the first time they were coming from southern and eastern Europe and Americans began to worry again—even those Americans who were second and third generation Americans from the earlier waves of immigration.

Once the Italians, Poles, Russians and Jews started coming the Irish started looking good. This is the period that Mr. Falkner was writing in and they were scary times for Native Americans. When I say Native Americans, I really mean old-stock Americans—those who immigrated here anytime after 1600 because by this time the truly native Americans were living on reservations and had already given up on their “Immigration Problem.”

Now, for the first time, Americans were wondering out loud whether America was in fact a “melting pot” or not just a “dumping ground.” Xenophobia, which was about as much Greek as Americans wanted to deal with, ran rampart through the country and it seems every few years brought new waves of immigrants followed by new waves of immigration laws. There were political parties formed specifically to address immigration—like the Know Nothing Party, originally formed to head off Irish and German Catholic immigration but eventually taking a stand against all immigration. The Papal coup they feared never materialized so I suppose we ought to be thankful.

The Know Nothing Party began as a secret organization whose members when asked about it would reply, “I know nothing.” In time there was an Anti-Know Nothing Party, whose members I’m sure would have told anyone inquisitive enough to ask that they knew everything.

My main point though is that despite what we say Americans, by and large, do not like immigrants until after they have been here awhile, until they have shed that old world, new car smell. We talk the “melting pot” talk but we walk the “get out of the neighborhood” walk. And it is still the demographic shifts that give us the most headaches. Hispanics represent the latest shift and the country seems to be immersed in a sort of Mexican standoff over how to solve the newest in a long line of immigration problems.

Yes many of them are illegal but as I’ve pointed out, legal and illegal has never been the real tipping point. Throughout our history it has always been an immigration problem pure and simple. And what history has told us over and over again is that the faster we accept one group of immigrants the quicker we can move on to the next problematic group and the better off we will be.

The one thing we know for sure is that they are not going anywhere and we shouldn’t want them to. We do not want to be a country that people emigrate from because that says more about us than the people leaving.