Getting Real About Immigration

The current fixation on refugees immigrating to the U.S. is very much a case of the tail wagging the dog.

According to the best current estimates, there are around 500,000 refugees legally in the U.S.—roughly one per 700 Americans. In contrast, the foreign born population, which adds about 1 million legal immigrants a year and perhaps an additional 750,000 illegal immigrants (the overall illegal immigrant population is estimated at around 11 million), numbers around 40 million. This is to say that refugees constitute just over 1 percent of the total foreign born population.

Historically, there have been three waves of mass immigration: 1820-1860, 1890-1920, and since 1965, really gathering momentum in the 1980s and 1990s. The percentage foreign born of the U.S. population was 13.2 in 1860, 14.8 in 1890, and 12.9 percent in 2010. The number of immigrants entering each year peaked in 1907 at 1.3 million. Though the percentage foreign born of the U.S. population today of around 13 percent is approaching the around 15 percent high one hundred years ago, the immigrant inflow in 1900 was about three times larger relative to the overall size of the U.S. population at that time than it is in the twenty-first century.

The biggest changes in the U.S. immigrant population are in the origins of voluntary immigrants (i.e., excluding enslaved Africans). Europe was the overwhelming source before the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. Since then, Latin America, with Mexico number one, and Asia have provided the lion’s share. In terms of ethnicity and religion, Irish and Germans were the largest groups before the Civil War when the majority of immigrants were Roman Catholic but a substantial minority Protestant. Polish and Italian Catholics and East European Jews predominated between 1890 and 1920. Since 1965, Mexicans, Chinese, and Asians Indians have provided the largest share of a religiously diverse immigrant population made up of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims.

In terms of post-1965 immigration, Mexico stands out. Roughly 30 percent of current U.S. immigrants (and a larger percentage of illegal immigrants) were born in Mexico, compared to 5 percent in China. However, as has been pointed out during the first Democratic presidential debate, the trend since the 2008 Financial Crisis is for immigrant outflows back to Mexico to gradually increase so that in 2015 net immigration from Mexico is probably zero or even less. On the other hand, much of the slack has been taken up by increasing immigration from Central America.

Despite the perennial arguments of immigration restrictionists,  there is a historical consensus that mass immigration was an important motor of American economic growth, certainly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that native born workers (with some exceptions) were pushed up rather than down the economic ladder by the influx.

In the twenty-first century, there is a more serious scholarly debate about the impact of mass immigration on the wages of the native born. Amidst the different positions, most experts agree that Asian immigrants are more successful in achieving socio-economic mobility than Latino/Hispanic immigrants whose presence in the labor market may constitute a depressant to the wages of the native born working class.

Culturally and politically, it can be persuasively argued that immigrants have provided a leaven enriching American life. However, honesty requires admitting that current concerns over “radical Muslim” immigrants have historical parallels. With negligible evidence, French “Jacobin” immigrants were blamed for radically perverting American politics in the 1790s. There was a real but small basis in reality for post-Civil War fears that Irish “Fenian” immigrants and German anarchist immigrants were sometimes violently challenging the status quo. In the twentieth century, fears of Jewish “Bolshevik” conspiracies fed on the relative prominence of Jewish immigrants and their children among American communists.

Perhaps the one case, as historian Paul Avrich has documented, where there was a significant basis in reality for nativist fears about international “radical immigrant” conspiracies was that of the early twentieth Italian and Italian American anarchists, including Sacco and Vanzetti, who belonged to loose networks of anarchist co-believers and actors that spanned the Atlantic. Of course, Sacco and Vanzetti, violent idealists, were no more representative of Italian Americans than was the also violent but not idealistic Al Capone.

The traditional view is that roots as a“nation of immigrants” are an important foundation of “American exceptionalism,” setting us apart in a generally positive way from other nations. Since the 1960s, scholars predominately on the left have challenged the notion of “American exceptionalism” in general and “nation of immigrants” claims in particular.

One irony of the current debate over Syrian refugees is that defenders of the influx, most vociferous on the left, now argue that the U.S. compared to Europe is indeed remarkable for its relative successes in assimilating immigrants. I think that they are right, but it would be nice if they had the candor to admit that they have modified their position and now embrace at least one foundation—that the U.S. is a great “melting pot”—which is at the core of the ideology asserting “American exceptionalism.”

There also is a need to debate whether the U.S. today assimilates immigrants as successfully as it once did. A century ago, there were “Americanization” programs, promoted by government and industry as well as the schools, to promote acculturate immigrants and their children to American “Protestant Ethic” values and ultimate assimilation into American life. These programs were often administered in a patronizing and prejudiced manner, but they nevertheless were effective. They have largely disappeared in the current age of “multiculturalism” and “identity politics.”

In the twenty-first century, do we need to revive “Americanization” programs, albeit in tolerant forms?