A Nation of Immigrants  ( | Volume: 69, Issue: 4)

A Nation of Immigrants 

AH article image

Authors: Bernard A. Weisberger

Historic Era:

Historic Theme:

Subject:

| Volume 70, Issue 2

Now that arguments against immigration are rising again, it is well to remember that every single one of them has been heard before.

Contents

In the Beginning: 1607–1798     
The Young Republic, 1815–60     
High Tide and Reaction: 1885–1930     
The Third World Comes to the U.S: 1965–90    

Only America takes special pride in describing its nationality as independent of race or blood. 

The question of what our policy toward the world’s huddled masses should be is especially topical at this moment. The Statue of Liberty still lifts her lamp beside the golden door, but in a time of economic downturn, there is no longer an assured consensus that the door should be kept open very far. Restrictionism is back in fashion. For every journalistic article like that of Business Week in July 1992, which notes that “the U.S. is reaping a bonanza of highly educated foreigners” and that low-end immigrants “provide a hardworking labor force to fill the low-paid jobs that make a modern service economy run,” there is another like Peter Brimelow’s in the National Review. His title tells it all: “Time to Rethink Immigration?” The burden of his argument is that America has admitted too many immigrants of the wrong ethnic background (he himself is a new arrival from Britain), that neither our economy nor our culture can stand the strain, and that “it may be time to close the second period of American history [the first having been the era of the open frontier] with the announcement that the U.S. is no longer an ‘immigrant country.’” In short, we’re here; you foreigners stay home. Nor are journalists the only voices in the debate. Last August California’s governor Pete Wilson got media attention with a proposal to amend the Constitution so as to deny citizenship to an entire class of people born in the United States, namely, those unlucky enough to be the children of illegal immigrants. 

You’ve heard the restrictionists arguments before and you can expect to hear them again. And you are under  obligation to answer back, because what is at stake in the argument is nothing less than the essential nature of the United States of America. We are different. We aren’t the only country that receives immigration or that has to deal with resentment directed toward “aliens.” The popularity in France of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front party and the surge of anti-foreign (and neo-Nazi) “Germany-for-Germans” violence in Germany are evidence of that..
Nevertheless and notwithstanding, the United States of America is different. Immigration is flesh of our flesh, and we need to be reminded of that. Some sneer at the statement that we are a nation of immigrants as a cliché; all nations, they assert, are made up of mixtures of different peoples. So they are. But the United States was created by settlers who arrived from elsewhere, who deliberately and calculatedly invited and urged others to follow them, and who encouraged the process in ways that were unique. Of course, countries