Desperate Crossings

Seeking Refuge in America

Norman L. Zucker, Naomi Flint Zucker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315480954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This work provides an examination of US refugee policy since the 1960s, particularly as it has been applied to Cuba, Haiti and Central America. The authors also address world-wide refugee problems, proposing ideas for the 21st century.

1
A Shifting Course: Immigrants

From colonial times to the present, the United States has never been united in its attitudes toward newcomers. Admissionists have pressed for an open door, restrictionists a closed door. The late Barbara Jordan, as chair of the United States Commission on Immigration Reform, represented the admissionists when she wrote: “The United States has been and should continue to be a nation of immigrants. A well-regulated system of legal immigration is in our national interest.” But Jordan also acknowledged, “There have always been those who despised the newcomers. The history of American immigration policy is full of racism and ethnic prejudice.”¹

Current American history is riddled with racism and ethnic prejudice. Patrick J. Buchanan, a sometime candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, summed up the restrictionist arguments:

There are flood tides of new immigrants coming to the country and I think these … contribute to some of the social problems we’ve got in America…. If present trends hold, white Americans will be a minority in 2050 … our great cities are riven with gang wars among Asian, black and Hispanic youth who grow up to run ethnic crime cartels.… What happened to make America so vulgar and coarse, so uncivil and angry? Is it coincidence that racial and ethnic conflicts pervade our media when the racial and ethnic character of the US has changed more in four decades than in the previous twenty?²

Barbara Jordan exposed the prejudice behind the restrictionists’ resentment. But resentment of immigrants flows from deeper springs than mere prejudice. Immigrants become, for many Americans, a safe target for their frustration with economic, social, even political problems. They argue that immigrants are taking American jobs, destroying American neighborhoods, demeaning American values. And the American government does nothing to stop the immigrants. The immigrant is a straw man, a spurious symbol for real frustrations. And a straw man is easily ignited on the bonfires of prejudice. This same straw man—the immigrant, or “the immigrant problem”—can also be the last best weapon of political opportunism. Politicians appealing to racial and ethnic prejudice can shield their diatribes behind the armor of patriotism.

Admissionists believe that immigrants and refugees substantially enhance the well-being of the nation. By creating new jobs and paying taxes, they help expand the economy. They bring with them energy, skills, and intellectual capital. They enrich society with cultural and ethnic diversity and rejuvenate rather than retard a pluralistic nation. Immigrants cross the ocean to the United States, lured by the promise of opportunity in a new land; but many who in the past entered as “immigrants” were in actuality refugees, expelled from their homes by persecution and forced to find safe haven in another land. Admissionists take particular pride in what they see as America’s humanitarian response to refugees. President Ronald Reagan expressed this ethos when he asked: “Can we doubt that only a divine Providence placed this land, this land of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free?”³

Restrictionists, on the other hand, believe that both immigrants and refugees diminish the nation. They steal jobs from Americans. They strain educational and health resources. And now they are accused of abusing the social security and welfare systems. They do not rejuvenate but retard the nation.

In the eighteenth century, the colonists objected to “jailbirds.”⁴ Benjamin Franklin inveighed against the Irish and the Germans. The Irish, he felt, echoing the popular view, were “a low and squalid class of people,” while Germans were “clannish.”⁵ In 1797, when the population was not yet five million, Harrison G. Otis, of Massachusetts, argued, “When the country was new, it might have been good policy to admit foreigners. But it is so no longer.”⁶ The admissionist view was voiced by George Washington, who said that “the bosom of America is to receive not only the Opulent and respectable stranger, but also the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and religions.”⁷

Admissionists’ arguments, buttressed by the real need to populate a virgin continent, kept the door open until after the Civil War. America needed foreigners more than it feared them. But the open door only fanned the flames of restrictionism. The Irish and Germans were the first waves of mass immigration. In the expanding frontier, they were settlers and laborers. In the industrializing cities, they ran the machines. But the Irish were Catholics. As the number of Catholics rose, so did the virulent anti-Catholic sentiment of the Native American party and the Know Nothing movement. The German Forty-Eighters, refugees from revolution, with their hostility to slavery and unorthodox political ideas, triggered another mode of nativism, a fear that immigrant radicals threatened established American institutions.

Both strains of nativism, religious bigotry and fear of foreign radicals, course through the immigration debate to the present. As the nation began to develop a federal immigration policy, the restrictionists’ arguments began to make political inroads. Federal regulation of immigration, which originated in good intentions, within a decade had degenerated into noxious racial nativism. The first national legislation, the Immigration Act of 1875, banned prostitutes and convicts. From the reasonable exclusion of undesirables, it was a short step to Congress capitulating to racism.

Anti-Chinese sentiment incited the passage, in 1882, of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Most of the Chinese who had come to the United States were unskilled laborers who were willing to work hard for long hours and low wages. They had been recruited to lay railroad track and dig ore in the mines of the Southwest. But when the transcontinental railroad was completed, their labor was no longer needed. A depression in the 1870s ravaged the economy and incurred resentment against their continuing presence. Labor organizations protested foreign competition. Nativists protested the cultural and linguistic differences of the Chinese immigrants. Sinophobes held that the Chinese were unassimilable—criminals and prostitutes. The California Senate in 1876, in a frightening display of bigotry, resolved that the “Chinese are inferior to any race God ever made.”⁸ The exclusionary statute was not repealed until 1943. But this belated concession to our wartime ally was hollow. The statute was replaced by an invidious quota: Only 105 Chinese would be permitted entry annually. This quota remained in effect until 1965, when the era of immigration liberalization began.

Prejudice against the Chinese was embedded in law. But other immigrants also felt its lash. The second wave of mass immigration, which began in the 1880s, came primarily from southern and eastern Europe—Italians, Russians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Poles, Croatians, Serbs, Magyars, Greeks, and Jews. The recession of 1893–97 impelled American restrictionists to rally against this new threat. In 1894, Boston bluebloods organized the Immigration Restriction League, which launched a campaign to alert the country to the social and economic dangers posed by the alien hordes. Edward A. Steiner, a professor at Grinnell College in Iowa, in a contemporary account, The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow, described the hostility toward the new immigrants:

Upon the immigrant the Boston man laid the blame for the degeneration of America and Americans.

“What can you expect of our country with this scum of the earth coming in by the million? Black Hands, Socialists, and Anarchists? What can you expect?

“The Sabbath is broken down by them as if it had never been a day of rest. They drink like fish, they live on nothing.…” He saw our country ruined, our flag in the dust, liberty dethroned and the Constitution of the United States trampled under the feet of these infuriated Black Hands, Socialists and Anarchists.⁹

Pushed by the Immigration Restriction League, Congress passed a bill requiring a literacy test, but President Grover Cleveland vetoed the bill.

The pendulum swung toward the admissionists after the Spanish-American War reinvigorated the economy and spurred a need for unskilled immigrant labor. Once again, America needed foreigners more than it feared them. Two influential conservative business organizations, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, came out against restrictionism. The desire for profit had temporarily triumphed over the desire for population purity.

Antiradical nativism rose up anew when anarchist Leon Czolgosz fatally shot President William McKinley. McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, recommended an educational test and urged Congress to bar “all persons who are anarchists … of low moral tendency or of unsavory reputation,” as well as all “who are below a certain standard of economic fitness to enter our industrial field as competitors with American labor.”¹⁰ Congress responded with the Immigration Act of 1903. Although the act failed to impose a literacy test, it preserved American virtue by denying entrance to anarchists, beggars, and white slavers.

In 1907, immigration reached a peak. There was approximately one new immigrant for every sixty persons already in the United States. Southern and eastern European immigrants now outnumbered northern European immigrants by four to one. The numbers and the origins of the immigrants roused the restrictionists, who, in turn, convinced the Congress that the immigration imbalance was perilous. That year a joint Senate-House commission to study immigration was created and named for its chairman, Senator William Paul Dillingham of Vermont.

The Dillingham Commission labored and in 1911 produced a forty-two-volume report, a monument to insularity. The report, which affirmed the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon, mirrored the prejudices of the time: Immigrants from northern and western Europe were more desirable than immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Southern and eastern European immigrants were criminally inclined, less skilled, more ignorant, and content with a lower standard of living. The commission concluded that immigration restriction was “demanded by economic, moral, and social considerations.”¹¹ The door was closing. The report served as the rationale for the rigidly restrictive national-origins quota laws of the 1920s.

The era of immigration restriction would last for nearly half a century and began with the Immigration Act of 1917, a victory for the restrictionists. The act, passed over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto on the eve of America’s entry into World War I, contained four major provisions: literacy, an expanded list of deportables, Asiatic exclusion, and alien deportation.

Since the closing of the frontier, successive Congresses had battled presidents over the literacy test. Congresses had passed literacy test bills, but presidents Cleveland, Taft, and Wilson, in 1915, had vetoed them. In 1917, the literacy test finally became law. But to the dismay of the restrictionists, the literacy requirement (persons over sixteen had to be able to read thirty to forty words in some language) was not a significant barrier. A second provision added to the list of those already excluded persons of “constitutional psychopathic inferiority,” men attempting to enter the country for immoral purposes, chronic alcoholics, stowaways, vagrants, and those with one or more attacks of insanity.¹²

A greater barrier was the exclusion of Asians. Chinese had earlier been barred by law. Japanese were kept out under a “Gentleman’s Agreement” with Japan made in 1907 by Theodore Roosevelt. The act now extended those exclusions to all others coming from a huge geographical area designated as an Asiatic Barred Zone. (The restrictionists were less successful in excluding Africans. In 1915 an amendment was approved in the Senate to exclude from immigration “all members of the African or black race.” But, after the NAACP mounted intense pressure, the House of Representatives defeated the proposal.¹³)

The power to deport aliens who did enter the country, in a significant change from established practice, was expanded. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deportation was a bureaucratic mechanism used to return recently admitted aliens who should have been denied admission at the port of entry. Under the new act, aliens who preached revolution or sabotage could be deported at any time after entry. The act, and subsequent legislation, raised deportation from a simple administrative procedure to a public policy weapon, a potent instrument for enforcing social, cultural, and political conformity.

The First World War fueled patriotism, conformity, and hostility to all things German. Speaking German was un-American. Sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage.” Dachshunds declined in popularity. These follies were but a prelude to the anti-immigration sentiment of the postwar decades.

Restrictionism reached its apogee in the 1920s, with an isolation...