Citizens, Strangers, And In-betweens

Essays On Immigration And Citizenship

Peter Schuck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367098605
• eBook ISBN: 9780429981241
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Immigration is one of the critical issues of our time. In Citizens, Strangers, and In-Betweens, an integrated series of fourteen essays, Yale professor Peter Schuck analyzes the complex social forces that have been unleashed by unprecedented legal and illegal migration to the United States, forces that are reshaping American society in countless ways. Schuck first presents the demographic, political, economic, legal, and cultural contexts in which these transformations are occurring. He then shows how the courts, Congress, and the states are responding to the tensions created by recent immigration. Next, he explores the nature of American citizenship, challenging traditional ways of defining the national community and analyzing the controversial topics of citizenship for illegal alien children, the devaluation and revaluation of American citizenship, and plural citizenship. In a concluding section, Schuck focuses on four vital and explosive policy issues: immigration's effects on the civil rights movement, the cultural differences among various American ethnic groups as revealed in their experiences as immigrants throughout the world, the protection of refugees fleeing persecution, and immigration's effects on American society in recent years.

PART ONE
Contexts

Nothing about America’s contemporary immigration policy is more striking than its constant reconsideration and change. It was not always thus. The framework of immigration law remained remarkably stable during more than four otherwise tumultuous decades between 1921 and 1965. Congress did not significantly revise the 1965 system until 1980 when it enacted the Refugee Act, introducing new legal protections and attendant policy dilemmas that persist today. Only in the mid-1980s did the problem of illegal migration receive sustained (but in the event, ineffective) legislative attention.

Since 1986, however, immigration policy has been roiled by fierce political storms and incessant flux. Although few Americans rank it as a high-priority issue, public feelings about immigration run strong and politicians run scared. Congress adopted the most far-reaching changes to date in the 1996 immigration and welfare reform laws. Indeed, it is difficult to exaggerate how radical these reforms are compared to prior law. It is not just that Congress severely restricted the legal rights of both legal and illegal immigrants; these changes also challenge some of the most fundamental precepts of the modern legal order—especially the right of judicial review of agency enforcement decisions and the equal treatment by citizens and aliens—that defines the rights of citizens, strangers, and in-betweens.

And yet … The contemporary politics of immigration are too complex and multidimensional, too replete with ambiguities, value conflicts, and contradictions, to allow today’s immigrants to be captured in a simple legal category like “discrete and insular minority,” a grouping under which they would enjoy heightened constitutional protection. Americans view the relationship among citizens, strangers, and in-betweens in often nuanced ways that combine the symbolic power of myth; the emotional power of deeply held ideals, fears, and antagonisms; the psychological power of family narratives; and the political power of clashing public and private interests.

Chapter 1, which has been updated to reflect conditions existing as of April 1998, discusses the historical, demographic, attitudinal, and legal factors that are propelling and molding these changes; it also furnishes a kind of informational and subject matter map that should help to guide readers as they navigate the remaining chapters.

1
The Immigration System Today

This essay summarizes six aspects of the legal and policy context: the demographic changes that immigration is spawning; the state of public opinion about immigration, which ultimately frames and shapes the legal and policy responses to these changes; the historical evolution of the immigration control system in the United States; the current form of that system; the 1996 immigration reform; and the 1997 amnesty.

I. DEMOGRAPHICS

Immigration is producing profound demographic changes in the United States.¹ During the last decade, the number of new immigrants (legal and illegal) exceeded those in any other decade in American history, including the 1905-14 period when 10.1 million immigrants were admitted. From 1987 to 1996, approximately 10 million immigrants were legally admitted, but several million more came or remained in the United States illegally during the decade, and an estimated 5-6 million of them were resident at the end of 1996.²

The level of legal admissions remains high. Not counting the almost 2.7 million aliens legalized under the amnesty program (who by 1994 had little inflationary effect on the admissions numbers), 915,000 were admitted in 1996, a large increase over the 720,000 admitted in 1995, and the 804,000 in 1994. As for emigration, an estimated 200,000 Americans leave the United States more or less permanently each year (Warren and Kraly; Dunn). Today, almost 10 percent of the US population—more than 25 million people—are foreign-born. This fraction is well below the 14 percent share in the first decade of this century, well below the share in Canada and Switzerland, and somewhat below that in France and Germany, but it has nearly doubled since 1970.

Because immigrants tend to be younger and have higher fertility rates than the native-born, this proportion is rising steadily; immigrants now account for more than one-third of the population growth in the United States. This may significantly alter the racial and ethnic composition of the population, not only in states like California but in the nation as a whole, although it will have relatively little effect on the nation’s median age (Espenshade, 1994). New studies by the US Census Bureau predict that by the year 2020, the white population will shrink to 78.2 percent, people of Hispanic descent (most of whom call themselves white) will increase to 15.7 percent, blacks will increase to 13.9 percent, Asians and Pacific Islanders will increase to 6.9 percent, and Native Americans will increase to 0.9 percent. These changes, moreover, are occurring even faster than the Census Bureau had only recently predicted (New York Times 1994).

II. PUBLIC ATTITUDES

Almost all Americans favor some restrictions on immigration. The principal public debates center on the questions of how much immigration should be permitted, the appropriate criteria and mix for whatever immigration is permitted, and the moral and policy justifications for these criteria. Virtually all Americans want stronger enforcement of existing restrictions, and most also favor reducing legal immigration below current levels, which in 1996 totaled 915,000 aliens admitted as legal permanent residents. In 1996 Congress considered a number of proposals for restrictions on legal immigration, ranging from modest adjustments to major reductions, but these proposals were defeated.

Although those who favor restrictions are commonly seen as monolithic in their views, they are actually a diverse group motivated by different emotions, principles, and interests some of which are misrepresented in public debate. In order to understand restrictionists’ views, it is useful to distinguish broadly among four ideological positions, which I call xenophobia, nativism, principled restrictionism, and pragmatic restrictionism. Although these positions can be distinguished analytically, they are often conflated in the political debate over immigration policy. This conflation occurs both because advocates of different positions may advance similar policy proposals and justifications and because conflating them may confer rhetorical and political advantage on particular groups in the intense policy debate.

Although I focus here on restrictionist views, the diversity of expansionist positions should also be noted. Some (like the author) favor moderate increases in legal immigration but tighter controls on illegal aliens. Principled expansionists—libertarians, some economists, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal—assert that essentially open borders will maximize individuals’ rights to engage in voluntary transactions with other individuals and otherwise to do as they like; government, they believe, should not limit these rights by impeding such transactions. Pragmatic expansionists, including many agricultural and other business interests seeking cheap labor or skills in short supply, ethnic groups desiring more members in the United States, and human rights organizations advocating larger refugee quotas, also favor increased immigration.

Xenophobia is an undifferentiated fear of foreigners or strangers as such. Who counts as a foreigner or stranger, of course, depends on the domain of one’s primary reference group, which is often much smaller than the nation-state. It may be that the sources of xenophobia are congenital, reflecting some deeply embedded, universal feature of human psychology and identity by which individuals seek to distance themselves from those whom they define as “others” or “strangers.” Fortunately, most Americans seem capable of overcoming or “unlearning” this fear as they are exposed to those outside their primary group. In this sense, the scope of xenophobia—the domain of perceived “otherness”—seems to be contracting over time.

One might predict, then, that the development of the so-called global village through advanced communications and transportation technologies and the integration of the world economy would tend to homogenize cultures and reduce the fear of otherness on which xenophobia feeds. No doubt this has occurred to some extent. Public attitudes toward Asians, for example, have grown markedly more favorable and less fearful than they were several decades ago, even as heightened economic competition between the United States and Japan has strained the newer tolerance. On the other hand, the advance of transcendent, cosmopolitan values can engender a sharp backlash in the more parochial enclaves where xenophobia tends to flourish. Sudden migration flows can inflame these attitudes, as has occurred recently in the United States and especially in Europe, including Germany. Some people in these enclaves engage in violence against those whom they view as foreign because of their race, language, appearance, or behavior. This may explain some of the crimes committed in recent years by blacks against Korean-Americans and other immigrant minorities in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. In general, however, the level of xenophobia in the United States has steadily declined and is probably not a significant force today.

Nativism is a more discriminating, specific position than xenophobia. Nativists believe in the moral or racial superiority of the indigenous stock. (In the US context, this refers not to the indigenous stock, which was, of course, Native American, but to the Anglo-Saxons who became demographically, politically, and culturally dominant.) Nativism holds that members of this stock alone exemplify the distinctive values that the nativist associates with the nation-state. The nativist insists that immigrant cultures are inimical to these values and, at least in that sense, inferior. Nativism, then, is a species of racism; it maintains that cultural values inhere in particular racial, ethnic, or national groups and cannot be learned. It demands not only exclusion of the inferior groups but leads ineluctably to doctrines that justify nativist domination of the members of the other groups who are already inside the country.

Nativism, unlike xenophobia, has been a perennial theme in US history; it is as constant as the motifs of welcome, succor, and assimilation mentioned earlier. It has erupted with special force during periods of social upheaval and economic crisis. But even in more stable times, groups of Americans have organized politically for the explicit purposes of ostracizing, excluding, and repatriating immigrants. In his classic study of American nativism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John Higham (1970) showed that nativism has appealed to all strata of society at different times. But it has especially attracted those whose economic and social positions are the least secure and who search most desperately for simple explanations, scapegoats, and conspiracies to assuage their painful sense of status vulnerability.

American nativism has assumed many repellent forms. Before (and even after) the Civil War, prominent Americans, including President Abraham Lincoln, proposed sending US blacks back to Africa. Nativist premises have led the federal and state governments to enact harshly discriminatory laws, among them the Chinese Exclusion acts, the national origins quotas, and anti-Japanese policies such as the Gentleman’s Agreement and World War II internment. Nativist groups have fomented violence against Catholics, Jews, and other immigrant groups.

As with xenophobia, however, nativism—as distinct from other restrictionist theories—is probably not a significant force in US politics today. Although the question is controversial among immigration scholars and the answer is far from clear (Schuck, 1996: 1966, n. 18), I believe that the support for Proposition 187 in California in 1994 is best understood as an expression of widespread public frustrations with the failures of federal immigration enforcement and the perceived erosion of US sovereignty and control over its borders and demographic destiny, not as a spasm of nativist hatred (Schuck, 1995). The openly nativist candidacy of Patrick Buchanan during the 1992 and 1996 Republican primary campaigns indicates that it does survive and is capable of being mobilized to some extent; the public’s decisive rejection of that candidacy, however, suggests that nativism is no longer widespread, even in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, some of the most prominent members of that wing, such as the House’s Richard Army of Texas, vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp, and commentator William Bennett, are openly pro-immigration, while others such as Speaker Newt Gingrich claim to favor immigration.

In contrast to xenophobia and nativism, principled restrictionism is a commonly held position in the United States today. Principled restrictionism is driven neither by a generalized fear of strangers nor by a belief that only certain categories of Americans are capable of civic virtue. Instead, it is the view that current levels of immigration threaten particular policy goals or values advocated by the restrictionist.

Today, the leading principled restrictionists in the United States include some advocates of environmental and demographic controls who maintain that zero (or even negative) population growth is essential to preserve ecological stability and that both the number of immigrants and their high fertility rates threaten that stability. The leading example here is the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Some of FAIR’s board members are environmental and population control activists, labor union professionals, demographers, and politicians—for example, presidential candidate and former Colorado governor Richard Lamm—who in other areas subscribe to liberal public policy positions.³ As I write, the Sierra Club is embroiled in a fierce internal debate about whether to call for immigration restrictions.

Many principled restrictionists also express a concern for the effects of contemporary immigration on the interests of low-income Americans. They believe, with some labor economists, that today’s levels of immigration—especially illegal (and some legal) migration by low-skill Mexican and Central American workers—displace native workers from jobs, drain scarce welfare benefits intended primarily for American indigent citizens, and consume already overburdened public services (primarily education and health care). Some also point to the adverse effects that large numbers of non-voting aliens (legal and illegal) have on the political effectiveness of Mexican Americans and other new immigrant groups.

Some principled restrictionists place greater emphasis on values such as national solidarity, linguistic unity, religious tolerance, or cultural coherence. These themes are commonly sounded in congressional speeches, organization newsletters, and private conversations. An example of such a group is U.S. English, founded by the late senator (and linguist S. I. Hayakawa. Many of these principled restrictionists appear to be more conservative in their social policy views than those of the FAIR stripe, but, again, they are well within the mainstream of US politics. Indeed, a number of prominent liberals such as Norman Cousins and Walter Cronkite have been closely associated with U. S. English at one time or another.

Unlike nativism, which most Americans regard as a disreputable position, principled restrictionism contributes significantly to the overt debate about US immigration policy. Because the etiquette of acceptable public discourse forces nativists’ views underground, nativists may seek political legitimacy and influence by publicly couching their racist views in the less-objectionable rhetoric of principled restrictionism. Thus it is difficult to determine the extent to which principled restrictionist positions are in fact motivated by nativist and racist views (Schuck, 1996: 1965, n. 14).

Ideally, only the merits of a speaker’s position would be relevant in the public debate over immigration, not the speaker’s motives. This debate, however, usually proceeds as if motives matter a great deal. Many immigration advocates seek to stigmatize their restrictionist opponents, whether principled or pragmatic, by tarring them with the nativist brush. The reverse is also true: restrictionists deride those favoring more liberal immigration policies as unpatriotic “one-worlders” and “open-borders” advocates. Principled restrictionists are especially vulnerable to this tactic; they cannot easily refute such charges even when they are false.

Pragmatic restrictionism is a common perspective on immigration levels. It resembles principled restrictionism in the policy positions that it supports, but it differs in one important respect. Where principled restrictionists see the threat that immigration poses to their preferred goals or values as inherent in the nature and fact of immigration, pragmatic restrictionists view such conflicts as contingent, not inevitable.

Pragmatists believe, for example, that immigration’s actual effects on population, the environment, national unity, cultural consensus, and so forth are empirical questions whose answers depend on a variety of factors. They do not oppose immigration in principle or in general. They may even be prepared to support it if they can be persuaded, for example, that immigrants actually create jobs rather than taking them away from native workers, that they are mastering the English language without undue delay, and that they do not exploit the welfare system or otherwise threaten social cohesion. Although certain labor unions, taxpayer groups, and other interest groups may have closed their minds on these factual questions, the pragmatic restrictionist remains open to persuasion by contrary evidence.

Most Americans, I suspect, are pragmatic restrictionists, although one cannot be certain. That is, they favor lower levels of immigration but are open to argument and evidence about what those levels should be and about what immigration’s actual effects are. Thus their views about the wisdom and level of restriction are capable of being changed. In a recent study, political scientists Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza examined public attitudes toward race-oriented policy issues and found them notably responsive to counter-argument.⁴

The evidence just cited did not specifically concern attitudes toward immigration policy. But if Americans are open to argument and evidence with respect to the explosive issues surrounding race and welfare, issues on which they presumably have already developed firm attitudes, it must be even truer of immigration about which (as I discuss immediately below) they are already profoundly ambivalent. Atti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• PART 1 CONTEXTS
• PART 2 THE COURTS AND IMMIGRATION
• PART 3 THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION
• PART 4 CITIZENSHIP AND COMMUNITY
• PART 5 CURRENT POLICY DEBATES
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index