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Introduction

It’s long been said that America is a nation of immigrants. But for closely connected reasons, it’s also been a nation of immigration restrictionists, among them some of the nation’s most honored founders. Indeed it would be nearly impossible to imagine the first without the second. And since we were to be “a city upon a hill,” a beacon of human perfection to the entire world, there were fundamental questions: Would America be able to refine all the imperfect material that landed on our shores, or would we have to determine what was not perfectible and shut it out? And what would happen when the once-unpopulated continent that badly required large numbers of settlers—unpopulated, that is, except for the Indians—began to fill up?

Our contemporary immigration battles, and particularly the ideas and proposals of latter-day nativists and immigration restrictionists, resonate with the arguments of more than two centuries of that history. Often, as most of us should know, the immigrants who were demeaned by one generation were the parents and grandparents of the successes of the next generation. Perhaps, not paradoxically, many of them, or their children and grandchildren, later joined those who attacked and dispar- aged the next arrivals, or would-be arrivals, with the same vehemence that had been leveled against them or their forebears

As a German-Jewish refugee from Hitler, I’m personally familiar with a slice of this story, having spent time on both sides of the nativ- ist divide. In the late 1930s my parents and I were on the short end of

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 0 . U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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2 Introduction

the nation’s immigration quotas. We narrowly escaped Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941 and arrived in the United States on a transit visa (to Mexico), later changed to a visitor’s visa. We didn’t formally immigrate until 1947. In the first years after our arrival, I and my friends in New York, several of us not yet citizens, endlessly lampooned people we called Japs, wops, and guineas; told jokes about fairies; assumed, often despite the protests of our anguished parents, that the Germany of our grandparents had always been a place of boors absolutely bereft of cul- ture. In wartime especially, denial or rejection of one’s heritage was the price one proudly paid for assimilation.

Most Americans have long forgotten—if they ever knew—the his- tory of the sweeps and detention of immigrants of the early decades of the last century. Those sweeps were not terribly different from the heavy-handed federal, state and local raids of recent years to round up, deport, and too often imprison illegal immigrants, and sometimes legal residents and citizens along with them. But it’s also well to remember that nativism, xenophobia, and racism are hardly uniquely American phenomena. What makes them significant in America is that they run almost directly counter to the nation’s founding ideals. At least since the enshrinement of Enlightenment ideas of equality and inclusiveness in the founding documents of the new nation, to be a nativist in this country was to be in conflict with its fundamental tenets.

This book grew out of more than two decades of writing about immi- gration and the bitter battles that have been waged over immigration law and policies since the mid-1980s. It seeks to trace the complex his- tory linking nearly three centuries of ideas, uncertainties, and conflicts about what America is, who belongs here, what the economy needs and doesn’t need—who, indeed, is an American or is fit to be one—to our contemporary controversies and ambivalence about immigration and its many related questions. In that multigenerational process, nativism, always an essential element in what one writer described as “the nation’s self-image of innocence and exceptionalism in a decadent world,” has had a long and, one might say with only a touch of irony, an honorable history, going back to the very beginnings of British settlement.1

American exceptionalism echoes through colonial complaints about the estimated forty thousand British convicts sentenced to transpor- tation who were arriving on American shores in the eighteenth cen- tury—“the dregs, the excrescence of England.” All of the colonials, said Samuel Johnson, were “a race of convicts [who should] be content with anything we allow them short of hanging.” In the same era came

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Introduction 3

Benjamin Franklin’s warning (in 1751) that Pennsylvania was becoming “a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”2 Later, Jefferson worried about immigrants from foreign monarchies who “will infuse into American legislation their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”3

Although already fading into obscurity, one of the most vocal and paradigmatic of latter-day immigration restrictionists, Colorado Repub- lican Tom Tancredo, echoed much of that. Briefly a candidate for presi- dent in 2008 and, until shortly before his retirement from the House of Representatives that same year, leader of the Congressional Caucus on Immigration Reform—meaning immigrant exclusion—Tancredo liked to boast about his immigrant Sicilian grandfather. Tancredo forgot that his grandfather belonged to a generation widely regarded by the WASP establishment and many other Americans of the early 1900s, when he arrived, as genetically and culturally unassimilable—ill-educated, crime-prone, diseased. Yet Tancredo, like many of today’s immigration restrictionists, echoed the same animosities. “What we’re doing here in this immigration battle,” he said in one of the Republican presidential debates in 2007, “is testing our willingness to actually hold together as a nation or split apart into a lot of Balkanized pieces”—not so differ- ent from Jefferson’s “heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”4 Like other contemporary restrictionists, Tancredo’s portrayal of Mexican immigrants was almost identical to the characterization of the Italians, Jews, and Slavs of a century before, and of the Irish and Germans before them, people not fit for our society.

If Franklin’s and Jefferson’s opinions turned out be of little prac- tical consequence—Franklin later changed his mind; Jefferson in his purchase of Louisiana gobbled up a whole foreign (mostly French) cul- ture—the nineteenth century provided an endless chain of more sig- nificant examples. Among them, Know-Nothingism and the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic virulence that swept much of the nation in the 1850s, waned briefly during and after the Civil War, and then flourished again for more than half a century after 1870: “No Irish Need Apply” (later, “No Wops Need Apply”), “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” and then “The Chinese Must Go” and, as the ethnic Japanese on the West Coast were interned after Pearl Harbor, “Japs Keep Moving.” The magazine cartoonists’ pirates coming off the immigrant ships in the 1880s and 1890s were labeled “disease,” “socialism,” and “Mafia.” And always

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4 Introduction

there was the shadow of the Vatican, looming to take over American democracy and, more ominously, seducing the nation’s schoolchildren.

In almost every generation, nativists portrayed new immigrants as not fit to become real Americans: they were too infected by Catholi- cism, monarchism, anarchism, Islam, criminal tendencies, defective genes, mongrel bloodlines, or some other alien virus to become free men and women in our democratic society. Again and again, the new immi- grants or their children and grandchildren proved them wrong. The list of great American scientists, engineers, writers, scholars, business and labor leaders, actors, and artists who were immigrants or their children, men and women on whom the nation’s greatness largely depended, is legion. Now add to that the story of Barack Obama—who was not just the nation’s first African American president, but also the first American president who was the son of a father who was not a citizen—and the argument becomes even less persuasive. Yet through each new wave of nativism and immigration restriction, the opponents of immigration, legal and illegal, tend to forget that history, just as Tancredo forgot that his Sicilian grandfather (who he says arrived as a “legal immigrant”) came at a time when—with the exception of the Chinese, most of whom were categorically excluded beginning in 1882—there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant.

• • •

The list of factors contributing to the surge of anger, xenophobia, and imperial ambition in the two generations after 1880 is almost end- less: the “closing” of the frontier and the western “safety-valve” in the 1890s;5 industrial expansion and depression-driven cycles of economic fear; urban corruption and the rise of the big-city political machines. Mostly Democratic, they patronized new immigrants more interested in jobs, esteem, and protection—and were often more comfortable with their values of personal and clan loyalty than with the abstract WASP principles of good government and efficient management that fueled the Progressive movement and that most of the nation’s respectable small- town middle class grew up with.

Many Progressives, as the historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out, joined moderate conservatives “in the cause of Americanizing the immi- grant by acquainting him with English and giving him education and civic instruction.” Still “the typical Progressive and the typical immigrant were immensely different, and the gulf between them was not usually

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Introduction 5

bridged with much success in the Progressive era.”6 The Progressivism of academics like the sociologist John R. Commons and the influential labor economist Edward A. Ross, both close associates of Governor and later Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, and the ethnic and cultural beliefs of nativism grew from the same roots: good government was an Anglo-Saxon legacy. Along with their confident sense of racial superior- ity came the heightening fear, bordering on panic in some circles, of our own immigrant-infected racial degeneration. It resounded through Ross’s work, through Madison Grant’s influential Passing of the Great Race (1916), through the writings of Alexander Graham Bell and countless others in the first decades of the twentieth century, and in the hearings and debates of Congress. In the face of the inferior, low-skill, low-wage but high-fecundity classes from southern and eastern Europe, demoral- ized Anglo-Saxons would bring fewer children into the world to face that new competition.7 Grant’s theme of racial extinction would later be picked up in books like Lothrop Stoddard’s very successful Rising Tide of Color (1920) and would continue to echo through books like Rich- ard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, published in 1994. To this day, these ideas are circulated (and promoted and defended) by the Virginia-based self-described “racialist” American Renaissance online magazine, which offers reprints of Stoddard’s book for sale.8

But probably the most representative, and perhaps the most influ- ential, voice for immigration restriction in the 1890s and the following decade was that of Representative (later Senator) Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, the paradigmatic Boston Brahmin, later leader of the isolationists who kept the United States out of the League of Nations in the 1920s. Lodge’s articles and speeches warning of the perils of the rising tide of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—many of them mere “birds of passage” who only came to make a little money and then return to the old country; many more bringing crime, disease, anarchism, and filth and competing with honest American workers— drove the debate and presaged many later arguments against immigra- tion. By 1926, in congressional testimony about restricting Mexican immigration, Lodge’s bird had become a pigeon—a “homer” who “like the pigeon . . . goes back to roost.”9 The late Harvard political scien- tist Samuel Huntington’s restrictionist book, Who Are We? published in 2004, is shot through with Lodge-like fears.

There were countless reasons for the old patricians to be worried— and they weren’t alone. The overcrowded tenements of the nation’s big cities were incubators of disease and violence that put ever more

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6 Introduction

burdens on schools, the police, charities, and social agencies. And so, in words and tones not so different from today’s, members of Congress and other national leaders heard increasingly loud warnings about the social strains and dangers the immigrants imposed. Similarly, check- ing the rising political participation of the new urban immigrants and the power of the big-city machines that challenged the Anglo-Saxon establishment’s authority—and in the view of a whole generation of muckraking reformers, corrupted democracy itself—was an obliga- tion that the reformers were certain couldn’t be escaped. The same fear had resonated through the Know-Nothings’ nativist platforms of the 1850s, which, in calls for tighter voter requirements in elections, continues to run through conservative American politics.10 As John Higham characterized him in his seminal study, Strangers in the Land, the nativist, “whether he was trembling at a Catholic menace to Ameri- can liberty [or] fearing an invasion of pauper labor,” believed “that some influence originating abroad threatened the very life of the nation from within.”11 Higham, writing in the early 1960s, could just as well have been writing now.

What’s striking is how many immigration restrictionists came, and still come, from a Progressive or conservationist background. Madison Grant was a trustee of New York’s American Museum of Natural His- tory and active in the American Bison Society and the Save the Red- woods League. David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford, a respected ichthyologist and peace activist, along with a group of other leading scholars and clergymen, was deeply involved in the race bet- terment movement that aimed “To Create a New and Superior Race thru Euthenics, or Personal and Public Hygiene and Eugenics, or Race Hygiene .  .  . and create a race of human thoroughbreds such as the world has never seen.”12 Like Hiram Johnson (the Progressive who became governor of California in 1910) and the McClatchy family (newspaper publishers in Sacramento and earnest backers of the initia- tive process, civil service, and municipal ownership of public utilities), many Progressives fiercely battled to forever exclude Asians from immi- gration and landownership. Why let Asiatics immigrate when the Con- stitution didn’t allow them to be naturalized? “Of all the races ineligible to citizenship under our law,” said V. S. McClatchy in Senate testimony in 1924, “the Japanese are the least assimilable and the most dangerous to this country.”13

Again and again, as I hope this book will show, our history reflects the national ambivalence between the demand for more immigrants to

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Introduction 7

do the nation’s work and the backlash against them. Again and again, past debates presage our current immigration dilemmas. During and immediately after the Civil War, many of the states—trying to settle the prairies opened by the Homestead Act or to replace emancipated slaves with cheap labor—created immigration commissions, adver- tised abroad, and/or sent what were essentially recruiters. The states negotiated low fares with the steamship companies and railroads that brought newcomers, created information centers for new immigrants, and arranged for housing until the new people could get settled. But as backlash developed against what Americans began to regard as the problems they associated with thousands of newcomers in their commu- nities, rules were tightened. As early as 1858, less than a decade after the discovery of gold, California passed an “act to prevent the further immi- gration of Chinese or Mongolians to this state.”14 Some states enacted legislation allowing for the interstate deportation of criminals, lunatics, and other social misfits to the states they’d come from. In 1901, Mis- souri prohibited the “importation of afflicted, indigent or vicious chil- dren.” The states were in the immigration-management business in a big way. One hundred and fifty years later, they would be again.

Almost inevitably the stresses, violence, and insecurity brought by the shift from the agrarian economy and culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the industrial, urban nation that rapidly replaced them were deeply associated with the immigrants who helped build it and often became its most visible casualties. As industrializa- tion, World War I, and the Russian Revolution drew the nation into a globalized world we didn’t understand and that, in our founding, we thought we had forever put behind us, they brought yet another round of nationalism and xenophobia. With the war, Beethoven and Bach became composers non grata in American concert halls. States all through the Midwest stopped German-English bilingual education in the public schools. Americans were supposed to eat “liberty cabbage” instead of sauerkraut and their children suffered from “liberty measles.” (Eighty years later, when Congress wanted to show the French what-for after they challenged the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the side dish of choice in the capital’s restaurants became freedom fries).

Shortly after Armistice came the wave of labor unrest that brought the Red Scare of 1919 and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s round- ups and deportation of suspected anarchists and Bolsheviks, many of them immigrants. Although the Palmer Raids flamed out as quickly as they’d begun, the Depression a decade later would bring the widespread

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8 Introduction

detention of Mexicans and other immigrants, not all of them illegal entrants, whose labor had been desperately wanted during the war and was now superfluous.

• • •

Just after the turn of the twentieth century, theories about the inferiority of the new arrivals also began to be reinforced by eugenic “science” that seemed to prove that virtually all the “new” immigrants—Slavs, Jews, Italians, Asians, Turks, Greeks—who arrived in the two generations after 1880 were intellectually, physically, and morally inferior. Henry H. Goddard, one of the American pioneers of intelligence testing, found that 40 percent of Ellis Island immigrants before World War I were feebleminded and that 60 percent of Jews there “classify as morons.”15 Meanwhile, the eminent psychologists who IQ-tested army recruits dur- ing the war, convinced that intelligence was a fixed quantity, concluded that the average mental age of young American men was thirteen, that a great many were “morons,” and that those from Nordic stocks—Brits, Dutch, Canadians, Scandinavians, Scots—showed far higher intelligence than Jews, Poles, Greeks, and the very inferior immigrants, like Grand- father Tancredo, from southern Italy. “The intellectual superiority of our Nordic group over the Alpine, Mediterranean and negro groups” wrote Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham, who popularized the army data after the war, “has been demonstrated.”16 Only “negroes” were less intelligent than southern and eastern Europeans, a point made again by Columbia University psychologist Henry Garrett, former presi- dent of the American Psychological Association, when he cited the army test results in his testimony against school desegregation in one of the cases leading to the 1954 Brown decision.17 Despite the growing volume of critical analyses debunking the racial theories and the shoddy science of the eugenicists, the miasma of racialism lived on.

But in the long chain connecting the country’s historical nativism, the eugenic “science” of the 1920s and 1930s, and its shifting immigration restriction policies, past and present, it was Harry Laughlin who was far and away the most prominent single link, both between eugenics and immigration policy and between the nativist ideology in the immigra- tion policies of the 1920s and the present. Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, from its founding in 1910 until 1939, was the author of such eugenic treatises as the Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the

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Introduction 9

Best Practical Means to Cut Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Amer- ican Population (1914).18 Laughlin was a major promoter—call him the godfather—of eugenic sterilization in this country and the legitimization it gave racist sterilization in Nazi Germany, whose eugenic policies he lavishly praised. In 1921, Laughlin had also become the “expert eugen- ics agent” and semiofficial scientific advisor to Representative Albert Johnson’s House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, which wrote the race-based national origins immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 that would be the basis of U.S. policy for the next forty years and, in some respects, well after.

It took Johnson’s committee four years of fiddling to find the for- mula that would achieve the desired ethnic immigration makeup with- out blatantly confessing racism and thus (among other things) risking diplomatic difficulties and too obviously trampling on the nation’s founding ideals. The number of immigrants from any particular coun- try, excepting Asians, who were already excluded, and people from the Western Hemisphere (including Mexico) who were exempt from the new quotas, was capped, first, at 2 percent of a country’s estimated share of the foreign-born, not in 1910 or 1920, the most recent cen- suses, but in 1890, when northern Europeans dominated the population of foreign-born. In 1924, the formula was changed to make it cosmeti- cally more defensible, but the proportions were nearly the same as is if they’d been based on the 1890 numbers. Even when immigrants from favored nations didn’t fill a given year’s quota, the quotas for other countries would remain fixed. As late as 1965, John B. Trevor Jr., the patrician New York lawyer who was the son of the man who devised the national origins formula, would testify against repeal of the origins quotas, warning that “a conglomeration of racial and ethnic elements” would lead to “a serious culture decline.”19

Laughlin spent his thirty-year career at the Eugenics Record Office reinforcing the belief, shared by legions of social reformers, Margaret Sanger among them, that “vicious protoplasm” had to be bred out of the native stock or, better yet, kept out of the country altogether.20 In 1937, while still at the ERO, Laughlin also became the cofounder and first director of the Pioneer Fund, whose prime research interest has been—and continues to be—race and racial purity. Arthur Jensen, the Berkeley psychologist who caused an uproar in the late 1960s and early 1970s with work purporting to show that blacks were intellectually inferior, and thus would never benefit from better schools, got more than $1 million from the fund.21 Stanford physicist William Shockley’s

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10 Introduction

Foundation for Research and Education in Eugenics and Dysgenics got $188,000 in Pioneer funding. Murray and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve, which argued that group differences in IQ between blacks and whites were primarily genetic, and which included a sympathetic discussion of “dysgenic pressures” in contemporary America, some coming from inferior immigrants, relied heavily on the work of researchers funded, according to one estimate, with $3.5 million in Pioneer money.22 The president of the fund in 2008 was J. Philippe Rushton, whose research purports to show a hierarchical order in the development of races, with Mongoloid (Asians) at the top, whites in the middle, and Negroid at the bottom, all of it accompanied by an inverse correlation between intel- ligence and the size of genitalia.

Through Laughlin and the Pioneer Fund particularly, the institu- tional, personal, and ideological links and parallels run almost directly from the eugenics and nativism of the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, the Pioneer Fund contributed roughly $1.5 million to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the organization started by the Michigan ophthalmologist John Tanton in 1979 that is probably the most influential immigration restriction organization in America today. FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies, and its sister organizations have been essential sources of information for the radio and TV talkers, the bloggers and the politicians leading the immigration restriction cam- paign. They were also the primary generators of the millions of faxes and e-mails that were major elements in the defeat of the comprehensive immigration reform bill and the “shamnesty” of the Dream Act in 2007. In Congress, both were accomplished with the threat of filibusters and by putting the immigrant’s face on inchoate economic and social anx i- eties—the flight of jobs overseas, the crisis in health care, the tightening housing market, the growing income gaps between the very rich and the middle class, and the shrinking return from rising productivity to labor.

We can’t see the jobs that no longer exist or that were shipped over- seas, but we can see the crowded schools and the Latinos waiting for day jobs in the parking lot at Home Depot. The descriptions of Mexi- cans taking jobs away from American workers, renting houses meant for small families, crowding them with twelve or fourteen people, and jamming their driveways with junk cars were often true but inevitably echoed the rhetoric of an earlier age. In 1900 also, “inferior” people were brought in as scabs, crowding tenements, bringing disease, crime, and anarchy (now become “terrorism”). The new arrivals of 2000, too,

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Introduction 11

endangered the nation and lowered living standards to what Edward Ross a century ago called their own “pigsty mode of life.”23

• • •

To anyone who’s followed the latter-day arguments against immigra- tion or the characterization of the hazards that immigrants, legal and illegal, pose to the nation’s economy, culture, social stability, and sys- tem of government—to any reader of Samuel Huntington’s book or Hoover Institution historian Victor Davis Hanson’s Mexifornia, or any reader of Pat Buchanan or watcher of Lou Dobbs on CNN or listener to Rush Limbaugh or the scores of other radio talkers who’ve made illegal immigration their prime issue—the warnings of the immigration restric- tionists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have to be eerily familiar. The nation is being “flooded”—another old metaphor—by people from backward places that make them culturally or politically unfit for assimilation. They are people (mostly men) who come here only to make money to send back to the old country, have dismally low levels of education, bring le

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