We Need More Immigrants

by OSCAR HANDLIN

THE measure which became the McCarranWalter Immigration and Nationality Act was long in preparation. It passed in June of 1952 with substantial majorities in both houses; even a presidential veto did not stand in its way. In the months of its consideration it encountered no substantial opposition.

Yet it was not long before accusations of prejudice and injustice were echoing throughout the land. During the campaign, politicians preparing for the election began to take an interest in the matter. By the fall, both Eisenhower and Stevenson had spoken out in vigorous denunciation. As the year came to a close hardly a voice was heard in defense of the new law.

Surprised, the chief sponsors of the offending act pointed out it was largely a codification of existing statutes and administrative practices. Nevertheless, President Eisenhower’s State of the Union message plainly stated that demands for a change would not long be put off. What neither Senator McCarran nor Congressman Walter realized was that they had brought to light the unlovely residue of outworn prejudices that now stand in the way of our own national interest.

The heart of this legislation, carried over from a law of 1924, is the system of national origins quotas. The law provides for the admission of a little over 150,000 newcomers a year. But the available places are allocated among the nationalities by a rigid, inflexible formula supposedly based upon the contribution of each foreign country to the total American stock of 1920. Thus Great Britain may send us well over 65,000 immigrants annually, while Italy can send less than 0000 and Greece about 300.

Whatever justifications may today be made for this system, those who contrived it thirty years ago were altogether candid as to their reasons for enacting it. They hoped by this means to limit the total of new entrants; but, more important, they hoped also to sift out for admission those folk most capable of becoming Americans. The quotas were contrived to let in more Germans and Englishmen than Italians or Greeks because the Congressmen of the 1920s were convinced that the former could adjust to life in the United States and the latter could not.

That conviction rested upon a theory and upon a semblance of fact. The theory, shocking in retrospect, was elemental. Mankind, it was then held, was divided into biologically distinct races. American civilization was the work of the AngloSaxon branch of the great Nordic, or Aryan, family. Additions to the population from the kindred stocks of northern and western Europe were therefore relatively harmless—in moderation perhaps desirable. Contact with the inferior Latins or Slavs, “beaten men from beaten races,” was dangerous.

These racist assumptions were buttressed with pseudoscientific pseudo facts. Between 1890 and 1920 a whole generation of sociologists laboriously turned out the data to show that all the ills of American life had their source in the wrong type of immigration. Unemployment and low wages, city slums and crime, vice and intemperance were alike held to be the products of national carelessness which left our gates unguarded against the brutish hordes from southern and eastern Europe.

The crown of these studies was the great report of the immigration commission in 1911. Product of years of investigation, its forty-two imposing volumes seemed to prove conclusively that the “new" immigrants from the Mediterranean and Slavic lands were inferior to the “old" Nordic immigrants. Few legislators were able to read through the long and complex report in order to penetrate the distortions of evidence from which the commission assembled its biased conclusions. Nevertheless, for years thereafter, here was all the official support race prejudice demanded.

Not that much support was needed in the four years after 1920 when the new immigration laws took their form! These were, after all, the years when the Ku Klux Klan drew into its ranks some 5 million Americans, frightened by the specter of the Catholic and the Jew. These were the years when the United States, revolting against all that was foreign, rejected its European antecedents and turned against the League of Nations and the World Court.

The same distrust of anything foreign planted in the law a consistent animus against the alien. In the precipitate retreat toward a tight isolationism, it made sense of a sort to slam the gates shut against practically all but the closest blood-kin of the original Americans, But whether blood-kin or not, the alien was thereafter suspect. The least misstep on his part became ground for exclusion or deportation. The burden of proof was to be always upon him. Potentially dangerous, he was not to be welcomed but grudgingly tolerated. This was the heritage the 1920s left us.

2

THE law of 1924 remained unchallenged upon our statute books for a quarter-century. Americans who came to doubt its wisdom and propriety nevertheless felt it useless to reopen the question. Memory of the dark emotions of the earlier debate silenced those who might have sought a change. Even during the war and the cold war, when the national economy could have used immigrants and when the victims of Nazism and Communism could have used refuge, it seemed safer not to stir up the dying embers of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism by agitating the issue anew. Better, it appeared, to accept the law as settled and to try to forget the hatreds that had brought it forth.

Unwillingness to discuss the problem left the public ignorant of its import. Immigration was thought to have no bearing upon the welfare of the country. Occasional appeals were made on behalf of displaced persons, but these were couched in terms of their need rather than of ours. Our sympathies were touched, but not our interests; and we remained apathetic toward the larger issue of immigration.

Hence it was not surprising that the law of 1952 should reaffirm the principles of 1924, Senator McCarran is correct when he says the new act follows along the lines earlier legislation had already marked out. The McCarran-Walter Act retains the national origins quota system and, within the assumptions of the 1924 act, strengthens and makes more rigid the obnoxious racial features. So a British subject born in London is nevertheless considered Chinese if even one of his parents is tainted with yellow blood. For the same reason, English citizenship does not entitle the Jamaica Negro to use the British quota. Race, not nativity or citizenship, is the ultimate test.

Similarly the burdensome administrative provisions accumulated under the old laws are now extended to the point of meanness. Consular officials who deal with potential immigrants are endowed with arbitrary power against which the alien has no right of appeal. The newcomer bears the responsibility for any error in his documents, including errors he himself did not commit. A trivial mistake by the American clerk in Naples can bar the Italian who, after years of waiting, has managed to reach these shores in good faith. A two-yearold baby adopted in Germany by an American army couple is even now threatened with deportation because of an irregularity in its admission.

Once hero, the alien faces imposing hazards. Minor missteps which would not be penalized in the case of citizens entail in his case the risk of deportation long after he has established roots here. Ignatz Mezzei, who visited Europe after twentyfive years of blameless residence in Buffalo, was recently denied readmission, and cannot even secure a statement of the charges against him. Naturalization brings no security. The foreign-born citizen who, in all innocence and ignorance, joins what seems to be a labor organization may later discover, to his sorrow, that it appears on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. This action, which is not a crime for natives, will subject him to denaturalization proceedings and ultimately to deportation.

Pervasive hostility to the aliens reaches over to injure the native Americans with whom they have contact. The law refuses to recognize that citizens sometimes have a vital concern in the fate of an immigrant. American husbands have thus found themselves powerless in attempts to intercede on behalf of their foreign-born wives denied admission to the country; and American children have been forced to stand by while their immigrant parents were ordered deported on trivial grounds. The whole spirit of the law breathes a consistent animus toward the strangers in our midst. The McCarranWalter Act thus absorbs all the fears and prejudices of the 1920s and drags them incongruously out into a society that has long outgrown them.

That accounts for the mounting indignation against it. Many groups perceived at once that the law perpetuated an unfavorable judgment of their ability to be Americanized, of their worth as citizens. The slur implicitly cast upon all the “new” immigrants was resented not simply by such among them, as the Polishor Italian-Americans, who still had friends and relatives eager for the opportunity to migrate. It was resented equally by Irishand Jewish-Americans, who no longer have an immediate stake in immigration, but who do have a profound concern with the imputation of their inferiority. Indeed Americans of every ethnic background have come to perceive the contradiction between this measure and the basic American ideals of diversity and cultural freedom.

As a result, the act has had no real defenders. Senator McCarran’s feeble accusation that the attack upon it was led by Communists fell flat in the face of the actual character of the attackers; even the Senator from Nevada could find no reds among the Catholic archbishops, the Protestant and Jewish clergy, the labor unions, and veterans’ groups who united in criticism of the law. Only those who have ventured to affirm that the United States must become a purely white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country have been able conscientiously to support the McCarran-Walter Act.

The great achievement of the act was thus unintentional. By exposing what we long hid from ourselves, it pointed to the immediate necessity for a fresh immigration policy in accord with our true national interests.

The start is repudiation of ideas we no longer accept. Thirty years of experience have dissolved the old prejudices. No respectable scientist now accepts the racist dogma of inherent biological differences among men; and such ideas as the Klan once peddled with ease are now everywhere regarded with abhorrence. We know more than the old commission did of the part immigrants actually played in the making of America. In particular we have learned that people from every cultural background are capable of leading creative lives within the free institutions of the United States— Armenians, Syrians, Greeks, and Italians, as well as Germans, Swedes, and Englishmen.

Now and then the old bias rears its head in accusations of Italian criminality or Greek cupidity, as the distinctive names of exceptional individuals single them out for special notice. But unless we are confused by prejudice we know that careful studies have shown crime and cupidity to be the failings of no particular group in American life — that Luciano was no more typical of Italians than Dillinger was of natives. And what the sociologist gathers from his community survey, the man on the street has already understood from the roster of the baseball team for which he roots and from the cast of his favorite TV show. By the practical tests of working together, of fighting loyally together in two wars, all these folk have shown how thoroughly they have been Americanized.

The old specious considerations of national origins need therefore no longer obscure our vision of the means through which we might make immigration serve our own domestic and international interests.

3

AT HOME, we have already felt the adverse effects of restrictive policies, which are arranged paradoxically to frustrate themselves. The law assumes that an annual immigration of 150,000 is desirable; but makes it certain that that number can never enter, by setting aside almost 70 per cent of the quota places for countries like Great Britain which are no longer producing emigrants. In periods of depression and unemployment, this is a harmless eccentricity; whatever system we adopt should have a provision for halting t he flow of newcomers when our own laborers are without work. But in periods of prosperity, the unused quotas entail an actual loss of productive power.

Through the war and since, several sections of the country have suffered from shortages of particular types of labor, in manufacturing, in agriculture, in domestic services, and in a variety of useful tasks that Americans find unattractive. Groups with favorable connections in Congress have managed to secure relaxation of the law for their own benefit; Mexican transients are thus allowed to come in to work in the beet and the fruit fields, and Basque herders to tend the sheepfolds of the Southwest. Industries without the influence to secure such dispensations would also welcome moderate additions to the labor force. And no doubt many a housewife thinks with regret of the willing maids who might relieve her of her drudgery, but against whom our gates are shut.

In the past, these incoming hands added strength to our productive system; they are capable of doing so in the future. Immigration has always had the effect of raising the standards of native labor. By taking the lowest places in industry and agriculture and, as consumers, by expanding domestic markets, the new immigrants helped those who were here earlier to advance into superior clerical, managerial, or professional positions.

Immigration can continue to have the same effect. Certainly American workingmen will gain by the presence of the new hands, so long as their own employment and their own wage rates continue to be protected by the vigilance of their unions. Under such circumstances our economy, which expands despite the gloomy predictions of its critics, will profit from the immigration of fresh laborers.

The long-term effects of the block that deprives us of the advantages of immigration may be more serious than those which are immediately apparent. The war years saw a significant rise in the American birth rate. But that temporary change, induced by the special circumstances of the period, did not reverse permanently the downward trend that has persisted for three generations and seems likely to continue into the future.

The consequences of that decline are already asserting themselves. Our population is no longer increasing as rapidly as it did in the past. There is every indication that the rate of growth will continue to fall and that, in two decades or so, our population will level off and actually start to decline. The economic and social repercussions will be grave enough. But the threat to our security in a world in which the powers hostile to us continue to grow in population can hardly be imagined.

Immigration is not the only means of counteracting the falling birth rate. But it is a convenient and expeditious way of doing so at no cost to the nation. A moderate flow of newcomers, regulated in terms of our changing needs, would add invaluable strength to our resources.

4

SUCH domestic considerations alone might dispose us to a review of immigration policy. But we cannot now think in terms of our domestic requirements alone. We do not live in the isolated, self-contained America the men of the 1920s dreamed of. Our commitments and interests are world-wide, reaching east as far as Iran, west as far as Korea. What happens in these distant areas of the globe we know will determine our future. We cannot act in any matter without regard to our stakes around the earth.

We are thus decisively dedicated to the reconstruction of such countries as Greece and Italy. The hundreds of million dollars we devote to that end are spent not so much out of philanthropic sentiment as out of a larger self-interest. The strength of our allies is, after all, our strength. In these places, overpopulation is a serious obstacle to social improvement; the annual emigration of even a few thousand surplus families would bring a considerable measure of relief. Do we not injure ourselves when the anachronistic quota system prevents us from extending that relief?

Throughout the world, the inability to use immigration as an instrument of national policy hampers our struggle against Communism. Behind the Iron Curtain we have a vast, if undefined, number of potential allies, people for whom America is the one hope against the tyranny that oppresses them. These are the men whom Secretary of State Dulles has called to flock to our standards. Hundreds of them drift regularly across the boundaries into the Western zones of Germany and Austria.

What hope does America now offer these refugees? Suppose a Latvian has taken the risk of escaping. Suppose he meets all our requirements: is sound in mind and body, not a subversive, not likely to become a public charge, has an American sponsor and guarantor. Let him then apply for his visa at our consulate. He will find, alas, that there is a waiting list, that the Latvian quota unfortunately admits only 235 a year, and that his turn will not come until the year 2274.

He will not be consoled to discover that Englishmen and Germans, who do not wish to emigrate, could be admitted at once. Rather he will begin to speculate on why he should be regarded as a less desirable future citizen than the Briton or German. He will certainly find it more difficult to discover any meaning in American ideals or in the American way of life. For our own actions will have indicated that we regard those as applicable only to the favored few among the races.

We are engaged in a war unlike any we have ever fought before, a war fought as much in the minds and hearts of men as on the battlefields. In the competition for allies we cannot afford to overlook any weapon, much less one tried by experience and in accord with our true ideals.

Long since, we proclaimed that the cause of America was the cause of all mankind. Until the 1920s, our immigration policy implemented that promise. Recognizing no distinctions of origin or creed among those we admitted to residence and citizenship, we gave the people of the world the assurance that what we were struggling to achieve, they could also attain. The fund of friendship and faith we then acquired has only partly been dissipated by the policies we now follow.

It can be restored. Only a few years ago, a tide of reassuring letters from Italian-Americans to relatives in the Old Country helped to swing an election away from the Communists there. Every newcomer who hereafter settles in the United States and begins of his own accord to write home to people he knows will be a far more effective propagandist for Americanism than the expert public relations men we now send abroad. On the other hand, the slurs upon millions of our own citizens who are not “Anglo-Saxon” in antecedents, the animus towards strangers, and the prejudiced quota system undermine confidence in the message we are attempting to spread abroad. Self-interest and principle alike dictate a new line of legislation free of the disastrous prejudices of the present law.

National interest alone should shape immigration policy. There need be no change in the longstanding safeguards against the entrance of undesirables likely to become public charges, against the diseased, the disabled, the insane, and the subversives who advocate the overthrow of government by force. All such applicants for admission can be excluded as individuals on the ground that they are not likely to contribute constructively to our culture.

The law could also limit the total number of newcomers each year without expressing any invidious prejudices. That total should not be arbitrary and fixed; it should be flexible and should bear some meaningful relationship to our resources and population. At the moment, for instance, it would not strain our capacity to admit one immigrant for every 600 Americans. A maximum of 250,000, with the proviso that the President could lower that sum when necessary in periods of unemployment and depression, would be more reasonable than the present fixed but unattainable figure of 154,000. No year would then see more newcomers than could be absorbed, nor fewer than can readily find places.

Within the total, the central principle of admission for eligible immigrants should be “first come, first served.” The potential migrant would register and be examined by the American consul as at present. His name would go on a register or waiting list, as at present. But that register need not be broken up, as it now is, according to national origin. Instead the places would be assigned simply in accordance with length of wait. That would eliminate the inequity of compelling some people to linger hopelessly in Europe for decades, whileothers enter the land of promise without any delay at all. More important, it would relieve us of the legal absurdity that now leaves many places annually unfilled, while scores of eager, worthy people are turned away.

Special provision could be made, if need be, for particular categories of newcomers. Some preference could be given to unify the families of American citizens. Part of the total could be allocated in special cases for the relief of political and religious refugees, or for assistance in the reconstruction of parts of the world with which the United States is especially concerned. In the next few years we could thus set aside a portion of available quota numbers for Soviet escapees or for some of the surplus population of Italy and Greece. But all such assignments would rest upon a calculation of American interests and not upon racial prejudice.

With this change must come a more general change of administrative attitudes. Immigration is not a necessary evil; if it is an evil at all, it is not necessary. If, on the other hand, it is a source of potential advantage to the United States, it should be treated as such.

That means the newcomers must not be simply tolerated as supplicants whom we condescend to favor. Future citizens of the United States, they should be treated as such, with all the regard for due process, the rights of the individual, and respect for proper procedures that our law enjoins upon officials in their other contacts with the public. The meannesses of the McCarran—Walter Act must disappear to give the immigrant, in his first encounter with our government, a fair impression of our democracy.

We no longer live in the world of free movement that peopled the United States in the nineteenth century. We cannot restore the old conditions that formerly added 35 million immigrants to our strength. Had we no restrictive laws at all, the prohibitive cost of transportation and the barriers other countries set in the way of the departing immigrants would be enough to limit the flow.

But we can recapture some of the old values, though on another scale. Whatever the limits we set on total immigration, we are not likely again to find millions of applicants crowding to our shores. In the future we are more likely to attract smaller numbers of individuals drawn to us by personal connections or by attachment to our way of life. In the next few years these will probably be Italians, Greeks, and Poles, sponsored and helped across by families, friends, and voluntary organizations.

The new direction of our policy would, however, have a meaning in all parts of the world. In places like India or Indonesia, it is true, only a handful are likely to be affected directly; not many in those countries will ever have the funds to meet the heavy expenses of coming here. But even there the reversal of our restrictive policy would be significant as a token of our attitude toward the world.

There as much as anywhere, the anxious regard of millions of men is fixed upon us. They wonder to what extent Americanism is for them a true alternative to Communism. Do the ideals we hold up to their view, of freedom, equality, and respect for the individual, hold for all mankind; or are they valid only for the favored breeds, as the national origins system implies? A new immigration policy, free of racial prejudices, would help restore the confidence of millions who will themselves never have the opportunity to migrate that Americanism is, in our view, a way of life feasible for all people.

The highest considerations of self-interest call upon us for that affirmation.