That is hardly surprising given the tone of newspaper coverage of the immigration issues. When The Times of London reported that 193,000 foreign-born residents mostly from former British Commonwealth countries had become citizens, it ran the story under a banner headline across the whole top of the front page, “The Great UK Passport Giveaway.” The story made no mention of poignant ceremonies at government offices where people proudly recite an oath of allegiance and family and officials hug and congratulate them for assuming the responsibilities of citizenship, as happens every day in the United States.18
The British government under Prime Minister David Cameron attempted to cap the number of non-E.U. citizens and government vans canvassed immigrant areas with posters worded “Go Home or Face Arrest” to discourage Romanian and Bulgarian immigration. In 2011, Cameron declared the “doctrine of state multiculturalism” a failure and warned that Islamic extremists were graduating from British universities and becoming terrorists because multiculturalism “encouraged different cultures to live separate lives” and made it “hard to identify with Britain” because it “allowed the weakening of [Britain’s] collective identity.” To show he was dead serious about what was happening to Britain going into the 2015 general elections, Cameron announced he would negotiate with other E.U. leaders to establish a four-year waiting period before their nationals could get in-work benefits or access to social housing, a right to deport immigrants who have not found work after six months, and a much longer waiting period before job seekers from new E.U. entrants such as Turkey may come to Britain. And as the ultimate leverage, he committed to hold an in-or-out referendum in 2017 on Britain’s membership in the European Union if the Conservative Party forms the next government.19
Even before Islamist French Muslim terrorists slaughtered ten journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo and five Jews at a kosher supermarket, two-thirds of the French public believed there were too many immigrants in the country and almost 60 percent believed immigrants make little effort to integrate into French society. Just think about that poll question. It assumes that immigrants are obligated and judged by their degree of integration into a unified and static French identity.20
The French courts have upheld a 2004 prohibition against conspicuous religious symbols in schools that are meant to be secular and a 2011 prohibition against covering one’s face in public. By these laws, France has effectively banned the wearing of the niqab in public and head scarves in schools. The French public overwhelmingly supports these laws and argues that they protect human rights and the secularism needed for religious liberty.21
Revulsion at the Islamist terrorist attack of January 2015 brought 3.6 million people to march in protest in Paris and cities across France. In a sign of unity, Jewish, Muslim, and Catholic leaders including Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas were featured prominently in the front rows of the marchers. The leaders of the French government called for national unity and for reaffirming the values of liberty and the Republic. They vowed to protect the Muslim and Jewish communities, yet you did not hear any openness to multiculturalism or any new model for dealing with France’s diversity. In fact, you did not hear from Marine Le Pen at all, because the National Front leaders were not invited to join the march, though she did urge government surveillance of French mosques.22
The European public’s reaction against immigration and the elite’s failure to defend national identities got fully expressed in the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. The populist, anti-immigration, Eurosceptic bloc in the parliament grew by two-thirds, led by Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN), which took a quarter of the vote and topped the polls in France for the first time. It joins the U.K. Independence Party, which finished first in Britain. Austria’s Freedom Party won 21 percent of the vote, and Greece’s Golden Dawn, with its prominent display of Nazi salutes, won 10 percent.23
But these anti-immigrant and nationalist parties are also a growing force in national politics, and they are shattering the electoral coalitions of both the established center-left and center-right parties. Austria was formally ostracized when the anti-Muslim and anti-immigration Freedom Party won 27 percent of the vote in 1999 under Jörg Haider and joined the government, though the FPO now regularly gets a fifth of the vote in national elections. The Progress Party in Norway won about 23 percent of the vote in 2009, and the far-right Sweden Democrats doubled their support to 12.9 percent in 2014. Both have forced a national debate over welfare benefits for immigrants and the impact of immigration on national identity.24
The U.K. Independence Party won its first parliamentary seats in by-elections in 2014, and while it won only one seat in the 2015 general election, it quadrupled its support nationally, getting 13 percent of the vote. UKIP leader Nigel Farage told his party delegates that “in scores of our cities and market towns, this country in a short space of time has frankly become unrecognizable.” Farage declared, “Whether it is the impact on local schools and hospitals, whether it is the fact in many parts of England you don’t hear English spoken anymore. This is not the kind of community we want to leave to our children and grandchildren.” That disdain for immigration and the E.U. as well as the condescension of the cosmopolitan and political elites have allowed the UKIP to build deepening support among disaffected working-class and older voters determined to affirm traditional British values.25
The quandary facing the established parties played out vividly in the third season of Borgen, the top-rated TV series in Denmark and Britain, which follows the fictionalized first female prime minister. She is forced to form her own party because she is outraged that all the mainstream parties have catered to the anti-immigration Freedom Party, starting with their support for a new proposal to deport immigrants found guilty of a misdemeanor. Then, real life took over. In 2015, the Danish People’s Party surprised the pollsters, finished as the second largest party and ensured a new right-wing government would act to address the influx of immigrants. The center is not holding in real life and in this fictionalized television world, and it is the nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-elite parties that are setting the agenda.
What is missing in the European countries is a broadly accepted framework that sets rules for governing immigration and integration and that accepts the new diversity as part of country’s character. Clinton’s “diversity is our strength” formula seemed like a pretty innocent way to organize a country in light of the big disruptions produced by ongoing globalization, yet his approach is winning out and working. In any case, it is the hand America has been dealt.
THE NEW IMMIGRANT COUNTRY
When fashioning the U.S. Constitution and justifying our form of government, the author of Federalist Paper, No. 2 wrote:
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.
He gave voice to an assumption ascendant then and to this day in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia about what is necessary for a country to be stable, united, governable, and capable of making progress for its own citizenry. Our founders solved the inconvenient problems of Native Americans, slaves, and women by excluding them constitutionally from full personhood, citizenship, or enfranchisement, as was the norm in that era. The first Federalist administration after George Washington passed the Alien Acts, which gave the president the power to expel foreigners and extended the residency requirement for citizenship from five to fourteen years.26
That incipient nativism was stifled once the Jeffersonian Democrats won the 1800 election. They repealed these laws and opened the country. Amazingly, for the first four decades of the nineteenth century, there were no new national laws regulating immigration.27
From the beginning, the economic and political elites and the public intellectuals constructed an intellectual framework that highlighted America as a welco
ming nation for people from different traditions, histories, and battles. The revolutionary ideals in the Declaration of Independence and the dominant Protestantism did presume an essential equality and that different people would come to live in unity. The Jeffersonian Democrats generally supported the liberal revolutions across Europe, and Latin America welcomed their refugees. Between the 1850s and the end of the nineteenth century, German immigrants, many of whom went to the Midwest, were the largest immigrant group, followed by British, Irish, Scandinavians, and French Canadians. They were opposed to slavery, and almost one-half million foreign-born men served in the Union Army. There was brief rioting among the Irish working class of New York in opposition to the draft, but for the most part the shared experience of the Civil War subsumed immigrant distinctions under a common nationalism.28
The commercial and business classes promoted immigration and brought a rising number of laborers to the cities, railroads, interior land grants, mines, and manufacturing jobs from Pennsylvania to the Rockies. From 1870 until 1920, one-third of the employees in manufacturing were immigrants. The New England factories and the agents of different states actively recruited workers in Europe and French Canada and promoted it as central to American prosperity. The opening up of America and the expanding immigration went hand in hand with the invention of the steam engine that made the Industrial Revolution transforming and catapulted America to its economic ascendant position.29
America’s leaders mostly accepted that different peoples would assimilate and become part of America’s nationalism. Indeed, Radical Republicans began to argue before the Civil War, and certainly with Emancipation, that African Americans and the former slaves could have freedom and live in harmony and unity. The post–Civil War Republican Party pledged to encourage immigration. The democratic and Christian traditions created a framework for, in John Highan’s words, “an inclusive nationality, at once diverse and homogeneous, ever improving as it assimilated many types of men into a unified superior people.”30
Liberal enlightened opinion, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes, described America as a unique country. Holmes labeled Americans as “the Romans of the modern world”—“the great assimilating people.” And Melville: “We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western Hemisphere all tribes and peoples are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future which shall see the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearthstone in [an American] Eden.”31
Even Darwin and social Darwinists wrote about an America that received the most ambitious of those from Europe and created a melting pot that was producing a higher order of man. Fredrick Jackson Turner wrote of immigrants reaching the Mississippi Valley: “In this crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”32
That was a lot more romantic than the teeming tenements that immigrants occupied in most of America’s cities. The muckrakers famously focused on what was really happening in the slaughterhouses and factories and tenements of Chicago and New York where immigrants lived and worked. “Life here means the hardest kind of work almost from the cradle.” Jacob A. Riis described “Jewtown” on the Lower East Side, where there were 330,000 Jews per square mile, almost double the crowding of London at its worst. Every foot, alley, and child was crowded and dirty. But it was worse still, says Riis, for “the Italian [who] comes in at the bottom.” They were the preferred tenants because they were, according to Riis, “content to live in a pig-sty and [submit] to robbery at the hands of the rent-collector without murmur.” And while it was well known for all the immigrants that there was some level below which a man’s wages could not fall, “woman’s wages have no limit, since the paths of shame are always open to her.”33
Yet these immigrants had only recently fled the potato famine in Ireland, the deep poverty of southern Italy, and the anti-Semitic pogroms in Galicia, the mandated region for Jewish settlement in Imperial Russia. America began as a refuge for people who fled oppression in Europe and sought freedom here, as Tom Paine wrote at the time of the Revolution. More than a century later, Emma Lazarus penned a poem to raise funds for erecting the base of the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”34
But the waves of immigration produced waves of opposition that would ultimately taper off the free flow of immigrants after World War I. Indeed, the growing resentment and organization against immigration would keep the Statue of Liberty dedication speeches focused on promoting liberty more than opening America’s doors to refugees. The growing opposition of Evangelical Protestants, white southerners, and northern reformers was increasingly being heard.35
Anti-Irish, anti-Catholic sentiment was first to break through in strong nativist form. The Irish had made their way into the eastern cities working as common laborers and in the new industries. But with Catholicism dominant in the surrounding Spanish and French territories, this influx looked especially threatening to some. Emerging critics worried that the authoritarian Church and papacy were incompatible with American liberty. They spoke of a Catholic Church with “separate organization, unknown to the laws,” and not acting “as a portion of the great American family of freemen.”36
In the 1850s, the anti-immigration societies formed the American Party. It was consumed with Irish immigration, the rising power of the Catholic Church, and the flock of new Catholic voters available to the urban machines. With 427,000 immigrants arriving in 1854, and nearly one-quarter of them Irish, the “nativist” candidates won six governorships the next year. With little evidence of the welcoming tone in Emma Lazarus’s poem, the American Party warned that the “almshouses of Europe” are being “emptied upon our coast,” transporting “the feeble, the imbecile, the idle and intractable.” Sooner than you can imagine, it claimed, “the natives of the soil [will be] a minority in their own land!”37
More than anything, the anti-immigrant forces feared the electoral power of new immigrants. The Philadelphia Inquirer cautioned that many “get no farther than New York” before they “take out naturalization papers” and “sell themselves to Tammany.” Henry George wrote of the British government paying to empty ports on the western coast of Ireland and “dumping them on the wharves of New York and Boston.”38
A couple of decades later, the American Protective Association won some Republican political support when it attacked that “un-American ecclesiastical institution,” boycotted Catholic merchants, and pledged never to vote for a Catholic. They fabricated a document entitled “Instructions to Catholics” that was supposedly circulated by papal agents. “In order to find employment for the many thousands of the faithful who are coming daily to swell the ranks of our catholic army, which will in due time possess this land,” it stated, without much subtlety, “we must secure control of every enterprise requiring labor” and “remove or crowd out the American heretics who are now employed.”39
That deep Protestant hostility to the Catholic Church would survive a century—forcing John F. Kennedy, late in the 1960 campaign, to address the Protestant ministers of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, telling them: “But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured—perhaps deliberately.” So he restated, to be clear: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” That means, “I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.”40
The expanded federal role to control and limit immigration came piecemeal and was contested every step of the way. It took four decades before America’s unique history with global migration was sharply curtailed. The deep recessions of the 1870s and 1880s were impetuses for t
he first laws in this spirit. The Immigration Act of 1882 made authority over immigration a federal responsibility and refused entry to those likely to become public charges. In addition, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 placed a ten-year moratorium on Chinese immigration, reflecting the virulent attitudes toward Chinese labor, even among the new Irish immigrants. The 1891 Immigration Act went further, confirming the federal control over immigration, commanding the deportation of illegal immigrants and those who became a public charge within one year of their arrival, and making steamship companies responsible for returning rejected immigrants.41
The assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist of foreign extraction in 1901 provided fodder for those seeking to restrict immigration. The Congress passed laws allowing for the deportation of foreign anarchists and extending the period to three years when an immigrant could be deported for becoming a public charge. And, alert to the political advantage Democrats were gaining with the immigrant population, the Naturalization Act of 1906 barred the distribution of immigration papers on the eve of an election.42
The opponents of immigration battled to impose a head tax on each new immigrant and to require that they take literacy tests in their native language. The proponents of these restrictions now included the American Federation of Labor, some civic reformers, and nearly every southern U.S. senator. By the turn of the century, major sections of the Republican Party allied with the anti-immigrant movements and led the battle for further immigration restrictions. Senators such as Henry Cabot Lodge lent legitimacy to the idea that Anglo-Saxon stock was in jeopardy and the country was at risk of being overrun.43
After such ferment, what is most striking in this account was the inability of the anti-immigration forces to pass into law anything more substantial. Serious restrictions were lost or blocked in the Congress or vetoed by successive presidents. The Republican Party and the labor unions were both divided on the issue, and big commercial interests continued to believe America’s industrial miracle needed the fuel of continued influxes of immigrant labor.44
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