DR: What would you like the government of the United States or society to do to make certain that gays and lesbians have the rights they’re entitled to?
LF: What the Supreme Court decided in June 2020 was crucial, but there needs to be the equality act that Bella Abzug and Ed Koch introduced in 1974 and in 1975 to assure the rights of the LGBTQ community. Because as has happened in many places, you can get married on a Sunday and still be fired from your job on a Monday. Hopefully because of the Supreme Court decision, that won’t happen so often, but the word needs to be spread that the Supreme Court made that decision last June.
DR: Should somebody use the word gay, lesbian, or an acronym? What would you say is the right way to identify people?
LF: Our community is so diverse in terms of all demographics, race and class and generation. People of my generation, for instance, will never adjust to the word queer. Young people love it. It’s a good umbrella term for young people. I prefer lesbian or gay. A lot of people now, within the community, call themselves nonbinary. I think it’s important to ask someone what their preferred pronouns are. Maybe the best approach is always to ask, “How should I refer to you?”
JIA LYNN YANG on the History of Immigration
National Editor, New York Times; author of One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924–1965
“We don’t have some kind of inherent right to be here that was guaranteed by the founders. These are laws that are fought over, that have been fought over, that are being fought over very fiercely right now. We, as a nation, are always tussling over who gets to count as an American and what requirements you have to have.”
Far more than any other country in the world, the United States has been a nation of immigrants. The country was founded by immigrant settlers from Europe; during much of the country’s history, immigration was encouraged, in part to provide workers for the expanding territory and the growing economy; and as a result, today the country has by far a higher number of immigrants (about forty-six million) and children of immigrants (about forty million) than any other country.
But the welcoming image and words on the Statue of Liberty can be misleading, for there have certainly been long periods when the U.S. was clearly not very welcoming to immigrants unless they were from certain western European countries or belonged to certain religions. Indeed, the country whose self-image has long been that of a “melting pot” was anything but that for long periods of time.
For instance, following the events of 9/11, immigration from most Middle Eastern countries saw increased regulation and enforcement. And during the Trump administration, efforts were made to limit immigration from Muslim-majority countries; to restrict visas for students, academics, and highly skilled workers; and to erect a wall between Mexico and the United States in order to restrict illegal immigration, which, in combination with other measures, slowed legal Mexican and Latin American immigration.
But the Trump period was relatively short in the nation’s time span. The far greater constraint on immigration began to occur in the late 1800s and early 1900s when members of Congress (presumably reflecting constituent concern) felt that the homogeneity of the country was being threatened by increased immigration from southern and eastern Europe, from Asia, and by Jews.
After many failed efforts in Congress to restrict the influx to the “desired” immigrants, the Johnson-Reed Act was passed in 1924. That act placed tight quotas on immigrants from countries or with backgrounds deemed less desirable. The result was reduced immigration generally, but particularly by those from eastern and southern Europe or who were Asian or Jewish.
While that legislation was seen by many as discriminatory and effectively barring from the country many talented and educated individuals, efforts to amend or repeal the legislation were met with fierce resistance in Congress and the State Department. But in the 1960s, President John Kennedy was interested in seeking a repeal, and President Lyndon Johnson completed that effort, working closely with Congress’s most ardent opponent of the existing law, House Judiciary Committee Chair Emanuel Celler.
The result was the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which removed discriminatory country and ethnic quotas and encouraged immigration of talented individuals or those with family ties to the United States. From that moment forward, largely until the Trump era, the United States was again seen as a welcoming beacon for those seeking a better and more productive life.
The story of this oscillating American welcome mat is told well by Jia Lynn Yang, then a deputy national editor at the New York Times, in a September 11, 2020, New-York Historical Society interview based on a book that she wrote on this subject. (She has since been named the Times’s national editor.) Her interest in this area, and the resulting book, was spurred by a look at how her forebears from China and Taiwan managed to get into the United States. As Yang researched the subject, she realized that, for a fair bit of American history, the country was not as immigrant-friendly as the Statue of Liberty might suggest.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): We like to say we are a nation of immigrants, but as you point out in the book, we were a nation of immigrants from certain places. If they came from China or Japan or southern Europe or Latin America, they weren’t as welcome for a long part of our history. Is that right?
JIA LYNN YANG (JLY): Yes, for the most part. We had pretty much open borders, period, until about a hundred years ago. At that point, we began to restrict immigration by ethnicity. All of us can trace our families to different points, right? At the beginning, you have many people from England. You have Irish immigrants, Germans, and then later you have people from other parts of the world. As those waves of new immigrants come in, there’s inevitably something of a backlash.
DR: Let’s talk about the beginning of the country. The settlers in the thirteen original colonies were mostly from England?
JLY: That’s right.
DR: Did they need a passport or visa to come here?
JLY: No, no documentation. This entire infrastructure we have is very recent.
DR: When the Constitution was ratified in 1788, was there any provision for immigration? Was there anything then about people coming in? Anybody could just show up in those days?
JLY: Pretty much. Benjamin Franklin helped create the earliest passports, which were kind of like letters of reference. When you traveled abroad, you had this piece of paper, but it wasn’t about your citizenship or your legal status. There were no visas. Passports didn’t become codified the way we think of them now until after World War I, when the League of Nations created a worldwide standard out of Europe.
Again, all this paperwork that we’re used to didn’t really exist then. The only thing from those early days that we’re still very much living the legacy of is that, in 1790, the founders created naturalization requirements. Those requirements said that only free white men of, quote-unquote, good moral character could become citizens, could naturalize. For a long time, only those people could become citizens after immigrating here.
DR: To become a citizen in the early days, did you have to take a test? You had to be here a certain number of years?
JLY: It changed over time. At some point there was a sense that if you came here, we really wanted to encourage you to become a citizen. You would basically file a petition for citizenship so that you were in an interim period of trying out being a citizen. I think in fact you could vote during that time. It’s almost like training wheels for citizenship.
It’s only now that we have a very different view. We cultivated immigrants as citizens more than we do today.
DR: I should point out that there was one provision in the Constitution that dealt with people coming to the country involuntarily. The slave trade was supposed to be eliminated by 1808. But coming voluntarily wasn’t really dealt with at all in the Constitution. When did Congress pass a law that said if you’re from a certain country, you cannot come
to this country?
JLY: The first instance of this, of singling out a group of people based on their ethnicity, is the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It’s a really important historic point, because once you see that law pass, there’s a succession of such attempts, peaking in the 1920s.
That is the beginning of a long era of adding restrictions based on people’s race and ethnicity. This law is really a backlash to the wave of Chinese migrant laborers, who were showing up in the West, searching for gold and, as we all know, helping to build railroads. They were competition for a lot of white workers on the West Coast. Out of that backlash this law’s passed, and it’s Chinese laborers in particular who are banned.
This changes immigration forever. There are more Korean and Japanese immigrants who come after, but this is such an important law for people—even those who aren’t Asian American—to know, because it’s the bedrock law that says, “We’re going to start restricting immigration, and the way we’re going to do it is singling you out by your ethnicity.”
DR: Most of the people coming to the United States were not from China. They weren’t from Mexico or Latin America. Most of the people coming in the 1800s to the United States were from western Europe, where the colonists had originally come from. They were coming from England, or they might have been coming from Ireland or Germany or Scandinavia.
But in the early part of the twentieth century, all of a sudden people are coming from southern Europe—Italians, Greeks. And a lot of people are coming who are Jewish.
This began to make people a little uncomfortable in the United States. They were thinking that the wrong type of people were coming. So during the early part of the twentieth century, the first twenty years, was there a big debate? What ultimately happened in 1924?
JLY: This is such an important period of American history. I think of New York, for instance, which overnight had a flood of Italian and Jewish immigrants who left a powerful and permanent imprint on the city that you can see if you spend any time in New York.
There were people who were Catholic, who were Jewish. They had different religions, they spoke different languages. They seemed really different, in different ways, and this set off a lot of alarm among, in particular, white Protestants.
This is when the idea of the melting pot is in the air. There’s a sense that there’s some assimilation, but there was also a feeling that these people were too different. They couldn’t be assimilated. There needed to be restrictions to protect America’s identity and, by that measure, ethnic identity. So they begin to pass ethnic quotas in the ’20s to stop this big migration from southern and eastern Europe.
DR: The concern was a little bit that these people were coming in and they were not well educated and they would work for lower wages than existing American citizens. But the main point you’re making is that there was a concern that there would be people who were not going to assimilate. They weren’t going to be white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant types, and the culture of the United States would dramatically change. Was that the main concern?
JLY: Yes. It was about the stability of the democracy, in these people’s minds, and they had a kind of science backing them. This is also a time when eugenics is completely mainstream—the breaking up of all of the human race down to the smaller groupings of ethnicities and race, and measuring the size of your head, and saying, for example, if you’re Jewish, it means that you have these inherent traits.
There was this sort of prejudice, especially from people in the white elite. People on the Upper East Side especially were horrified by these Jewish and Italian immigrants coming, but they also could point to this pseudoscience, which was later discredited, of course. But at the time this was fully accepted among American elites and intellectuals: “I’m uncomfortable personally with these people, but also the science tells me these are inferior people whom we don’t want coming into the U.S. and intermarrying and having children and diluting the quality of the typical American.”
DR: Before 1924 and the legislation we’ll talk about in a moment, if somebody who was Jewish or Italian or Greek came into New York or wherever and said, “Here I am,” there was no way to say, “Go back.” They just were here and you couldn’t kick them out?
JLY: There was a literacy test that had been added in 1917 as an early effort to begin to restrict all these different-seeming people, but it wasn’t all that effective. They didn’t want people with epilepsy or people who seemed mentally ill. A minuscule percentage of people were turned away.
Again, because there weren’t visas, you didn’t need to go to a consulate in your home country before you came. You just came on the boat.
If you could make the journey, you show up at Ellis Island and they basically say yes or no. If yes, then you’re in and that’s it. People weren’t deported either. So once you came in and you began to settle, it was unthinkable that you would be forced to leave.
DR: One time the National Archives gave me something that showed my grandfather at the age of eleven coming into the United States. It lists the ship, and it had the manifest, and it said, “Eleven years old Hebrew.” They emphasized religion.
In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act passed. What is that act, and why was it so significant in terms of changing the way we let people into the country?
JLY: This is such an important law to understand in American history. As we’ve been talking about, it’s open borders. You can just show up. There’s no paperwork really needed.
In 1924, based on this sort of world-of-eugenics ranking, all these races and ethnicities, Congress passes a series of very strict ethnic quotas that says, “We’re going to codify that we want people who are white Anglo-Saxons from northern and western Europe. We don’t want people from other parts of the world.”
They literally created quotas. They would say, “We want most of the people to come from these countries and only a few hundred from places where there had been no numerical limits before.”
And it wasn’t just that there were quotas. It was the symbolism of it. It was a very explicit way to say, as a nation, that America is defined by the races of the people who are living in the country. And so to preserve that idea of America, we have to turn away from this idea of a melting pot, turn away from the famous Emma Lazarus poem about being a place for the “huddled masses.”
People who supported the law explicitly said this. They said, “We are no longer to be a place for the huddled masses. We are going to keep America America by using these quotas.”
Once these quotas were passed, overnight there was a dramatic difference. Ellis Island is suddenly quiet, because you have to have a visa to come, and people don’t have them.
The ethnic makeup of the country is frozen in time. The percentage of immigrants really plummets, so that by the time you get to the 1950s, the ’60s, even into the ’70s, the percentage of foreign-born just keeps dropping. The older immigrants who had come in this wave that we’ve been discussing were dying, and there weren’t new people coming in.
And so by the ’50s—it’s astonishing to me—people thought about immigration as kind of a past era of American history. That there had been this mass migration before, but we had turned away from that. That was all part of the past, and we were never going to do that again.
DR: Many people thought in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s that this legislation was racist and anti-Semitic, among other things, and was hurting the country, because we weren’t getting immigrants coming in and we weren’t expanding the population, which we do with immigrants to some extent. Were efforts made to change the legislation?
JLY: Very much. There were people, in particular Jewish Americans, who understood what these laws symbolized right away. It wasn’t a mystery that people who supported them were quite openly anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic.
When the laws were passed, they were passed quite easily. There was mainstream support for this. This was a time of enormous isolationism in America generally, but from the moment they wer
e passed, Jewish activists and lawmakers in particular really tried to overturn them.
This became a huge tragedy during World War II, because during the Holocaust, there was of course a huge demand for people to escape Nazi Germany and to escape all the countries that Nazi troops were invading, and there were all these Jewish refugees looking for a place to resettle. But because of these quotas the U.S. had, it was impossible for them to come here.
There are just so many tragic stories of people desperately trying to leave Europe in this time of genocide and war and total upheaval. And they can’t come to the U.S. because of these quotas.
And so, motivated by how awful the quotas seemed to be, especially to those who watched what happened during World War II, people like President Truman tried to overturn them. In 1952, there was a huge fight on the Hill over it, but they kept failing. They kept failing because the quotas seemed very much by then common sense to people—like we want to keep America this way ethnically.
DR: During World War II, there were many people who went to President Roosevelt and said, “Jews are being killed in Europe. We have to either let them in on a special refugee exception or change the existing quotas.” You write about a very famous ship that came to our shores, the St. Louis. Can you describe what happened?
JLY: This ship arrives with all these Jewish refugees who have uncertain paperwork, and they are desperate to get to the U.S. They get so close that there are reports from the time that they can see the lights of Miami. That’s how close they are to the U.S., but essentially they don’t have the right papers.
They have a scheme that they’re going to go through Cuba somehow, but that all falls through. So this ship is sitting there, unable to dock. The State Department—which at the time was also quite anti-Semitic—is going through all the visa applications and saying yes and no and determining the fates of people’s entire families.
The American Experiment Page 37