Juan Williams

by Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate

  Many Hispanics, too, have used the national focus on the immigration drama for their own purposes. They dismiss calls that Hispanics deal with legitimate concerns over rising numbers of Mexican and Latin American legal and illegal aliens who make little or no effort to assimilate into life in the United States, even as they clamber to get into the country and enjoy the benefits of living here. The push for assimilation is now often dismissed inside the Latino community as a betrayal of an immigrant’s true identity. To this way of thinking, only self-hating immigrants move away from their native roots and the ethnic, nationalistic, and racial parameters of the old country. By that logic it has become politically correct and chic, especially among younger Latino immigrants, to disparage those Latinos making the effort to assimilate. What is hip among some young immigrants is remaining apart from the American mainstream and taking identity from refusal to fit into the American melting pot.

  In 2009, the Census Bureau reported that 97 percent of people coming to the United States from Mexico and the Dominican Republic spoke no English at home; 52 percent of the people born in another country report they don’t feel confident of their ability to speak English, much less write it. It has never been easier to see identity politics at play than it is today in large Latino communities, dissuading newcomers to America from doing the work necessary for assimilation and consciously breaking with the American tradition of “E Pluribus Unum”—or becoming one people out of many. Today well over half of U.S. immigrants are people of color born in Latin America. In California alone more than a quarter of the population is made up of immigrants. They have to deal with the twin barriers of race and language. And yet inside the Latino community, that very effort is often denigrated. This problem is compounded among illegal immigrants, whose status creates feelings of alienation. Nevertheless, it is critically important for such cultures to assimilate today because there is so much immigration. Self-segregation—remaining isolated and apart from the mainstream in America—is a self-defeating strategy for anyone who wants to be successful in America.

  I believe the Hispanic community has to take a firm stand against illegal immigration themselves, in order to break the logjam on overall immigration reform. They need to wave the red, white, and blue. Newly arrived Hispanic immigrants, in the tradition of earlier immigrants, should be trying to be more American than most Americans. The pretenders in this game are people who think they are still back home and celebrate the old languages and customs out of proportion to what they would do if they were back in their native land.

  This is a critically needed step to defuse much of the opposition to immigration reform. The congressional failure to act on immigration reform distracts from a legitimate discussion of the threat that immigrants who fail to assimilate pose to American society and democratic principles. But at the moment, the Republicans, the Democrats, recent immigrants, and leaders in America’s Latino community are all finding some advantage in not dealing with the immigration problem.

  The immigration crisis, as President Bush pointed out, goes beyond anxiety over the high number of immigrants in America today. It impacts language, culture, and unemployment. Yet the distortions caused by outright lies and politically correct assertions on immigration make it difficult for the public to keep track of the critical nexus between economic growth and welcoming talented immigrants into the United States. Somehow the immigration equation is reduced in political debates to low-wage, unskilled laborers who work in factories, kitchens, and fruit orchards. Unattended by this is the nation’s critical need to attract the world’s best minds, its most ambitious, driven, innovative people, in order to successfully compete in a global economy. It is also necessary to welcome people with money to invest. Yet these critical issues are rarely addressed in the rage in the media that passes for immigration debate.

  The heart of the concern raised by our top business leaders is that there is a shortage of H-1B visas, those documents that allow highly skilled foreigners to reside and work in the United States. Like tickets to a hot concert, they sell out within days of being offered. The limited number falls far short of the demand and the need in a country of three hundred million people striving to compete globally with China and other countries.

  After the 9/11 attacks, visas for top foreign students and skilled workers became even more difficult to obtain. The result is a brain drain; the United States is not keeping the top international talent that is often educated at the best American schools. “These policies work against urgent national economic priorities,” the Brookings Institution concluded in a 2011 report, “such as boosting economic vitality, achieving greater competitiveness in the global marketplace and renewing our innovation leadership.”

  The same conclusion was reached by an exasperated New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently said: “Our immigration policy is a form of national suicide.… We ship [top students from around the world who come to our nation’s top universities] home where they can take what they learned here and use it to create companies and products that compete with ours.”

  It was the same warning that came from an American-born entrepreneur, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Gates is a man looking for the best technological talent to boost his American-based company. He recently told a congressional committee on science and technology: “We provide the world’s best universities … and the students are not allowed to stay and work in the country.… The fact is [other countries’] smartest people want to come here and that’s a huge advantage to us, and in a sense we are turning them away.”

  There have been no serious rebuttals to Bloomberg and Gates. The right-wing talk-show hosts carp that the smart foreigners being celebrated by Bloomberg and Gates are taking the jobs of slightly less educated Americans. It is a weak response, because in a global economy the smartest people are always going to be hired or attract the money to start their own business. The only question is where they rev up their economic engines. That populist retort stems, perhaps, from a fear that Americans are increasingly unable to keep up with foreign competitors. If true, that should lead us to insist on structural reform of our elementary, high school, and college education, rather than indulge protectionist impulses that keep smart people out in the name of defending mediocrity.

  “Tech giants such as Google and Apple will no doubt move significant development projects out of the U.S. to places where these skilled workers are available,” wrote Frank Aquila, a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, in the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. “Smaller high-tech businesses, historically the engine of U.S. growth and job creation, will simply never get off the ground. The consequences are clear: The next generation of innovative companies will not likely be founded here. Instead, due to U.S. policy, these companies will most probably be created in places such as India, China, and Singapore.”

  Aquila offered a proposal to break up the clogged and closed-minded thinking around immigration that is damaging American economic interests. He wants Congress, which he describes as “stalled” by partisanship over immigration, to allow foreign entrepreneurs who have investment capital to come to the United States to start their businesses and create an invigorating wave of economic activity. “It’s a sensible approach, but sadly few in Congress appear to have the political will to move it forward,” he wrote. “We may no longer be willing to accept the world’s huddled masses, but we must make a place for the world’s top scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs if we want to remain the world’s largest and most dynamic economy.”

  The Brookings Institution estimates that immigrants’ productivity (even though immigrants are only 10 percent of the population) increases the nation’s gross domestic product by $37 billion per year. According to Brookings, immigrants have founded more than half of Silicon Valley’s new high-technology companies. Immigrants founded more than a quarter of all American technology and engineering businesses between 1995 and 2005, the report stated. And in just one year, 2005, American-based com
panies started by immigrants employed 450,000 workers and produced $52 billion in sales.

  “In order to fully reap the benefits of the worldwide talent market, U.S. immigration policy must be reoriented,” the Brookings report concluded. “Current policy is significantly and negatively affected by the unintended consequences of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that made family unification its overarching goal.… Its main effect was to enable immigrants to bring in family members without regard for the new immigrants’ education, skill status or potential contributions to the economy.…

  “U.S. employers have a large, unmet demand for knowledge workers,” the authors of the Brookings report explained. “They are eager to fill jobs with well-trained foreign workers and foreign graduates of U.S. universities—particularly those with degrees in the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics, the STEM fields that continue to attract too few U.S.-born students.… Meanwhile the United States is falling behind in the pace of innovation and international competitiveness. Evidence for the decline in innovation is the decreasing share of international patents.”

  So how can we better approach this problem from all angles? A big part of finding some solutions begins with better understanding and identifying with the tradition and legacy of immigration in America.

  The current political stalemate over immigration threatens the nation’s future on so many levels. But at its deepest and most compelling level the debate touches our national identity. America celebrates as a principal tenet of its democratic freedoms the noble claim to be a welcoming host to people of the world, or as the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty read: “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It is fact, and not myth, that America is, overwhelmingly, a “nation of immigrants,” beginning with the colonists who settled the nation.

  The history of immigration in America includes periods of anger at new arrivals, as well as outright racism. But this country stands apart from any other in terms of its open door to the world. And that attitude began in the colonial period, when immigration to the United States was a rather open and unbureaucratic affair. The major hurdle was the courage to make the ocean voyage to the new land. It was not until 1790 that the newly formed United States adopted a formal immigration and naturalization policy. After two years of residence, any “free white person” of good moral character could become an American. In 1795 the two-year wait was extended to five years as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The law gave the president power to deport any foreigner deemed a threat to national security.

  During the early 1800s wars, religious bigotry, and political oppression in Europe led a steady wave of people to book passage on ships and flee to America. More than thirty million Europeans migrated to America between 1836 and 1914. American Heritage magazine, in a 1981 article, described the historic shift in populace and the country it created:

  By 1830 annual arrivals numbered 23,322 and a visiting Frenchman wrote glowingly of “the great flood of civilization” that was pouring over the American landscape “with a wonderful power and an admirable regularity.” In 1840, a total of 84,066 newcomers landed; in 1850 the number had risen to 369,980. Between 1820 and 1860 some 5 million immigrants crossed the seas, their number surpassing in four decades the total 1790 population it had taken nearly two centuries to achieve. With justifiable pride, Oliver Wendell Holmes exulted, “We are the Romans of the modern world—the great assimilating people.”

  The pace of Europeans coming to America through an open-door policy continued to accelerate. Between 1880 and 1920 about twenty-six million immigrants made the trip to America. The first big shift came in 1924 when President Coolidge, responding to the post–World War I growth of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, put a limit on immigration from any one country. Under the new law only 2 percent of the total number of immigrants from any one country already living in the United States gained admission. The Great Depression further slowed the rate of immigration. It was not until well after World War II that pressure from overseas and a booming U.S. economy led to a pro-immigration shift in U.S. law.

  The Hart-Celler Act of 1965, strongly influenced by the civil rights movement against racial segregation in the United States, eliminated the immigration quotas of the 1920s. The impact was to open the doors as never before to immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and other nonwhite, non–Western European nations. Official government estimates mark the increase in immigrants living in the United States rising from 4.7 percent in 1970 to 10.4 percent in 2000. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, with Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush, the nation’s immigration laws became even more liberal, with increases every year in the number of immigrants allowed into the United States.

  President Reagan directly addressed illegal immigration in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. His goal was to organize the flow of seasonal laborers, mostly Mexicans, coming into the United States and to offer illegal aliens living permanently in the United States an opportunity to become legal citizens. Cutting a deal with a Democratic majority in the House and Senate, the Republican president agreed to make it easier for immigrants without proper visas to gain legal status. Ed Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, later wrote that the path to citizenship carved by President Reagan required immigrants to “pay application fees, learn to speak English, understand American civics, pass a medical exam and register for military selective service.”

  The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 2.7 million people became legal citizens under the Reagan-era law. But the congressional debate about the law, and subsequent arguments about its impact, focused a level of political attention on the immigration issue not seen since the 1920s. Conservative leaders began to openly complain about immigrants lacking an understanding of American history and democracy. They complained, as well, about the sharp changes coloring the ethnic and racial makeup of the nation. Many of their complaints gained traction as complaints about continued high rates of illegal immigration.

  “President Ronald Reagan signed that [1986] bill into law with great fanfare amid promises that it would grant legal status to illegal immigrants, crack down on employers who hired illegal workers and secure the border once and for all,” the New York Times later reported. “Instead, fraudulent applications tainted the process, many employers continued their illicit hiring practices and illegal immigration surged.”

  Public concern about illegal immigration prompted another round of immigration legislation under President George H. W. Bush. The Immigration Act of 1990 was advertised as correcting the problems with the Reagan-era immigration law by offering new avenues for legal immigration. It also raised the number of immigrants allowed into the country to seven hundred thousand annually. And it eased requirements for immigrants to be conversant in English while eliminating bans on homosexuals and people with AIDS. This was also the first immigration law to create “priority” visas for immigrants with “extraordinary abilities,” including top professors, researchers, and corporate executives.

  But by the 1992 election a public split over immigration emerged on the Right. A primary challenger to President Bush, conservative social critic Patrick Buchanan, made a call for an “America first” policy as a centerpiece of his campaign.

  Buchanan’s attack on the Republican president, as described in Saint Louis University professor Donald Critchlow’s book The Conservative Ascendancy, echoed “the prewar isolationist Right that promised to restore American sovereignty through trade protectionism, a nationalist foreign policy, enforcement of national borders against illegal entry, and immigration restriction.”

  President Bush defeated Buchanan in the primary but lost his bid for a second term to President Bill Clinton. But immigration remained an issue. The persistent conservative complaints about high numbers of illegal immigrants came into play during debate over a regional U.S. trade pact with Mexico and Canada. To win Republican votes for the 1994 North American Free Trade
Agreement, NAFTA, President Clinton argued that an improved economic climate in Mexico would reduce the flow of Mexicans coming to the United States illegally to find work. But while U.S. corporate investments in Mexico grew under NAFTA, there was no improvement in Mexican schools, roads, or social services. Combined with an economic slump in the mid-1990s, fear of drug violence, and widespread corruption, Mexico’s lack of opportunity and quality of life continued to give its people seeking a better future plenty of good reasons to risk entering the United States illegally.

  When Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years in the 1994 midterm elections, President Clinton faced pressure to deal with illegal immigrants. His 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act increased border patrols, reduced government benefits available without proof of citizenship, and started a system for employers to check by phone on any job applicant’s immigration status. The plan passed the Republican House and, along with an economic boom in the late nineties, calmed the national anxiety that had heightened over immigration.

  Over the next decade, however, Mexican immigration to the United States increased, from four hundred thousand annually to more than five hundred thousand a year, and the government estimated that 80 percent of those people crossed the border illegally. George W. Bush, the former governor of Texas, a border state with a large Hispanic population, campaigned in 2000 to bring “compassionate conservatism” to the immigration debate. That approach by Governor Bush included reforming immigration laws to legally bring together the supply of Mexicans seeking work and the demands of American employers seeking low-wage workers. On September 5, 2001, the president met at the White House with Mexican president Vicente Fox to promote a “guest worker” program, under which Mexicans could enter the country for a set period of time to do specific jobs. The two presidents spoke about the crisis surrounding illegal immigration in terms of exploited workers and the sad loss of life that occurs when people face dangerous currents to swim across deep rivers to get into the United States, or when people walk through the blistering desert risking death to get a job and support their families. They also addressed concerns about the social and financial burden—in terms of crime and added people in hospitals and schools—to states on the southern border.