In 1958, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts published a book titled A Nation of Immigrants. During the years of the Soviet Union’s existence, politicians liked to point out that Communist nations locked their borders to keep people from moving out, while we welcomed those who managed to escape from Communism. It may be hard to remember in a climate where immigrants are demonized and called rapists and murderers, but our nation used to boast of its immigrant heritage.
In this article, Heather Cox Richardson reflects on that heritage and points out that the Republican Party championed immigration. She does not mention the immigration restriction acts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which excluded or limited admission of Asians, Italians, Russians, Poles, and others who were not Northern Europeans (Nordics).
In the past days, we have learned that the six maintenance workers killed when the bridge collapsed were all immigrants, natives of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Around 39% of the workforce in the construction industry around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., about 130,000 people, are immigrants, Scott Dance and María Luisa Paúl reported in the Washington Post yesterday.
Some of the men were undocumented, and all of them were family men who sent money back to their home countries, as well. From Honduras, the nephew of one of the men killed told the Associated Press, “The kind of work he did is what people born in the U.S. won’t do. People like him travel there with a dream. They don’t want to break anything or take anything.”
In the Philadelphia Inquirer today, journalist Will Bunch castigated the right-wing lawmakers and pundits who have whipped up native-born Americans over immigration, calling immigrants sex traffickers and fentanyl dealers, and even “animals.” Bunch illustrated that the reality of what was happening on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed creates an opportunity to reframe the immigration debate in the United States.
Last month, Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post noted that immigration is a key reason that the United States experienced greater economic growth than any other nation In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The surge of immigration that began in 2022 brought to the U.S. working-age people who, Director Phill Swagel of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office wrote, are expected to make the U.S. gross domestic product about $7 trillion larger over the ten years from 2023 to 2034 than it would have been otherwise. Those workers will account for about $1 trillion dollars in revenues.
Curiously, while Republican leaders today are working to outdo each other in their harsh opposition to immigration, it was actually the leaders of the original Republican Party who recognized the power of immigrants to build the country and articulated an economic justification for increased immigration during the nation’s first major anti-immigrant period.
The United States had always been a nation of immigrants, but in the 1840s the failure of the potato crop in Ireland sent at least half a million Irish immigrants to the United States. As they moved into urban ports on the East Coast, especially in Massachusetts and New York, native-born Americans turned against them as competitors for jobs.
The 1850s saw a similar anti-immigrant fury in the new state of California. After the discovery of gold there in 1848, native-born Americans—the so-called Forty Niners—moved to the West Coast. They had no intention of sharing the riches they expected to find. The Indigenous people who lived there had no right to the land under which gold lay, native-born men thought; nor did the Mexicans whose government had sold the land to the U.S. in 1848; nor did the Chileans, who came with mining skills that made them powerful competitors. Above all, native-born Americans resented the Chinese miners who came to work in order to send money home to a land devastated by the first Opium War.
Democrats and the new anti-immigrant American Party (more popularly known as the “Know Nothings” because members claimed to know nothing about the party) turned against the new immigrants, seeing them as competition that would drive down wages. In the 1850s, Know Nothing officials in Massachusetts persecuted Catholics and deported Irish immigrants they believed were paupers. In California the state legislature placed a monthly tax on Mexican and Chinese miners, made unemployment a crime, took from Chinese men the right to testify in court, and finally tried to stop Chinese immigration altogether by taxing shipmasters $50 for each Chinese immigrant they brought.
When the Republicans organized in the 1850s, they saw society differently than the Democrats and the Know Nothings. They argued that society was not made up of a struggle over a limited economic pie, but rather that hardworking individuals would create more than they could consume, thus producing capital that would make the economy grow. The more people a nation had, the stronger it would be.
In 1860 the new party took a stand against the new laws that discriminated against immigrants. Immigrants’ rights should not be “abridged or impaired,” the delegates to its convention declared, adding that they were “in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
Republicans’ support for immigration only increased during the Civil War. In contrast to the southern enslavers, they wanted to fill the land with people who supported freedom. As one poorly educated man wrote to his senator, “Protect Emegration and that will protect the Territories to Freedom.”
Republicans also wanted to bring as many workers to the country as possible to increase economic development. The war created a huge demand for agricultural products to feed the troops. At the same time, a terrible drought in Europe meant there was money to be made exporting grain. But the war was draining men to the battlefields of Stone’s River and Gettysburg and to the growing U.S. Navy, leaving farmers with fewer and fewer hands to work the land.
By 1864, Republicans were so strongly in favor of immigration that Congress passed “an Act to Encourage Immigration.” The law permitted immigrants to borrow against future homesteads to fund their voyage to the U.S., appropriated money to provide for impoverished immigrants upon their arrival, and, to undercut Democrats’ accusations that they were simply trying to find men to throw into the grinding war, guaranteed that no immigrant could be drafted until he announced his intention of becoming a citizen.
Support for immigration has waxed and waned repeatedly since then, but as recently as 1989, Republican president Ronald Reagan said: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation…. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
The workers who died in the bridge collapse on Tuesday “were not ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’” Will Bunch wrote, quoting Trump; “they were replenishing it…. They may have been born all over the continent, but when these men plunged into our waters on Tuesday, they died as Americans.”
Hello Diane, Thank you so much for your superb recommendations.If I could proof-read your typing for you, I would! (Can almost get my own work close to legible). Much appreciation from a retired educator and a fan of Heather CoxRichardson, and good wishes to you and yours, Kathleen Kathleen Baker3 S. Bradford St., Dover DE 19904703/403-6882
Thank you for your offer, Kathleen, for your kind offer. I have many times made typos or been the unwitting victim of auto correct. I’m sure I would greatly benefit by having a proof reader; I’ve made some egregious mistakes, including typos in headlines. But the reality is that I work at home, alone. Much of what I post is written well in advance, but some is spur of the moment. To be effective, you would have to move to Brooklyn and move in. Unfortunately, I have no extra bed.
Kathleen,
I encourage you to correct me when you see an error, whether typographical or content. I welcome corrections.
Sensible conservatives are not anti-immigrant as many of them are entrepreneurs and business owners. They fully understand the benefits of immigrants to the economy. The current GOP leadership is appealing to the racist extremists in the party that scapegoat immigrants. I live in Matt Gaetz’s district among the hypocritical MAGA maniacs. Here no one can walk past a new roof installation, a construction site or landscaping project without hearing Latino music playing in the background. Even on county road projects a number of the workers wearing yellow and orange vests are speaking Spanish. Latinos continue to work in hotels and restaurants here as well. While right wing politicians bash immigrants in the media to feed their false narrative, they continue to hire them for the jobs Americans are unwilling to do. They just don’t talk about it.
Richardson is correct in all this history, but she leaves out the effect of the 1924 immigration laws on African-American and Appalachian migration in the conterminous 48. When Congress placed severe restrictions on various immigration, which discriminated against Eastern Europeans, Chinese, and most other brown people, it coincided with the boom in economic activity that grew out of first the automobile industry, then the Second World War, then the postwar economy that produced modern suburban America. This sent millions of impoverished African-Americans north to work in places where Eastern Europeans had once been the source of new labor. The great migration happened parallel to an outpouring from poor southern whites, especially from the places where agricultural practices could not support the large families there. At one time, there were over 100,000 West Virginia born residents of Akron, Ohio. Whole city blocks of Detroit arrived from Cannon County Tennessee. Regular bus service took families from their ancestral homes to what we now call the Rust Belt. Almost every person I know who grew up in my part of the country still has relatives in these places.
It is hard to imagine that all this would have happened without the immigration restrictions of 1924. I do not think restrictions based on ethnic backgrounds is compatible with the ideals of our democracy. It is equally hard to imagine how the south and Appalachian regions would have dealt with over-population without the massive demand for labor I describe above.
If it seems none of this is going anywhere, we must imagine that none of us knows where anything is really going. So maybe we should just be good to our neighbors, whomever they are.
Really interesting, Roy, I never considered this.
Good advice, Roy.
And not to get lost in all of this. The good family men from Central America did NOT have to die. The Dali Singapore had already spent 2 days in port for the malfunctioning electrical system. It should never have been cleared for operation. Multiple Maritime Worker Unions have been sounding the global alarm on these massive freighters, their dirty fuel and dangerous cargo. They have all been routinely ignored in favor of profit. Los hombres de familia paid the price with their lives.
Our students in Science class can now study the engineering it will require for cleanup and the politics of a maritime shipping economy that treats human beings as expendable.
Kathy, excellent point.
The trolls will descend on the blog soon to repeat their lies about immigration–that immigrants are a drain on our economy, that they take away American jobs, that they use more in government services than they pay to government in taxes, and so on. All FALSE. These people are so brainwashed by the Trump Fascist Party. A bunch of racist Trumpanzees with their heads full of Faux News.
Bob, the trolls will also say that I advocate open borders, which I do not and never have.
They always do.
Well, that didn’t take long. See below.
No, this time they said that I advocate for open borders. ROFL.
Here’s the thing that truly astonishes and revolts me, Diane. There are white makes right people so filled with hate and venom toward immigrants that they devote their days to trolling on this topic. It’s so weird. And they always have their bizarre alternative facts from the Reichwing blogosphere.
Where did their ancestors come from? Mars?
I don’t watch Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN at all. I read a lot of news and opinion sources with varied viewpoints. Bob Shepherd obviously doesn’t; his support for open borders is grounded in emotion and a need to be woker-than-thou. Several credible studies of immigration show that low-income people receive far more in public benefits than they pay in taxes. If they become citizens and qualify for ALL public assistance programs, that gap will become even wider. The Brookings studies are not holy gospel.
Linked is an analysis of this issue, with a chart on page 7 prepared in 2017 by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine – not a right-wing group.
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116727/witnesses/HHRG-118-JU01-Wstate-CamarotaS-20240111.pdf
his support for open borders
ROFL laughing
The report cited in your response was presented by an anti-immigration organization. It is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center:
“CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES
Founded in 1985 by John Tanton, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has gone on to become the go-to think tank for the anti-immigrant movement with its reports and staffers often cited by media and anti-immigrant politicians. CIS’s much-touted tagline is “low immigration, pro-immigrant,” but the organization has a decades-long history of circulating racist writers, while also associating with white nationalists.”
Michelle Robinson,
This is a very informative article about immigration. Catharine Rampell of the Washington Post writes that the increase in immigration has added a windfall of $7 trillion to our economy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/13/immigration-economy-jobs-cbo-report/
As expected, Diane Ravitch deflects from the data in the linked report and hurls an ad hominem attack. The SPLC is a corrupt fundraising outfit that describes everyone who is not far Left as racist, xenophobic, hater, etc. That’s why I specifically cited the study by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine that is noted on page 7. No one here read that linked material because doing so would expose them to information that doesn’t advance their preferred narrative about massive, low-skilled immigration.
Michelle, what ad hominem thing did I say about you? Please be specific.
I listen to audiobooks when I’m in the car. At home, I read paperbacks and hardcovers.
The current audiobook I’m reading with my ears while driving somewhere, is American Dirt by Jeanine Cummings.
This story is about the journey migrants take to reach the United States. The main characters of this story are migrants because they are victims of crime, and if they didn’t run, they’ll be murdered.
It’s a powerful story with more than 165,000 ratings/review on Amazon and 568,515 ratings on Goodreads.
“Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, the #1 New York Times bestseller and Oprah Book Club pick that has sold over three million copies, is finally available in paperback.“
This novel SHOWS what migrants have to go through to reach El Norte. Many migrants chasing dreams or running from crime or a certain death never make it.
If you haven’t heard of this book and haven’t read it, I highly recommend reading it.
In other news, I just came out of the hospital where I was held for two days because of an infection. My Humana Medicare Advantage plan denied all coverage. I just got a $25,000 bill. For me, at this time in my life, that might as well be a bill for a billion dollars.
Health”care” in America.
Bob, I warned you about Medicare Advantage plans. They turn a profit by denying claims.
You must appeal. Most appeals are approved.
The decision to deny coverage was made by non-medical staff who gave you about one minute of consideration.
I said before:
MA plans are great when you are not sick. When you get sick, they are awful.
This whole thing is frightening. Working on it.
Diane’s right. Stay calm (when interacting with them) but be relentless.
Thanks, Flerp. Will do.
Oh, Bob!
I am so sorry to learn this.
Thanks, Christine. I very much appreciate your comment. And so begins the fighting with them. As if I need this grief in my life.
Also worried about this potentially destroying my credit. Aie yie yie.
That’s understandable, Bob.
I’ll pass on some good but hard to follow advice from a very levelheaded friend: will worrying about it solve the problem? If not, try to put the worry aside as much as you can while you pursue a solution.
Exactly what I am doing.
God grant me the serenity. . . .
Pleased you admitted that most of the workers on the bridge were undocumented. If you’re a citizen in the USA, you can now pretty much forget about working in construction or road fixing etc. You just love your undocumented workers- they are just so so much cheaper than an American citizen. Hence your support for open borders.
This section of you pro cheap immigrant labor cheering is particularly offensive:
The kind of work he did is what people born in the U.S. won’t do.
People born in the US would love to do these jobs- and used to do them- they are not allowed to do them because employers only want cheap undocumented workers.
LOL. Go ahead and pull more of this bs out of your ass.
The 2006 version of Paul Krugman on immigration. The economics on massive low-skilled immigration haven’t changed since 2006, but the politics have.
“My second negative point is that immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants. That’s just supply and demand: we’re talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages. Mr. Borjas and Mr. Katz have to go through a lot of number-crunching to turn that general proposition into specific estimates of the wage impact, but the general point seems impossible to deny.
Finally, the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear. Mr. Hanson uses some estimates from the National Research Council to get a specific number, around 0.25 percent of G.D.P. Again, I think that you’d be hard pressed to find any set of assumptions under which Mexican immigrants are a net fiscal plus, but equally hard pressed to make the burden more than a fraction of a percent of G.D.P.”
https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/notes-on-immigration/
Did you read the last line?
Close the door to immigrants and the following industries would go into crisis mode: agriculture, hotels, restaurants, construction.
Do YOUR children want to clean hotel rooms? Do you?
Do YOUR children want to bring in the crops? Do you?
Do YOUR children want to work in a restaurant bussing table? Do you?
About 20 years ago now, I had my juniors and seniors do an oral history project in which they interviewed a family member who was an immigrant to the US. They wrote up their interviews as well as presented to the class. Their reports were hair-raising. One student in particular (whose older siblings I had also taught) interviewed her mother and was shocked to find out what her parent had endured.
And those were easier times.
A few years later, I had a stellar student whose family tried to get green cards to no avail. They decided to move to Canada when her older brother completed his community college degree as a hairdresser, but could not get a license to open a salon. I remember my student saying: people who come here would be the best citizens ever because they would always be grateful to the country that took them in when they were desperate.