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Someone is supposed to have said that the British acquired their empire in a fit of absent-mindedness. A bit of whimsy, to be sure, but not without a certain relevance to the present situation of the United States vis-a-vis immigration. For without consciously intending any such result—or even fully grasping how it came about—the country finds itself dealing once again with immigration on a massive scale.
True, Congress did quite consciously change the law in 1965, getting rid of the odious "national-origins quotas" for Europeans and opening the door to Asian immigrants on the same basis as anyone else. At the time, however, no one expected these changes to make a significant difference in the overall level of immigration. But did they ever! And their effect was reinforced by several major refugee flows and by an upsurge of illegal immigration, much of which was brought about by the termination in 1964 of the bracero program, a temporary guest-worker arrangement with Mexico that had been in place since World War II.
The upshot is that between 1971 and 1994, over 16 million immigrants entered the country legally—along with an unknown, but quite substantial, number of illegals. In numerical volume, this rivals the great flood of immigrants of the early 1900s, al though the foreign-born constituted a much larger percentage of the total population in those days (14.7 percent in 1910; 7.9 percent in 1990).
Well, one might say, so what? We're supposed to be a nation of immigrants, aren't we? Why can't we deal with this latest wave on the basis of our rich historic experience?
These are rhetorical questions, of course, but legitimate ones. The problem in answering them is that history's lessons are (as usual) subject to very different interpretations.
First of all, when the latest round began, we hadn't really been a nation of immigrants for a long time. Immigration had been so effectively cut off in the 1920s that it seemed a purely "historical" phenomenon. In deed, its remoteness in time no doubt contributed to the mistaken assumption that changing the law in 1965 wouldn't have any great practical effect. By the time people realized what was happening, the earlier epoch of large-scale immigration lay beyond the reach of living memory. Indeed, the only thing about it firmly fixed in the national consciousness—not so much by actual memory as by the consensus of scholarly opinion—was the conviction that a virulently racist form of nativism was the driving force be hind the laws that ended immigration after World War I.
That conviction played a key role in the sixties, when the reform of a racist immigration policy seemed a fitting complement to civil rights for African Americans. More over, the association of freer immigration with antiracism persists to the present, a fact that constitutes a major problem for those who think we ought to reduce current levels of entry. For such criticism invites the charge that it is inspired by racist nativism—or at least gives aid and comfort to those who are.
Racial thinking has, of course, been revolutionized since the 1920s; in fact, it has changed greatly since 1965! But that points up the fundamental problem: How can our historic experience guide us when everything is so different now from what it was when last we dealt with massive immigration? Sorting out the answer to that question is not made easier by ritualistic appeals to history that serve as polemical weapons in today's controversies—"Immigration is what made us a great nation!" versus "Our ancestors didn't have all these special programs; they made it on their own!"
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