While going through a mass of books and papers and magazines at home, I came across a review I had written fifteen years ago, published elsewhere. The subject of the review was Keith Fitzgerald's The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State, and National Identity (Stanford Univ. Press, 1996). It's an odd feeling, reading an old review (can it really have been fifteen years?), but I was struck by the extent to which the "debate" on immigration in 1997 paralleled the debate in 2012. The review is too long to reproduce here in its entirety, but I have excerpted some chunks of it. One caveat: Fitzgerald's book (as I wrote at the time) "does not yield its riches easily. Its pages of tiny type are filled with jargon-infested sentences. Moreover, Fitzgerald is a maddeningly repetitive writer." Still, as you'll see, I wasn't sorry to have made the trek.

In the preface to the second edition of their excellent book Immigrant America: A Portrait (1996), Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut speak of "the sharply politicized and increasingly acrimonious public debate on immigration in the 1990s." Noting that "the twenty million foreign-born persons counted by the 1990 U.S. Census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, and admissions in the 1990s appear certain to eclipse the record set in the first decade of this century," they register at the same time higher levels of "public alarm and nativist resistance" to immigration.

Readers who have followed immigration issues for a decade or more will recognize a familiar paradox here. It was in the 1980s that attention began to be focused on the enormous surge of immigration in the wake of the landmark Immigration Act of 1965, including as well more than one million refugees from Southeast Asia. Critics of U.S. policy warned of dire consequences if immigration continued at such high levels; in response, immigrant advocates denounced the critics for nativism and xenophobia and often added the charge of racism as well, since the "new immigration" was substantially non-European. When Congress finally got around to updating and revising immigration policy at the end of the 1980s, the result (the Immigration Act of 1990) was actually a higher ceiling for immigration.

So it has gone in the 1990s as well. In 1995, the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by Barbara Jordan, recommended that legal immigration be cut by roughly a third. President Bill Clinton initially endorsed the commission's recommendation, but as immigration reform bills wound their way through Congress, with the final compromise signed into law on September 30, 1996, the Clinton Administration backtracked, shifting the focus to illegal immigration. With regard to legal immigration, far from following the Jordan Commission's call for a substantial reduction, the 1996 law deals with procedural issues such as sponsorship, seeking to ensure that sponsors of new immigrants would indeed have the means to support them if necessary rather than adding to the burden of public assistance, Even these measures were denounced by immigrant advocates as "harsh."

Here, alas, is one of most durable features of immigration debate on both sides: the ramped-up rhetoric, the routine imputation of base motives. That hasn't changed between 1997 and 2012.

Fitzgerald's point of departure is the observation by various critics—among them the Cornell University economist Vernon M. Briggs, Jr.,—that U.S. immigration policy is "meandering" and "aimless," indeed irrational …. [In response, Fitzgerald draws on the insights of] the "new institutionalism," a school of thought which, in Fitzgerald's words, "puts politics back at the center of policy explanation." It emphasizes the way in which contingent historical circumstances—in particular, the structure, logic, and self-interest of bureaucratic institutions—shape the formation of policy ….

Now to anyone who has seen the film Advise and Consent (1962), or has merely served on a church committee, this theoretical debate may seem like much ado about nothing, a squabble among academics and of academic interest only. Obviously, at every level, from the local school board to the U.S. Congress, policy is shaped in part by institutions. And yes, politics matters; that give-and-take is not just an elaborate show. Yet Fitzgerald's book is not simply a theoretical treatise, for after laying this foundation he applies his approach by tracing the evolution of U.S. immigration policy. This "thick description" superbly conveys the byzantine twists and turns of lawmaking and administration related to all three varieties of immigration (front-gate, back-door, and refugee).

Of course this won't satisfy readers who are impatient with "politics," who blithely issue demands for "comprehensive immigration reform." Don't bother them, for instance, with the messy story of how 38,000 refugees from Hungary were resettled in the United States after the failed uprising of 1956.

About 5,000 of the Hungarian refugees were admitted under the provisions of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. That act, however, required a security check (to avoid admitting subversives who came in the guise of refugees), which most of the uprising refugees did not have the documentation to pass.

These remaining refugees could not be admitted through the front gate. The national-origins quota system codified by the Immigration Act of 1924 was still in place, and by 1956 front-gate Hungarian immigration had already "borrowed" from the annual quota of future years to such an extent that several decades of quotas were "mortgaged." Faced with this dilemma, the Justice Department responded by making use of an obscure parole provision of immigration law, originally "intended to meet such situations as the provision of emergency medical care or allowing a witness to aid prosecution." It was never intended to accommodate large-scale admissions. "Nevertheless," Fitzgerald writes, "the attorney general used the parole provision to allow 15,000 Hungarians in before Congress could even convene to consider the question." Given the outpouring of public sympathy for the refugees, Congress was not inclined to dissent, and ultimately almost 30,000 of the Hungarian refugees were admitted under the parole provision.

This action, which developed not from any central planning but rather was an improvised institutional response to a particular event, had far-reaching consequences. As Fitzgerald observes, "an astounding precedent was set enabling the executive branch to admit large numbers of aliens outside the ordinary legal framework of immigration policy." …

Fitzgerald's account should arm the reader against sweeping, simplistic generalizations about U.S. immigration policy. Yet there is one respect in which his own study is strangely reductive. Like many of the scholars with whom he is debating on theoretical grounds, Fitzgerald debunks what might be called the founding story of American immigration, imaged by the Statue of Liberty. "The evidence … provides persuasive documentation that immigration policy in the United States contrasts with the values crystallized by the immigration mythology," Fitzgerald writes in his concluding chapter …. What makes this reductive judgment strange is that it is so thoroughly contradicted by the nuanced story Fitzgerald himself has told, in which discrimination, exploitation, and the interests of the state are interwoven with a genuine commitment to freedom and equality ….

Thus we return to the paradox with which we began. Amid all the talk—the jeremiads of the immigration-control faction, and the victim-talk of the immigrant advocates—people keep coming to America in greater numbers than ever before. The face of the nation is changing; that much is certain. Yet exactly what it will mean in the America of the twenty-first century, no one knows.

Flashing forward fifteen years, we are into the second decade of the 21st century. The face of the nation is changing, yes (as it has time and time again). Legal immigration levels are not as high as they were in the record-setting 1990s, but they remain high. Illegal immigration is lower than usual right now, due largely to economic circumstances, but that lull is unlikely to last. For all the grim forecasts about national decline, the United States continues to attract would-be immigrants, rich and poor and in-between, from around the globe. We muddle on.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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