Learning from America's immigrant past

When debating current issues, it's helpful to avoid inaccurate depictions of past policy, especially on immigration, in which both opponents and advocates of President Donald Trump's policies have views based on not altogether accurate renditions of the past. Many opponents of Trump's policies seem to believe the president wants to cut off legal immigration altogether, to shut America's gates. But in recent times, around 800,000 individuals have taken the oath to become American citizens. In addition, about 1 million people have been granted green cards each year, making them eligible for citizenship. That's not a closed gate. You may argue that we should open the gate wider. I'm inclined to take that view, with the proviso that we reduce the number of extended family members eligible and increase the number of skill-based slots. You may also argue, as some Trump backers do, that we should reduce legal immigration, with some even calling for cutting it down to zero. But I'm not aware that there's any realistic prospect for drastic reductions even with a Republican-controlled Congress. Current debate revolves around how, or if, to enforce the law against those not legally here. One error made by critics on both sides is to say that the United States, until the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, had open borders. And that the bulk of immigrants in those years were, in the words of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed in the base of the Statue of Liberty, "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Lazarus' poem was published posthumously. It was an earnest attempt by an affluent New Yorker to seek tolerance for her fellow Jews and for other immigrants that accounted for the vast and apparently unanticipated flow of immigration in the years after the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886 and the opening of the Ellis Island screening station in 1892. But as Vincent Cannato points out in "American Passage," his definitive history of Ellis Island, America had never had unrestricted immigration even before the federal government took over the function from inspecting states in the 19th century. State and then federal authorities inspected arrivals for infectious disease, particularly tuberculosis, and for being unable to be self-supporting — in the language of the day, "likely to become public charges." After Ellis Island opened in 1892, Cannato writes, "Congress's list of reasons immigrants could be excluded at the nation's gates (grew) longer as the years passed." Policy became marginally more restrictive even before 1924. Even so, the vast majority of those arriving were admitted. The main reason: The steamship companies refused to carry those who couldn't afford steerage fares and refused to board those who appeared likely to be rejected on arrival, because rejectees would have to be returned to their home port free of charge. (The same principle obtains today. Airline gate agents demand to see your passport and visa before allowing you on a flight to destinations requiring visas.) How this worked out in practice is depicted vividly in Steven Ujifusa's recently published "The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I," which tells the story of Albert Ballin, himself Jewish, who rose to become managing director of the Hamburg-American Line and became a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Under Ballin's leadership, the company set up an inspection station of its own in Brest, on the western border of Czarist Russia, even as that regime was sanctioning violent pogroms against Jews. Those who passed Hamburg-American's standards were sent by rail to the busy port of Hamburg and then to New York. Jews were just part of the flow of immigrants from the multiethnic Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires in the Ellis Island era from 1892 to 1914. Interestingly, that flow included relatively few ethnic Russians, Germans, Austrians and Hungarians but vast numbers of people who, in an era of rising nationalist sentiment, were from minority ethnic groups — Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs and Croats. One of the things that attracted these second-caste people to America was the civic equality it promised and largely practiced, at least in the North (almost no immigrants settled in the racially segregated South). These were people, it turned out, who were eager to work and ready to learn English, who sought not to undermine American culture but adapt to it and to participate in America's sometimes rough-and-ready civic politics.