FACES AND PLACES: Immigration: benefit or bane? (10/28/01)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Immigration: benefit or bane?

The September 11 attack on the United States by Muslim terrorists has reopened the seemingly endless debate regarding immigration. Are new immigrants to America a benefit or a bane? That is the question.

One of the most outspoken critics of mass immigration has been conservative Samuel Francis who, as early as 1982, argued that our poor border control "represents an opportunity for foreign terrorists, for domestic extremists and for hostile foreign powers to destabilize this country." Others feel the same way, including, more recently, Linda Chavez who suggests restoring the requisite that all aliens register with the government once a year (a requirement abolished in 1980), and creating a state-of-the-art tracking system that monitors alien entries and exits from the United States.

Over the years, U.S. immigration law has tended to vacillate between two beliefs: America is a haven for "the huddled masses" of the world; America is the last bastion of white, Western civilization.

Immigration to the United States was wide open until about 1914. The industrial revolution and westward expansion after the Civil War demanded cheap immigrant labor; practically everyone from Europe was welcome. Beginning in the 1870s, most of the new immigrants were from the impoverished rural regions of southern and eastern Europe. Barely literate, they settled in ethnic enclaves in large cities and mining states that offered employment. They came in great numbers. At the turn of the century, for example, most residents of Chicago were foreign-born.

In 1909 progressive educator Elwood Cubberley concluded that because the new immigrants were "docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative," bereft of the "Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, government and order, their coming served to dilute tremendously our national stock and to corrupt our civic life." The first world war temporarily halted mass immigration to America.

In need of an expanded officer class, the U.S. military introduced literacy exams for all recruits during the war. Young immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, of course, scored poorly, "confirming" Dr. Cubberley's views.

Not all of America's pre-war immigrants were illiterate, however. Some could read and had become enamored of socialism. The first nationwide Ukrainian political party in the United States, for example, was the Ukrainian Federation of Socialist Parties of America (UFSPA), established in 1915 with encouragement from the Socialist Party of America (SPA). By 1918 the UFSPA included some 4,000 members. A group of SPA members later quit the SPA to create the Communist Party of America (CPA) that same year. Most UFSPA members joined the defectors and formed the Ukrainian Federation of Communist Parties of America (UFCPA) in 1919. Founded in Chicago, the CPA had 26,680 members, of which only 1,100 were native Americans.

The revolutionary fervor of American Communists and other extremists shocked the American public. The nation was plagued by a wave of bombings (eight cities were hit), strikes (some 4 million workers were out at one time or another), riots and other disturbances. Alarmed by a war department estimate of some 1,142,000 left-wing extremists in the United States, as well as the discovery of a Moscow-initiated directive to American Communist leaders to form a "military commission" and to carry out Comintern instructions "in the greatest secrecy," the Justice Department moved quickly against aliens who advocated the forceful overthrow of the American government. On the authority of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, FBI agents rounded up thousands of Americans. The so-called "Palmer Raids" led to great uncertainty, even hysteria among the public.

Contributing to the anti-immigrant atmosphere were writers who echoed Dr. Cubberley's earlier sentiments. A 1922 article by Cornelia James Cannon in The Atlantic Monthly, for example, analyzed the Army test results and concluded that the "inferior men" included a disproportionate number from Poland, Italy and Russia. That same year "The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of Under Man" by Lothrop Stoddard made its appearance, suggesting that America's racial stock was being weakened by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Other books denouncing the "wretched refuse" followed.

Responding to popular opinion, Congress passed laws in 1921 and 1924 calculating future immigration quotas on the basis of the nationalities living here during the 1890 Census. Since Ukrainians were not an official designation in 1890, there were no official quotas for Ukrainians.

Another anti-immigrant alarm surfaced during World War II when Americans of Japanese, German and Italian descent were singled out as possible threats. In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which forcibly removed Japanese Americans living in the states of Washington, Oregon and California from their homes and placed them in internment camps. The order was subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court.

In 1948 the United States returned to its "huddled masses" mode when Congress passed and President Harry Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act, allowing refugees from communism to emigrate freely.

Today, it seems the U.S. Congress is striving to make our nation more multicultural. According to an article by Joseph A. Agostino in the October 1 issue of Human Events, Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D-Mass.) introduced the so-called "Diversity Immigrant Visa Program" in 1990 for just that purpose. Signed into law by President George Bush, the goal of the program is to issue "highly prized permanent residence visas to 50,000 foreign nationals from countries that send relatively few immigrants to the United States." Administered by the State Department under Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the program went into effect in 1995.

Despite the fears of nativists over the years, immigration has always been and remains a benefit to the United States. In his new book "The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again," political analyst Michael Barone writes that like past immigrants, our new immigrants will be "interwoven into the fabric of American life...It can happen even more rapidly if all of us realize that that interweaving is part of the basic character of the country." That means a "melting pot" predicated on cultural pluralism rather than multiculturalism.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: mbkuropas@compuserve.com.

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