Immigration

Roger Daniels

Immigration and immigration policy have been an integral part of the American polity since the early years of the American Republic. Until late in the nineteenth century it had been the aim of American policy, and thus its diplomacy, to facilitate the entrance of free immigrants. From the 1880s until World War II—an era of immigration restriction of increasing severity—the diplomacy of immigration was chiefly concerned with the consequences of keeping some people out and, after 1924, when Congress made the diplomatic establishment partially responsible for immigration selection and its control, with keeping some prospective immigrants out. Since 1945, after only seemingly minor changes in policy during World War II, and partly due to the shift in American foreign policy from quasi-isolation to a quest for global leadership and hegemony, immigration policy has become less and less restrictive. Cold War imperatives plus a growing tendency toward more egalitarian attitudes about ethnic and racial minorities contributed to a change in immigration policy.

Many foreigners clearly understood that there were certain ironies in these long-term changes. No one was more aware of this than the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Visiting Washington in 1979 during a time when the United States was urging the Soviet Union to allow more Jews to emigrate, the Chinese leader, according to Jimmy Carter's memoirs, told the American president: "If you want me to release ten million Chinese to come to the United States I'd be glad to do that." Obviously, Deng was "pulling Carter's chain," but it is not clear from the text whether the Georgian realized that. Immigration was part of the raison d'être of the early Republic. One of the complaints in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was that George III had "endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands." The Constitution, while not mentioning immigration directly, did instruct Congress "to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization" (Article 1, Section 8) and provided that naturalized persons might hold any office under the Constitution save only President and Vice President. (Article 2, Section 1). The only other reference to migration referred obliquely to the African slave trade, providing that "the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight" (Article 1, Section 9).

In 1790 Congress passed the first naturalization act, limiting those eligible to "free white persons." This put the new nation on a collision course with Great Britain, which, although it had naturalization statutes of its own, often refused to recognize the switch of allegiance of its subjects. The question of the impressment of seamen was one of the issues that troubled Anglo-American relations from 1787, when the first of many American protests against impressment was made, until the end of the War of 1812. Foreign Secretary George Canning put the British case nicely when he declared that when British seamen "are employed in the private service of foreigners, they enter into engagements inconsistent with the duty of subjects. In such cases, the species of redress which the practice of all times has … sanctioned is that of taking those subjects at sea out of the service of such foreign individuals." Impressment, of course, became one of the issues that led to the War of 1812. After that the British recognized, in practice, the right of naturalization, but one of the ongoing tasks of American diplomatic officials has been trying to ensure that naturalized American citizens are recognized as such when they visit their former native lands. This has been particularly a problem for men of military age during time of war.

While barring the African slave trade at the earliest possible moment in 1808, immigration "policy" in the new nation universally welcomed free immigrants. American leaders understood that immigration was necessary to fill up their largely empty and expanding country and would have endorsed the nineteenth-century Argentine statesman Juan Bautista Alberdi's maxim that "to govern is to populate." Even Millard Fillmore, while running for president on the nativist American Party ticket in 1856, found it necessary to insist that he had "no hostility to foreigners" and "would open wide the gates and invite the oppressed of every land to our happy country, excluding only the pauper and the criminal." Actually the gates were open, and Fillmore's suggestion of restriction on economic grounds would not become law until 1882. As long as American immigration policy welcomed all free immigrants there were no policy issues for American diplomats to negotiate. Immigration first became a special subject for diplomatic negotiation during the long run-up to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

A few Chinese had come to the United States—chiefly to East Coast ports—in the late eighteenth century in connection with the China trade. After American missionaries were established in China, some Chinese, mostly young men, came to the eastern United States for education without raising any stir. But relatively large-scale Chinese immigration, mostly to California beginning with the gold rush of 1849, produced an anti-Chinese movement. Before this movement became a national concern, Secretary of State William H. Seward appointed a former Massachusetts congressman, Anson Burlingame, as minister to China in 1861. He was the first to reside in Beijing. A radical former free-soiler and antislavery orator, Burlingame supported Chinese desires for equal treatment by the Western powers. While still in Beijing, he resigned his post in late 1867 and accepted a commission as China's first official envoy to the West. With an entourage that included two Chinese co-envoys and a large staff, he traveled to Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States seeking modification of China's unequal status. He was successful only in Washington. There he negotiated in 1868 what became known as the Burlingame Treaty—actually articles added to the Treaty of Tientsin (1858). The 1868 agreement, China's first equal treaty, was ratified without controversy and contained the first immigration clause in any American treaty:

The United States and the Emperor of China cordially recognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance and also the mutual advantage of free migration and emigration … for the purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents … but nothing contained herein shall be held to confer naturalization upon the citizens of the United States in China, nor upon the subjects of China in the United States.

The United States would never again recognize a universal "right to immigrate," and by 1870 the anti-Chinese movement was becoming national. Spurred by economic distress in California and a few instances of Chinese being used as strikebreakers in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, anti-Chinese forces stemming largely from the labor movement made increasingly powerful demands for an end to Chinese immigration, usually blending their economic arguments with naked racism. That summer Congress was legislating the changes in the existing naturalization statute impelled by the end of slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment. Republican Senator Charles Sumner and a few other radicals wanted to make the new naturalization statute color blind, but the majority did not wish to extend that fundamental right to Chinese. The new statute amended the eligibility from "free white persons" to "white persons and to aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent."

In 1876 Congress created a joint congressional committee to investigate Chinese immigration. It took testimony in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco just before and after that year's presidential election. By that time both national party platforms had anti-Chinese planks. The Republican version was somewhat tentative, declaring it "the immediate duty of Congress to investigate the effects of the immigration and importation of Mongolians." The out-of-power Democrats denounced "the policy which tolerates the revival of the coolie-trade in Mongolian women held for immoral purposes, and Mongolian men to perform servile labor." The majority report of the joint congressional committee claimed that the Pacific Coast had to become "either American or Mongolian," insisting that there was "not sufficient brain capacity in the Chinese race to furnish motive power for self-government" and that "there is no Aryan or European race which is not far superior to the Chinese." The committee report urged the president to get the Burlingame Treaty modified and Congress to legislate against "Asiatic immigration." The report was presented to Congress while it was settling the election of 1876, so no immediate action was taken. After much debate the next Congress passed the so-called Fifteen Passenger bill, which barred any vessel from bringing in more than fifteen Chinese immigrants. The sticking point for many was the existing Burlingame Treaty: some wanted to over-ride it completely while others wanted to wait until the treaty was revised. The bill also instructed the president to notify the Chinese that portions of the treaty were abrogated, which passage of the bill would have accomplished.

Rutherford B. Hayes responded with a reasoned veto message that accepted the desirability of stemming Chinese immigration. He argued that the Chinese manifested "all the traits of race, religion, manners, and customs, habitations, mode of life, segregation here, and the keeping up of the ties of their original home … [which] stamp them as strangers and sojourners, and not as incorporated elements of our national life." But, he insisted, there was no emergency to justify unilateral abrogation of the treaty, which could have disastrous consequences for American merchants and missionaries in China. He promised that there would be a renegotiation of the treaty.

A somewhat protracted diplomatic renegotiation was completed by the end of 1880, and the new treaty was ratified and proclaimed in October 1881. It unilaterally gave the United States the right to "regulate, limit, or suspend" the "coming or residence" of Chinese laborers, but it allowed Chinese subjects "proceeding to the United States as teachers, students, merchants, or from curiosity, together with their body and household servants, and Chinese laborers now in the United States to go and come of their own free will and accord."

In the spring of 1882, Congress passed a bill suspending the immigration of Chinese laborers for twenty years. President Chester A. Arthur vetoed it, arguing that while a permanent bar to Chinese labor might be eventually justified, prudence dictated a shorter initial term. Congress responded by repassing the bill but with a ten-year suspension, and Arthur signed it into law in May 1882. The law prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers—defined as "both skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining"—after 4 August 1882. It also provided that any Chinese who was in the country on 17 November 1880—the effective date of the Sino-American treaty—or had come between that date and 4 August 1882 had the right to leave and return. The law, as opposed to the treaty, did not spell out who was entitled to enter, although it did specify that diplomats and other officials of the Chinese government doing government business, along with their body and household servants, were admissible. Fines for bringing Chinese in illegally could run as high as $1,000 per individual, and vessels landing Chinese illegally were liable to seizure and condemnation.

Thus, what is commonly called the Chinese Exclusion Act—its proper title is "To Execute Certain Treaty Stipulations Relating to Chinese"—became law. The typical textbook treatment is a sentence or two, sometimes relating it to other discriminatory treatment. Its real significance goes much deeper than that. Viewed from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the Exclusion Act is clearly a pivot on which subsequent American immigration policy turned, the hinge on which the poet Emma Lazarus's "Golden Door" began to swing toward a closed position. It initiated what can be called an era of steadily increasing restrictions on immigration of all kinds that would last for sixty-one years. It was also the first time that immigration policy per se became a focal point of a bilateral diplomatic relationship between the United States and another nation.

During the exclusion era—1882–1943—the problematic enforcement of changing immigration statutes and regulations for Chinese created future diplomatic problems, brought the principle of family reunification into American immigration policy, shaped the culture of immigration enforcement in the United States, and established a precedent for negotiations about American immigration policies. Various changes, generally of a more restrictive character, were added to the Chinese exclusion laws and regulations between 1882 and 1902, when a modified law extended them "until otherwise provided by law." These changes exacerbated relations and triggered repeated negotiations between the two nations.

The most significant of these negotiations occurred in the aftermath of the Geary Act of 1892, which not only extended exclusion for ten years but also required that all Chinese in the United States get a residence certificate (a kind of internal passport) within a year or be deported. The statute also reversed the usual presumption of innocence and provided that "any Chinese person or person of Chinese descent" was deemed to be in the country illegally unless he or she could demonstrate otherwise. This set off a mass civil disobedience campaign orchestrated by Chinese-American community organizations. They urged Chinese Americans not to register and hired a trio of leading constitutional lawyers to challenge the statute. Their suit, Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), was expedited to the Supreme Court, which quickly ruled, five to three, against Fong and two other litigants. Justice Horace Gray, writing for the majority, held that Chinese, like other resident aliens, were entitled "to the safeguards of the Constitution, and to the protection of the laws, in regard to their rights of persons and of property, and to their civil and criminal responsibility," but insisted that the Constitution could not shield them if Congress decided that "their removal is necessary or expedient for the public interest."

At the time of the Court's ruling only some 13,000 Chinese had registered; perhaps 90,000 had not and were presumably liable to immediate deportation. But both cabinet officers responsible for enforcement—Treasury Secretary John G. Carlisle and Attorney General Richard Olney—instructed their subordinates not to enforce the law. Carlisle estimated that mass deportations would cost at least $7.3 million and noted that his annual enforcement budget was $25,000. Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham confidentially informed the Chinese minister, Yung Yu, that Congress would soon amend the law so that Chinese could register even though the deadline had passed. In November 1893, Congress extended the deadline by six months, and in that time about 93,000 additional Chinese registered and received the disputed certificates.

While relations between China and the United States were complicated by actions of the federal government toward immigrants, those between Italy and the United States deteriorated because of discrimination by lesser governmental bodies. There was widespread violence directed against Italian Americans, but one outbreak in particular had the most serious international consequences. On 15 October 1890 the police superintendent in New Orleans was murdered by a group of men using sawed-off shotguns; before he died he whispered that the Italians had done it. He had been investigating so-called Mafia influence among the city's large Italian-American population. New Orleans authorities quickly arrested almost 250 local Italian Americans and eventually indicted nineteen of them, including one fourteen-year-old boy, for the murder. Nine were brought to trial. On 13 March 1891 the jury found six not guilty and could not agree on three others. All nine were returned to jail for trial on another charge. The day after the verdict, a notice signed by sixty-one prominent local residents was placed in the morning newspaper inviting "all good citizens" to a 10 a.m. mass meeting "to remedy the failure of justice." A mob of perhaps 5,000 persons assembled, and, led by three members of the local bar, went first to the arsenal where many were issued firearms and then to the parish prison, where they shot and killed eight incarcerated Italians and removed three others and lynched them. Three or four of the victims were Italian citizens and the others were naturalized American citizens. None of the mob was ever punished.

Local public opinion hailed the result, as did much of the nation's press. The New York Times wrote that the victims were "sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins" but insisted in the same editorial that the lynching "was not incited by any prejudice against Italians." The Italian government protested, demanding punishment for the lynchers, protection for the Italian Americans of New Orleans, and an indemnity. President Benjamin Harrison himself, acting during an illness of Secretary of State James G. Blaine, directed the American minister in Rome to explain "the embarrassing gap in federalism—that in such cases the state alone has jurisdiction," while rejecting all the demands. There was nothing new about this. Similar responses had been made by the federal government in a number of previous instances, most notably in 1851 when Spaniards had been killed in New Orleans; in 1885 after the Rock Springs, Wyoming, massacre of twenty-eight Chinese miners; and in a whole host of other outrages, mostly against Chinese in the Far West. In all of these cases the president eventually called upon Congress to make an ex gratia payment. Congress, after debate, did so, and the matters were ended. For the Rock Springs affair, for example, the payment was nearly $150,000.

The lynching of Italians in New Orleans took a somewhat different course to the same essential result. Exasperated by the initial stonewalling, the Italian government recalled its minister in Washington but did not break relations. There was foolish talk of war in the press—all agreed that the Italian navy was superior to the American—and naval preparedness advocates used the speculation to their advantage. Eventually good relations were restored, but Harrison settled the matter without the traditional reference to Congress. In his December 1892 message to Congress Harrison reported the payment of $24,330.90 (125,000 francs) to the Italian government, a little over $6,000 per person. The money was taken from the general appropriation for diplomatic expenses. Congress was furious—or pretended to be—because of executive usurpation of its prerogatives and reduced the fund for diplomatic contingencies by $20,000.

A more complex and potentially more serious situation developed from the mistreatment of Japanese in the United States—more serious because of the growing hostility between the United States and Japan over conflicting plans for Pacific expansion and more complex because both local and national discrimination was involved and because major tensions about Japanese immigrants continued for more than two decades. Long before diplomatic tensions over Japanese immigration to western states and the Territory of Hawaii surfaced, Tokyo had shown concern about possible mistreatment of its immigrants in America. As early as the 1890s internal Japanese diplomatic correspondence shows that there were fears in Tokyo that emigrant Japanese workers in the United States, who in many places were filling niches once occupied by Chinese workers, would eventually evoke the same kinds of official treatment—exclusion—that Chinese workers had experienced. This, Japanese officials were convinced, would negatively affect Japan's ambitions to achieve great-power status. The greatest fear—Tokyo's worst nightmare about this subject—was that someday there would be a "Japanese Exclusion Act." This fear—and eventually resentment at the result, which was in effect exclusion—so pervaded Japanese culture that for decades Japanese texts continued to refer to the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 as the "Japanese Exclusion Act."

Anti-Japanese activity had flared in race-sensitive California as early as 1892, when there were fewer than 5,000 Japanese persons in the entire country. In 1905 the state's leading newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, began what can be called an anti-Japanese immigrant crusade—a crusade that the rival publisher William Randolph Hearst soon made his own. In the same year San Francisco labor leaders organized the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, the California legislature passed a resolution calling on Congress to "limit and diminish Japanese immigration," and two California congressmen introduced the first bills calling for exclusion of Japanese into Congress.

Although these events all took place beneath the radar of national press consciousness, they did not escape the notice of the man in the White House. In May 1905, Theodore Roosevelt fumed in a (private) letter about the "foolish offensiveness" of the [mostly Republican] "idiots" of the California legislature, while indicating sympathy for the notion of exclusion of Japanese and muttering about their being "a serious problem in Hawaii." Two months later he instructed the U.S. Minister to Japan, Lloyd C. Griscom, to inform Tokyo that "the American Government and … people" had no sympathy with the agitation and that while "I am President" Japanese would be treated like "other civilized peoples." In his prolix annual message of December 1905, Roosevelt insisted that there should be no discrimination "against any man" who wished to immigrate and be a good citizen, and he specifically included Japanese in a short list of examples of acceptable ethnic groups. In the next paragraph, Roosevelt, who had signed the 1902 extension of Chinese exclusion without hesitation, made it clear that Chinese laborers, "skilled and unskilled," were not acceptable.

Almost a year later, on 11 October 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education ordered all Japanese and Korean pupils to attend the long established "Oriental" school in Chinatown. The announcement attracted little attention in the San Francisco press and seems to have been ignored outside California until nine days later, when garbled reports of what had happened were printed in Tokyo newspapers claiming that all Japanese pupils had been excluded from the public schools. Roosevelt reacted quickly. He wrote his high-ranking Harvard classmate Baron Kentaro Kaneko that he would take action; he also met with and gave similar assurances to the Japanese minister, Viscount Siuzo Aoki, and dispatched a cabinet member and former California congressman, Secretary of Commerce and Labor Victor H. Metcalf, to San Francisco to investigate the matter. In his December 1906 annual message the president formally recommended legislation "providing for the naturalization of Japanese who come here intending to become American citizens." Roosevelt made no serious effort to get such legislation introduced, let alone passed, and just two months later Secretary of State Elihu Root, in reacting to a Japanese proposal that acceptance of exclusion be traded for naturalization, informed American negotiators that "no statute could be passed or treaty ratified" that granted naturalization.

Secretary Metcalf's report was made public on 18 December 1906 and showed that rather than the hundreds or thousands of Japanese pupils discussed in the press there were only ninety-five Japanese students in the entire San Francisco school system, twenty-five of them native-born American citizens. He did find that twenty-seven of the aliens were teenagers enrolled in inappropriate grades because of language problems; the most extreme example was two nineteen-year-olds in the fourth grade. Metcalf's report recommended that age-grade limits be enforced, something that was acceptable to the Japanese community. Otherwise Metcalf found the segregation order unjust and against the public interest. But since the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had affirmed the legality of racial segregation in the United States, the federal government had no power over a state's right to practice it. California politicians of all parties, undoubtedly representing the will of their constituents, adamantly refused to mitigate their discrimination in any way, and, in the session of the legislature that began in January 1907, proposed enacting more anti-Japanese legislation. Roosevelt and Root set to work to ameliorate the situation, and, in something over a year, worked out a solution that is known as the Gentlemen's Agreement, the substance of which is contained in six notes exchanged between the two governments in late 1907 and early 1908. It is instructive to note that Root actually instituted an action in the northern federal district court of California to prohibit segregation of alien Japanese school-children, who enjoyed most-favored-nation rights under the existing commercial treaty with Japan, but could do nothing for the pupils who were American citizens.

In the event, no suit was necessary. Roosevelt summoned members of the school board to Washington, jawboned them in the White House, and got them to rescind their order in February 1907. (The only Japanese pupils actually segregated in California were in a few rural districts around Sacramento. Although that segregation continued, no fuss was made about it, so the Japanese government, which was concerned with "face" rather than principle, never complained.) Then Congress passed an amendment, drafted in the State Department, to a pending immigration bill, which enabled the president to bar by executive order persons with passports issued for any country other than the United States from entering the country. Japan, in turn, agreed to mark any passports issued to laborers, skilled or unskilled, who had not previously established American residence, as not valid for the United States. But the eventual agreement allowed Japan to issue passports valid for the United States to "laborers who have already been in America and to the parents, wives and children of laborers already resident there." Thus the principle of family reunification, which would become a hallmark of American immigration policy, was first introduced as a part of the process of restricting Asian immigration.

The Gentlemen's Agreement is an excellent example of the "unintended consequences" that have characterized much of the legal side of American immigration history. The diplomats and politicians involved assumed that with labor immigration at an end the Japanese American population would decline and the problems that its presence created in a white-dominated racist society would gradually fade away. They did not realize that through the family reunification provisions of the agreement tens of thousands of Japanese men would bring wives to California. Many if not most of these were "picture brides," women married by proxy in Japan to men who in most instances they would not see until they came to America. Most of these newly married couples soon had children who were American citizens by virtue of being born on American soil, which meant that the American Japanese population grew steadily. Eventually the anti-Japanese forces in the United States campaigned without success for a constitutional amendment that would repeal the "birthright citizenship" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and make the children of "aliens ineligible to citizenship" similarly ineligible. (In the 1970s nativist forces in the United States revived such demands but with a different target: they proposed making the American-born children of illegal immigrants ineligible for automatic citizenship.) When the Gentlemen's Agreement went into effect there were probably some 60,000 Japanese persons in the continental United States, the vast majority of them aliens. By 1940 there were more than 125,000, more than two-thirds of them native-born American citizens. Many white Californians and other concerned westerners who had been assured that the Gentlemen's Agreement was tantamount to exclusion came to believe that they had been betrayed by the uncaring politicians back east.

But even before the demographic consequences of the Gentlemen's Agreement became clear, a second crisis arose over Japanese immigrants. This one erupted in 1913 and focused on land rather than on people. Although most Japanese immigrants had come to California as laborers, many soon were able to become agricultural proprietors. As early as 1909 bills had been introduced into the California legislature barring the sale of agricultural land to Japanese, but Republican governors then and in 1911—the California legislature met only every other year—cooperated with Republican presidents in Washington and "sat upon the lid," as Governor Hiram W. Johnson put it. But in 1913, with Johnson still governor and Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the White House, the lid was off. Although Washington was again taken unawares by the crisis, Tokyo had been expecting it. Its consul general in San Francisco had warned in November 1912 that "the fear-laden anti-Japanese emotion of the people [of California] is a sleeping lion." By the time Wilson took office on 4 March 1913, bills restricting Japanese and other alien landholding had made considerable progress in the California legislature. The Japanese ambassador, Sutemi Chinda, called on the president during Wilson's second day in office: his dispatch to Tokyo quoted Wilson as saying "that the constitution did not allow the federal government to intervene in matters relating to the rights of the individual states." After much debate and publicity, in mid-April the California legislature passed legislation forbidding the ownership of agricultural land by "aliens ineligible to citizenship." This, of course, pointed the bill at Japanese, although it also affected other Asians. Californians argued that the discrimination—if such it was—was caused by federal rather than state law.

Even before Governor Johnson signed the bill, angry anti-American demonstrations erupted in Tokyo: the California legislature had again helped to create an international crisis. The Wilson administration, while trying to adhere to traditional states' rights doctrines, nevertheless felt that it had to at least seem to be taking action. Wilson sent Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan on a cross-country train trip to Sacramento to meet with Governor Johnson and the legislature and urged that the bill not be enacted before Bryan arrived. In the event, Bryan's trip was anti-climactic. Unlike Roosevelt and Root, Wilson and Bryan had nothing to offer the Californians in return for moderation. Bryan returned to Washington, and Johnson signed the Alien Land Act into law: eventually ten other western states passed similar measures.

The California law, which was strengthened in 1920, was relatively ineffective. Japanese farmers and the white entrepreneurs with whom they dealt evaded the law in a number of ways, most of which had been foreseen by Johnson and his advisers. The two major methods were placing land in the name of citizen children or leasing rather than purchasing the land. For a few relatively large-scale operators adoption of a corporate form was also effective. When the California legislature passed an amendment to the land act barring "aliens ineligible to citizenship" from exercising guardianship over their citizen children, the federal courts ruled that such a statute violated the constitutional rights of those children to have their natural parents as guardians.

These disputes, of course, helped to poison relations between Japan and the United States, which were already problematic on other grounds. During the Versailles treaty negotiations and in early sessions of the League of Nations, Japan tried to get questions of immigration and racial equality discussed but the imperialist powers successfully stifled every attempt. (Of course Japan did not have clean hands in such matters, but that is another story.) The final and most traumatic act in the conflicts between the Pacific powers over immigration came in 1924 and involved federal rather than state discrimination.

By the 1920s the American people and the Congress were ready for a general and massive curtailment of immigration. Prior to that time statutory immigration restriction based on race or national origin had been directed only at Asians. The Immigration Act of 1917—best known for imposing a literacy test on some immigrants—had created a "barred zone" expressed in degrees of latitude and longitude, which halted the immigration of most Asians not previously excluded or limited. The first statute to limit most immigration, the Quota Act of 1921, placed numerical limits on European immigration while leaving immigration from the Western Hemisphere largely alone; it did not directly impact Japanese immigration, which was still governed by the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907–1908. Under the 1921 act Japan got a small quota, and Tokyo could not and did not complain that the law was discriminatory. Had Japan been treated as European nations were in the 1924 statute, it would have received the minimum quota of 100, but the version of the more generally restrictive 1924 law that passed the House contained overt discrimination against Japanese by forbidding the immigration of "aliens ineligible to citizenship." In an ill-starred attempt to preserve the Gentlemen's Agreement, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes suggested verbally that Japanese Ambassador Masanao Hanihara write him a letter explaining the Gentlemen's Agreement, whereupon the American would transmit the letter to the Senate in an attempt to get the offending phrase removed. The note, which was not in itself either threatening or blustering, did contain the phrase "grave consequences" in referring to what might happen if the law were enacted with the offending phrase. Henry Cabot Lodge and other senators insisted that the phrase was a "veiled threat" against the United States and stampeded the Senate into accepting the House language. In The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge (1998), the historian Robert H. Ferrell presented evidence suggesting that Hughes and others in the State Department either drafted or helped to draft the original note, something that all those concerned categorically denied at the time and later.

How grave were the actual consequences? No one can say. Japan and the United States might well have engaged in what became a "war without mercy" even if no Japanese immigrant had ever come to America. But some authorities, such as George F. Kennan, have argued that the "long and unhappy story" of U.S.–Japanese relations were negatively affected by the fact that "we would repeatedly irritate and offend the sensitive Japanese by our immigration policies and the treatment of people of Japanese lineage."

The 1924 act, which established a pattern of immigration restriction that prevailed until 1965, also established a "consular control system" by providing that aliens subject to immigration control could not be admitted to the United States without a valid visa issued by an American consular officer abroad. Visas were first required as a wartime measure in a 1918 act and were continued in peacetime by a 1921 act, but they were primarily an identification device. The 1924 act for the first time made the visa a major factor in immigration control. Although the State Department often claimed that Congress had tied the government's hands, the fact of the matter is that since 1924 much actual restriction of immigration has been based on the judgment of the individual federal officials administering it. That responsibility has been shared between the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), then in the Department of Labor but switched to the Department of Justice in 1940. The diplomatic control is exercised by granting or failing to grant visas; the INS control is exercised largely at the borders, although since 1925 some INS personnel have been attached to some American embassies abroad as technical advisers. (The number of foreign countries with INS personnel has fluctuated. At the outset of the twenty-first century they were operating in thirty-eight countries. In Canada and a few other places, mostly in the Western Hemisphere, it has become possible to clear U.S. immigration and customs while still on foreign soil.)

The American foreign service—which was white, Christian (overwhelmingly Protestant), and elitist—had long exercised a largely negative influence on American immigration policy. Consular reports had provided much ammunition for the immigration restriction movement since the late nineteenth century. The tenure of Wilbur J. Carr as, in effect, head of the consular service from 1909 to 1937, placed a determined and convinced anti-Semitic nativist in a position to shape the formulation of both immigration and refugee policy. We now know that Carr, a skilled and manipulative bureaucrat, regularly fed anti-immigrant excerpts from unpublished consular reports to restrictionists such as Representative Albert Johnson, chief author of the 1924 immigration act. One Carr memo to him described Polish and Russian Jews as "filthy, Un-American and often dangerous in their habits." Many American consuls shared these views. Richard C. Beer, for example, a career officer serving in Budapest in 1922–1923, complained that the law forced him to give visas to Hungarians, Gypsies, and Jews who were all barbarians and gave his office an odor that "no zoo in the world can equal." Other consular officials, who might not have held such views, took their cues from their chief and the whole tone of the foreign service. During what was left of the "prosperity decade" after 1924 the INS and the State Department were pretty much on the same nativist page, although some INS officials resented their loss of control.

Although there were no statutory limits on immigration from independent nations of the Western Hemisphere until 1965, President Herbert Hoover administratively limited Mexican and other Latin American immigration by use of the highly subjective "likely to become a public charge" clause that had been on the statute books since 1882. The clause had originally been designed to keep out persons who for reasons of physical or mental disability were patently unable to support themselves. From the Hoover administration on, the clause has been interpreted at times to bar persons who were able-bodied but poor. The prospective immigrant could be stopped at the border or at an immigrant receiving station by INS personnel or could have a visa denied by someone in the diplomatic service in the country of origin.

The onset of the Great Depression temporarily reduced immigration pressures—during two years in the early 1930s more immigrants left the United States than entered it—but an entirely different situation developed after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. The unprecedented situation of large numbers of refugees and would-be refugees stemming from a western European power had not been foreseen by the drafters of American immigration legislation. The United States had an immigration policy but not a refugee policy. Congress had previously been favorable to political and religious refugees. Restrictive immigration acts dating from the nineteenth century barred persons with criminal records but always specifically excluded those convicted of political offenses. As late as 1917, in the part of a statute imposing a not very strenuous literacy test as a criterion for admission, Congress specifically exempted any person seeking admission "to avoid religious persecution."

By 1933, however, under the stresses of the Great Depression and after going through what John Higham has aptly termed the "tribal twenties," Congress was in no mood to ease immigration restrictions. And although some of the later apologists for the lack of an effective American refugee policy before the onset of the Holocaust put all or most of the onus on Congress, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt must share that blame. There was nothing even resembling a new deal for immigration policy. To be sure, New Dealers at the top of Frances Perkins's Department of Labor, which continued to administer the INS until 1940, were much more sympathetic to immigrant concerns than the labor movement bureaucrats who had previously run the department. But the anti-immigrant culture of the INS continued. Moreover, the State Department's personnel and policies about immigration and many other matters were little affected by the New Deal. The administrative regulation of immigration was tightened during the early years of the Depression by both sets of government agents: the consular officials abroad and the INS at the borders.

Jews and others seeking visas in the 1930s quickly learned that some American consuls were better than others. George S. Messersmith, consul general in Berlin in the early 1930s and minister to Austria before the Anschluss, at a time when the German quota was undersubscribed, gained a positive rating from Jewish individuals and organizations. Even more proactive for refugees was Messersmith's successor in Berlin, Raymond Geist, who on occasion actually went to concentration camps to arrange the release of Jews with American visas. Although there is no thorough study of the work of American consular officials in Europe during the period between 1933 and Pearl Harbor, it is clear that men like Messersmith and Geist were exceptions and that the majority of consuls were indifferent if not hostile to Jews desiring American visas. The signals consuls received from Carr and other officials in the State Department certainly encouraged them to interpret the law as narrowly as possible.

For example, when Herbert Lehman, Franklin Roosevelt's successor as governor of New York, wrote the president on two occasions in 1935 and 1936 about the difficulties German Jews were having in getting visas from American consulates, Roosevelt assured him, in responses drafted by the State Department, that consular officials were carrying out their duties "in a considerate and humane manner." Irrefutable evidence exists in a number of places to demonstrate that, to the contrary, many officials of the Department of State at home and abroad consistently made it difficult and in many cases impossible for fully eligible refugees to obtain visas. One example will have to stand as surrogate for hundreds of demonstrable cases of consular misfeasance and malfeasance. Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, the oldest Jewish seminary in America, had a Refugee Scholars Project that between 1935 and 1942 brought eleven such scholars to its campus. The 1924 immigration act specifically exempted from quota restriction professors and ministers of any religion as well as their wives and minor children. There should have been no difficulties on the American end in bringing the chosen scholars to Cincinnati. But in almost every case the State Department and especially Avra M. Warren, head of the visa division, raised difficulties, some of which seem to have been invented. In some instances the college, often helped by the intervention of influential individuals, managed to overcome them. In two instances, however, the college was unsuccessful.

The men involved were Arthur Spanier and Albert Lewkowitz. Spanier had been the Hebraica librarian at the Prussian State Library, and after the Nazis dismissed him, a teacher at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Spanier was sent to a concentration camp. The guaranteed offer of an appointment was enough to get him released from the camp but not enough to get him an American visa. The president of Hebrew Union College had to go to Washington even to discover why this was the case. Warren explained that the rejection was because Spanier's principal occupation was as a librarian and because after 1934 the Nazis had demoted the Hochschule (a general term for a place of higher education) to a Lehranstalt (educational institute), and an administrative regulation of the State Department not found in the statute held that a nonquota visa could not be given to a scholar coming to a high status institute in the United States from one of lower status abroad. Lewkowitz, a teacher of philosophy at the Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary, did get an American visa in Germany. Both men were able to get to the Netherlands and were there when the Germans invaded. The German bombing of Rotterdam destroyed Lewkowitz's papers, and American consular officials there insisted that he get new documents from Germany, an obviously impossible requirement. Visaless, both men were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Lewkowitz was one of the few concentration camp inmates exchanged, and he reached Palestine in 1944. Spanier was murdered in Bergen-Belsen. If highly qualified scholars with impressive institutional sponsorship had difficulties, one can imagine what it was like for less well-placed individuals.

Apart from creating difficulties for refugees seeking visas, the State Department consistently downplayed international attempts to solve or ameliorate the refugee situation. For example, in 1936 brain trusters Felix Frankfurter and Raymond Moley urged Roosevelt to send a delegation that included such prominent persons as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise to a 1936 League of Nations conference on refugees. The president instead took the advice of the State Department and sent only a minor diplomatic functionary as an observer. It was then politic for him to accept the State Department's insistence that "the status of all aliens is covered by law and there is no latitude left to the Executive to discuss questions concerning the legal status of aliens." When Roosevelt wanted to do something to he could almost always find a way. Immediately after the Anschluss, he directed that the Austrian quota numbers be used to expand the German quota, and shortly after Kristallnacht, he quietly directed the INS that any political or religious refugees in the United States on six-month visitor's visas could have such visas extended or rolled over every six months. Perhaps 15,000 persons were thus enabled to stay in the United States. On more public occasions however, such as the infamous early 1939 voyage of the German liner Saint Louis, loaded with nearly a thousand refugees whose Cuban visas had been canceled, he again took State Department advice and turned a deaf ear to appeals for American visas while the vessel hove to just off Miami Beach. The Saint Louis returned its passengers to Europe, where many of them perished in the Holocaust.

After the Nazis overran France, Roosevelt showed what a determined president could do. In the summer of 1940 he instructed his Advisory Committee on Refugees to make lists of eminent refugees and told the State Department to issue visas for them. An agent named Varian Fry, operating out of Marseilles and with the cooperation of American vice consuls, managed to get more than a thousand eminent refugees into Spain and on to the United States. Those rescued by these means included Heinrich Mann, Marc Chagall, and Wanda Landowska. But at the same time, Roosevelt appointed his friend Breckinridge Long as assistant secretary of state. A confirmed nativist and anti-Semite, Long was in charge of the visa section and thus oversaw refugee policy. The president eventually became aware of the biases in the State Department, and when he decided in mid-1944 to bring in a "token shipment" of nearly a thousand refugees from American-run camps in Europe, he put Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes in charge. Vice President Walter Mondale's acute 1979 observation that before and during the war the nations of the West "failed the test of civilization" is a sound assessment of American policy.

Two other wartime developments should be noted. First, the State Department became involved in American agricultural policy in connection with the wartime Bracero program, which brought temporary Mexican workers to the United States for work in agriculture and on railroads. The Mexican government was, with good reason, apprehensive about the treatment they might receive, so the State Department was in part responsible for the United States living up to its agreement. Second, the State Department was responsible for the wartime exchanges of diplomats and other enemy nationals with the Axis powers. It was also concerned with the treatment of American civilians in enemy hands, particularly Japan, and because of that justified concern persistently argued for humane treatment for both the few thousand interned Japanese nationals in INS custody and the 120,000 Japanese Americans, both citizen and alien, who were in the custody of the War Relocation Authority.

The war years also witnessed a historic if seemingly minor reversal of American immigration policy with the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Few episodes show the connection between immigration and foreign policy so explicitly. President Roosevelt sent a special message to Congress urging the action. Speaking as commander in chief, he regarded the legislation "as important in the cause of winning the war and of establishing a secure peace." Since China was a U.S. ally and its resistance depended in part on "the spirit of her people and her faith in her allies," the president argued for a show of support:

We owe it to the Chinese to strengthen that faith. One step in this direction is to wipe from the statute books those anachronisms in our laws which forbid the immigration of Chinese people into this country and which bar Chinese residents from American citizenship. Nations, like individuals, make mistakes. We must be big enough to acknowledge our mistakes of the past and correct them.

In addition, Roosevelt argued that repeal would silence Japanese propaganda and that the small number of Chinese who would enter would cause neither unemployment nor job competition. The president admitted that "While the law would give the Chinese a preferred status over certain other Oriental people, their great contribution to the cause of decency and freedom entitles them to such preference…. Passage will be an earnest of our purpose to apply the policy of the good neighbor to our relations with other peoples."

The repeal of Chinese exclusion was thus sold as a kind of good-behavior prize not for Chinese Americans, thousands of whom were then serving in the U.S. armed forces, but for the Chinese people. Nevertheless, Roosevelt's hint about future policy was right on the mark. Within three years Congress would pass similar special legislation granting naturalization rights and quotas to Filipinos and "natives of India," and in 1952 it would enact legislation ending racial discrimination in naturalization policy. By that time the emphasis was on winning "hearts and minds" in the Cold War.

THE COLD WAR AND BEYOND

Even before the Cold War came to dominate almost every facet of American policies toward the rest of the world, attitudes about immigration and immigration policies were beginning to change, as were the policies themselves. The increasing prevalence of an internationalist ideology, membership in the United Nations, and a growing guilt about and horror at the Holocaust all combined to impel the United States to do something about the European refugee crisis symbolized by the millions of displaced persons there. After some crucial months of inaction, Harry Truman issued a presidential directive just before Christmas 1945 that got some refugees into the United States. One important and often over-looked aspect of this directive enabled voluntary agencies, largely religious, to sponsor refugees, which virtually negated the application of the "likely to become a public charge" clause in such cases. Previously, sponsorship of most refugees without significant assets had to be assumed by American relatives. But it was only after passage and implementation of the Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950 that the United States could be said to have a refugee policy, one that the increasingly more diverse personnel of the State Department helped to carry out. That legislation brought more than 400,000 European refugees into the United States and expanded the use of voluntary agencies—later called VOLAGS (Voluntary Agencies Responsible for Refugees)—such as the Catholic and Lutheran welfare organizations and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Association. In addition, U.S. sponsorship of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and membership in its successors, the International Refugee Organization and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, contributed to changed attitudes about and policies toward refugees even though general immigration policy remained tied to the quota principle introduced in 1921–1924, which lasted until 1965.

Even the notorious McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952—a quintessential piece of Cold War legislation that passed over Truman's veto and seemed merely to continue the restrictive policies begun in 1921 and 1924—contained liberalizing provisions that were more significant than most of its advocates and opponents realized. Chief of these was the total elimination of a color bar in naturalization. While some of the impetus for this came from liberals on racial issues, the push from those impelled by Cold War imperatives was probably more important. State Department representatives and others testified how difficult it was to become the leader of what they liked to term the "free world" when American immigration and naturalization policies blatantly discriminated against the majority of the world's peoples. In addition, a growing understanding that an important diplomatic objective was to win the hearts and minds of peoples and not just the consent of governments made diplomats more aware of the significance of immigrants and immigration. For example, when Dalip Singh Saund, the first Asian-born member of Congress, was elected in 1956, the State Department and the United States Information Agency sponsored him and his wife on a tour of his native India.

Although the word "refugee" does not appear in the 1952 immigration act, an obscure section of it gave the attorney general discretionary parole power to admit aliens "for emergency reasons or for reasons in the public interest." This was the method that Roosevelt had used in 1944, without congressional authorization, to bring in nearly a thousand refugees. This allowed the executive branch to respond quickly to emergency situations such as the Hungarian revolt of 1956 and the Cuban revolution of 1959. Between the displaced persons acts of the Truman administration and the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1981 about 2.25 million refugees were admitted, with about 750,000 Cubans and 400,000 refugees from America's misbegotten wars in Southeast Asia the largest increments. Since during that period some 10.4 million legal immigrants entered the United States, refugees accounted for some 20 percent of the total.

Although most textbook accounts trace the transformation of post–World War II immigration and immigration policy to the act signed by Lyndon Johnson in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty in 1965, that is a gross exaggeration. The reality can be better glimpsed by considering the numerical incidence of immigration to colonial America and the United States over time. No official enumeration of immigration took place before 1819, but most authorities agree that perhaps a million European and African immigrants came before then. Between 1819 and the enactment of the 1924 immigration act some 36 million immigrants arrived. Between 1925 and 1945—with immigration inhibited first by the new restrictive law and then much more effectively by the Great Depression and World War II—nearly 2.5 million came, an average of fewer than 125,000 annually. In the decade before World War I more than a million came each year. Well into the post–World War II era, many authorities felt that as a major factor in American history immigration was a thing of the past, but as

the table indicates, based on INS data, this was a serious misperception.

With the self deconstruction of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, domestic policy began to reassume paramount importance in American policy, including immigration policy. Input from the Department of State assumed less significance in immigration matters than during the Cold War era, although the increased volume of immigration greatly taxed and often overtaxed American embassies and consulates. For example, the State Department was given the responsibility of administering the lottery provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 and its successors. The department announced on 10 May 2001 that for the 2002 lottery its Consular Center in Williamsburg, Kentucky, had managed to sift 10 million qualified entries while rejecting an additional 3 million applicants for not following directions and notified 90,000 potential winners chosen at random what they had to do to gain admission to the United States as resident aliens. Each overseas applicant would have to pass an interview examination for eligibility at an American consulate; those applying from within the United States would apply through the INS. Only a maximum of 50,000 of the 90,000 could actually win and gain admittance to the United States along with certain of their qualified dependents. All paper work would have to be completed by 30 September 2002. Anyone who did not have a visa by then lost the presumed advantage of winning. Applications for the 2003 lottery were scheduled to take place during the following month, October 2002.

The major functions of IRCA were the socalled "amnesty," which legalized some 2.7 million immigrants illegally in the United States, the majority of whom were from Mexico, and the promise of effective control measures to "gain control of our borders" by more effective interdiction of illegal border crosses and intensified deportation of remaining resident illegals. This created great fears in many nations of the circum-Caribbean, particularly the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, whose economies were greatly dependent on immigrant remittances, that large numbers of their citizens would be excluded and their remittances ended. These fears were chimerical; borders remained porous. But, in the meantime, to cite just one example, President José Napoléon Duarte wrote President Reagan in early 1987 requesting that Salvadorans in the United States illegally be given "extended voluntary departure" (EVD) status, an aspect of the attorney general's parole power enabling illegal immigrants to remain. While EVD was usually granted on humanitarian grounds, Duarte stressed the economic loss if immigrant remittances ceased. Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, who had opposed EVD on humanitarian grounds, now supported it, but the negative views of the Department of Justice and the congressional leadership prevailed. Forms of EVD or its equivalent were put into place during the Clinton presidency for Salvadorans and Nicaraguans by both the administration and Congress.

The State Department also had to deal with increasing complaints from foreign countries about the execution of its citizens by the criminal justice systems of American states, most of which had been practicing capital punishment with increased enthusiasm at a time when many nations had abolished it. Since it is a legal action, the United States cannot even consider paying compensation of any kind.

The more than 25 million post-1950 immigrants, as is well known, have changed the face of America. As late as the 1950s, immigrants from Europe, who had contributed the lion's share of nineteenth-and early-twentieth century immigrants, still were a bare majority of all immigrants. By the 1980s, thanks largely to the liberal 1965 immigration act and the Refugee Act of 1980, the European share was down to about 10 percent, and immigrants from Latin America and Asia predominated. Although anti-immigrant attitudes again came to the fore in 1980s—sparked in part by Ronald Reagan's warnings about being overrun by "feet people"—and some scholars saw "a turn against immigration" and predicted effective legislative restriction of immigration, those feelings were not turned into an effective legislative consensus. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, immigration continued at a very high rate, and screening and facilitating that influx continued to be an important aspect of the work of American diplomacy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Breitman, Richard, and Alan M. Kraut. American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945. Bloomington, Ind., 1987. A good account of nativist sentiment and activity in the State Department.

Corbett, P. Scott. Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians Between the United States and Japan During the Second World War. Kent, Ohio, 1987. Tells the story of the State Department's Special Division.

Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York, 1990. Surveys immigration and naturalization policy.

——. The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. 2d ed. Berkeley, Calif., 1991.

Dinnerstein, Leonard. America and the Survivors of the Holocaust. New York, 1982. Fundamental to an understanding of the postwar shift in American policy toward refugees.

Fry, Varian. Surrender on Demand. New York, 1945. Fry, whose papers are at Columbia University, tells his story.

Gillion, Steven M. "That's Not What We Meant to Do": Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America. New York, 2000. A series of case studies, including one on the 1965 immigration act.

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick, N.J., 1955. The classic work on American nativism.

Karlin, J. Alexander. "The Indemnification of Aliens Injured by Mob Violence." Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 25 (1945): 235–246. Treats indemnification for victims of violence.

Loewenstein, Sharon. Token Refuge: The Story of the Jewish Refugee Shelter at Oswego, 1944–1946. Bloomington, Ind., 1986. Describes the first mass shipment of refugees.

Meyer, Michael A. "The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College." In Bertram Wallace Korn, ed. A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus. New York, 1976. Most instructive about difficulties to refugee admission created by the State Department.

Mitchell, Christopher, ed. Western Hemisphere Immigration and U.S. Foreign Policy. University Park, Pa., 1992. A collection of essays largely by political scientists.

Peffer, George Anthony. If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion. Urbana, Ill., 1999.

Reimers, David M. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. 2d ed. New York, 1992.

——. Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn Against Immigration. New York, 1998. Along with Still the Golden Door, this book is part of the cutting edge of late-twentieth-century immigration history.

Sandmeyer, Elmer Clarence. The Anti-Chinese Movement in California. 2d ed. Urbana, Ill., 1991.

Schulzinger, Robert D. The Making of the Diplomatic Mind: The Training, Outlook, and Style of United States Foreign Service Officers, 1908–1931. Middletown, Conn., 1975. Although many works on the foreign service ignore its immigration functions, this work is a happy exception.

Schwartz, Donald. "Breckinridge Long." In John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds. American National Biography. New York, 2000. This sketch makes the subject's prejudices explicit.

Smith, David A. "From the Mississippi to the Mediterranean: The 1891 New Orleans Lynching and Its Effects on United States Diplomacy and the American Navy." Southern Historian 19 (1998): 60–85.

Wilson, Theodore A. "Wilbur J. Carr." In John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds. American National Biography. New York, 2000. This laudatory sketch of Wilbur J. Carr ignores Carr's prejudices and his role in immigration policy.

See also Asylum; Department of State; Refugee Policies .

THE IMMIGRATION ACT OF 1965

The Immigration Act of 1965 changed the face of America and is one of three laws passed that year—the others being the Voting Rights Act and the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid—which collectively represent the high-water mark of twentieth-century American liberalism. Yet the immigration statute was not always so perceived. At the signing ceremony on Liberty Island, with Ellis Island in the background, President Lyndon Johnson minimized the act's importance: "The bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or add importantly to our wealth and power."

The law, in fact, changed the focus of immigration to the United States, greatly increasing the share going to Asia and the Western Hemisphere, and, through its heightened emphasis on family migration, led to a massive increase in the volume of immigration. Johnson was not dissimulating in his assessment. He was repeating what his advisers in the State and Justice departments had told him. They had focused on righting what they saw to be past mistakes of American immigration policy, and Johnson, following them, stressed the wrong done to those "from southern or eastern Europe." Members of both departments had testified before Congress that few persons from the Third World would enter under its provisions, and it is highly doubtful that the law would have been recommended or enacted had anyone understood what the results would be. Political scientists later developed the concept of unintended consequences. As Stephen M. Gillion points out in "That's Not What We Meant to Do" (2000), the 1965 Immigration Act is one of the prime examples of this phenomenon.

IMMIGRATION

IMMIGRATION. Except for some 2.5 million Native Americans and Alaska natives, the 281 million persons recorded in the 2000 census are immigrants and their descendants. Some 70 million immigrants have come to what is now the United States, beginning with the Spanish settlers in Florida and New Mexico in the late sixteenth century. The United States only began counting immigrants in 1819, so the numbers before that time are problematic.

Table 1

Table 1 shows a reasonable estimate of total immigration, legal and illegal, by centuries; as it shows, more than twothirds of all the immigrants who have come arrived in the twentieth century.

For a long time it seemed appropriate to many historians of immigration to focus on the so-called "century of immigration" that ran from 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, to 1924, the date of the most restrictive immigration law in U.S. history. However, the large movements that occurred after World War II make such an emphasis inappropriate.

Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

Approximately 24 million immigrants—36 percent of all who have ever come—had arrived since 1960, leading many to fear that immigrants were swamping the nation. In fact, even in the immigrant-rich decade after 1990, the rate of immigration—computed by dividing the yearly number of immigrants by the total population—was well below peak level. In both the decade after 1850 and the one after 1900, the rate was over 10; for the first eight years after 1990, the rate was only 3.6. Such baseless fears about immigration—called "nativism" since the mid-nineteenth century—have often been present in America.

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Most of the million immigrants who arrived in the nearly two and a half centuries between the Spanish founding of St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 and 1800 came during the years of peace between the 1680s and the 1770s. Between the outbreak of the American Revolution and Napoleon's final defeat in 1815 there was little nonmilitary immigration, although perhaps eighty thousand American Loyalists emigrated during and after the Revolution, mostly to Canada and Britain.

Since the largest single component of colonial immigration was English, and since Great Britain was the final European winner in the imperial wars of the era, the English language, English law, and English religious practices became norms to which later immigrants would be expected to conform. To be sure, the New World environment as well as distance and time worked cultural transformations, as did the influence of both aboriginal peoples and non-English immigrants. But the English were what John Higham has called the "charter group" and set norms for others to meet. About 48 percent of the total nonaboriginal population at the first census in 1790 has been estimated to be of English origin.

English: Virginia and the South. Permanent English settlement began at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and, although there were non-English in most settlements, English immigrants predominated in every seventeenth-century colony except New York. The Virginia colony was for two decades a demographic disaster in which more than half of the immigrants died within a year or so. The immigrant population there and in other southern colonies was heavily male, so natural increase—the excess of births over deaths—did not begin much before the beginning of the eighteenth century, if then.

Why then did English immigrants continue to come? Most were probably ignorant of the true conditions and for many there was no choice. A majority of those English who migrated to the American South in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were indentured servants. The dependence on tobacco growing in Virginia created almost insatiable demands for labor, which were eventually filled by enslaved African immigrants, but for decades, most indentured laborers were English and other Britons. Later in the eighteenth century about fifty thousand persons, overwhelmingly male, were "transported" from English prisons to British colonies.

But others came voluntarily, attracted by the availability of land and the possibility of wealth—what students of migration call a "pull factor," and/or repelled by wretched economic conditions and poor future prospects in England—a so-called push factor.

Maryland, where settlement conditions were less harsh than in Virginia, was founded as a refuge for English Catholics. Much of the gentry was Catholic, but they were soon outnumbered by Protestant lower orders. South Carolina had settlement patterns similar to those in Virginia, but, because of Charleston, the one city of any size in a southern colony, it had more non-British immigrants, including French Huguenots and a few Jews, among its elite population.

English: Massachusetts and New England. Most of the early migration to Massachusetts, beginning with the Pilgrims in 1620, was family migration, much of it religiously motivated. Most of the leading figures and a considerable number of the lesser lights were Protestant dissenters from the Church of England. For significant numbers of the "lesser sort," economic motives predominated. The largest increment of immigrants to New England, perhaps twenty-five thousand persons, came during the "great migration" of the two decades before 1641. Unlike the colonies on the Chesapeake, which were immigrant colonies until the beginning of the eighteenth century, persons born in the New World were a majority of the New England settlers within a few decades of settlement.

New England was less affected by non-British immigration than any other section.

Africans. Africans and their descendents have never been more statistically prominent in American society than in the colonial period. The best estimate is that, at the first federal census in 1790, Africans and their descendents were about 20 percent of the population. The earliest Africans in British North America—brought to Jamestown in 1619—were first treated as indentured servants. By about 1700 in all parts of the American colonies, most Africans were enslaved. Philip Curtin's conservative 1969 estimate judged that almost 430,000 Africans were brought to what is now the United States, about 4.5 percent of all those brought to the New World by the African slave trade. Africans made up more than a third of all immigrants to the United States before 1810. Perhaps fifty thousand more were brought after the United States outlawed further imports of foreign slaves in 1808; those fifty thousand were the first illegal immigrants and the only ones before 1882. Africans and African Americans were found in every colony and state: in 1790 more than 90 percent of the 750,000 Negroes enumerated in the census lived in the South, a percentage that remained fairly constant until well after the World War II era.

Until well into the twentieth century, scholars believed that African immigrants were stripped of their culture and brought nothing but their labor to the United States. It is now clear that African contributions to early American culture were considerable, consisting largely of agricultural and craft techniques.

Other Europeans. The largest groups of non-English Europeans in the new United States were Irish, 7.6 percent; German, 6.9 percent; and Dutch, 2.5 percent; but they were distributed quite differently. The Irish, almost all of whom were Protestants, were dispersed widely throughout the colonies and had little impact as a group although a number of individuals were quite influential. The Germans, whose immigration in significant numbers began only in 1683, were heavily concentrated in Pennsylvania, where they constituted a third of the population. Many came as indentured servants, often called "redemptioners" because other relatives who had either come as free immigrants or had gained their freedom, would frequently purchase their remaining time. Their presence—and their politics—inspired some of the earliest American nativism. In 1751 Benjamin Franklin complained, "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs. …"

Franklin's fears, of course, were groundless. Although the English and Germans each constituted about a third of Pennsylvania's population, most of the rest were Britons—Irish, Scots, and Welsh. The only ethnic political power exercised by a non-English group was in New York, where the Dutch had been in charge until the bloodless English conquest of 1660. Even though they were less than a sixth of the state's 1790 population, the Dutch, because of their status and wealth, continued to exercise significant political power. Although all of the American port cities, even Boston, contained considerable ethnic diversity in the colonial period, only New York was truly polyglot. Swedes had settled on the Delaware while a number of French Huguenots settled throughout the colonies: other French, the Acadians, were expelled by the British in 1755 from Nova Scotia and scattered throughout the colonies. Many wound up in Louisiana, which became an American territory after 1803.

The Nineteenth Century

The 19 million immigrants who came during the nineteenth century arrived at a generally accelerating pace, as table 2 indicates.

The Civil War in the first half of the 1860s and the economic slump during much of the 1890s account for the two decades in which the numbers decreased. But mere numbers do not properly indicate the impact of immigration: it is important to understand the rate or incidence of immigration. For example, in 1854 some 425,000 immigrants came, making it by far the heaviest single antebellum year for the arrival of immigrants. As there were about 26 million persons in the United States that year, the new immigrants amounted to, as such numbers are usually cited, 16 per 1,000 of the nation's people. Table 3 shows the rate of immigration per thousand averaged for each decade from the 1820s to the 1890s. Thus, the increase in actual numbers of immigrants from the 1860s to the 1870s was, in terms of incidence, a slight decrease. Beginning in 1850 each decennial census has recorded place of birth for every person enumerated, making it possible to calculate the percentage of foreign born in the population as indicated in table 4. The amazing consistency of the percentage of foreign-born persons shows clearly that, despite the fluctuations in other data, foreigners had a stable incidence in American life for a seventy-year period.

Table 2

Table 3

Table 4

From the 1830s through the 1860s a majority of immigrants were from just two ethnic groups—Irish and German. There were some 2.3 million of each, and in the 1850s and 1860s they were more than 70 percent of all immigrants. Their profiles, however, were quite different.

Irish. For the Irish, one terrible event, the potato famine of the second half of the 1840s, has dominated the memory of emigration, but there was substantial Irish immigration both before and after the famine. The root causes of Irish migration were mass poverty, underdevelopment, and a burgeoning population. Irish population almost doubled in the half-century after 1791 so that on the eve of the famine there were 8.1 million persons in Ireland. In the 1830s over 200,000 Irish had immigrated to the United States, and large numbers went to Canada and across the Irish Sea to England. Those Irish and their predecessors came largely as single men, and Irish labor was vital to much of the American "internal improvements" of the era. Some three thousand Irishmen had done most of the digging for the Erie Canal before 1820 and several thousand dug the New Canal in New Orleans in the 1830s.

The great famine that began in 1845 had as its proximate cause an infestation of the fungus Phytophthora infestans. This blight was well known in Ireland: it had occurred at least twenty times in the previous 125 years and did not cause alarm at first. But in 1846 it struck more completely than ever before or since and triggered the last peacetime famine in western European history. Its impact was exacerbated by the disdain and ineptitude of the British government and Irish landlords as well as by the poverty and ignorance of the people. Disease, the constant companion of famine, took its toll. That and massive emigration in the next ten years reduced the population of Ireland by some 2.5 million people—nearly one person in three.

The migration of the famine years and beyond was largely family migration. Relatively few Irish settled in rural America, and the vast majority became residents of east coast cities between Boston and Baltimore, although there were large groups of Irish in such western cities as Cincinnati, Chicago, and San Francisco. They often filled the worst neighborhoods, such as the infamous Five Points in New York City. But they also began to fill the new urban occupations and came, in many cities, to dominate public services, particularly police and fire departments, and such new urban occupations as horse car drivers. And in city after city, they played a larger role in politics than their mere numerical incidence would indicate. Most became traditionally associated with the Democratic Party.

Before the end of the century, young, unmarried women became the majority of Irish emigrants. This reflected, in part, demographic and cultural changes greatly influenced by the famine and endemic poverty. Ireland had the oldest average age at marriage and the greatest percentage of persons who never married of any nation in western Europe. The Irish emigrants of these years were overwhelmingly Catholic and they soon came to dominate the Roman Catholic Church in America. For the Irish, and to a lesser degree for other Catholic immigrants, the immigrant church became what its historian, Jay P. Dolan, termed a fortress helping to protect its faithful from a largely hostile Protestant world.

Anti-Catholic hostility was nowhere stronger than among the Protestant Irish already in America. Most American Protestant Irish began, in the 1830s and 1840s, to call themselves Scotch Irish, a term never used in Ireland or anywhere else. They formed the backbone of the most militant anti-Catholic movements in the United States, including the so-called Know-Nothing movement of the 1840s and 1850s and the American Protective Association of the 1880s and 1890s.

Germans. The major push factor in nineteenth-century German immigration was the modernization of the German economy, which dislocated millions of Germans, a minority of whom chose emigration as a response. The Germans were the most numerous of nineteenth-century immigrants. They settled heavily in eastern cities from New York to Baltimore and in the midwestern area known as the German triangle, whose corners were Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. While most came in at eastern ports, a large number of those who settled in the "triangle" came to southern ports carried by ships in the cotton trade and made their way north by river boat and then railroad. Those in the cities worked largely at artisanal and mechanical pursuits, while one industry—the production of lager beer—was dominated by German producers and, for a time, consumers. Large numbers of German immigrants settled in rural areas, and some German American groups have shown very high levels of persistence in agriculture over several generations.

Although seventeenth-and eighteenth-century German migration was almost all Protestant, and although Protestants have probably been a majority of German immigrants in every decade except the 1930s, very sizable numbers of those since 1800 have been Catholics, and a significant minority of them have been Jewish. Among the German Protestants the majority have always been Lutherans, even during the colonial period, when a considerable number were Mennonites of various persuasions.

One of the most impressive aspects of German immigration was the vast cultural apparatus German Americans created: newspapers, magazines, theaters, musical organizations, and schools proliferated throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Some of these institutions, particularly the German kindergartens, had great influence on the national culture. The Germans were largely Republican in politics. On one of the great cultural issues of the era—Prohibition—most took the wet rather than the dry side.

Scandinavians. Almost 1.5 million Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes came to America in the nineteenth century, and perhaps 750,000 followed in the twentieth. Predominantly agricultural, Scandinavians were driven to migrate by expanding populations and a shortage of arable land. No European country sent a greater proportion of its population to America than Norway. Most Scandinavians settled initially in the upper Midwest and the Great Plains, with a large later migration, some of it second generation, to the Pacific Northwest. They were overwhelmingly Protestant: the major exception was some 25,000 Scandinavian converts to Mormonism whose passage to Utah was aided by a church immigration fund. The Scandinavian groups founded a relatively large number of colleges for the training of ministers of religion, the first ethnic groups to do so in any significant degree since the colonial era. In politics they were even more predominantly Republican than the Germans, with a heavy tilt toward the dry side of the Prohibition issue.

Era of Industrial Expansion, 1870s–1920

Prior to the Civil War, most immigrants settled in rural and small town America, although the incidence of immigrants in cities was higher than that of native-born Americans. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, as the industrial sector of the American economy became more dynamic, the cities, and the jobs that they held, attracted more and more immigrants. At the same time, the spread of railroad networks in Europe and the development of shipping lines for whom immigrants were

the major purpose rather than a sideline meant that more, and more ethnically varied, immigrants were able to cross the Atlantic. Although immigrants left from almost every port city in Europe, the lion's share left through Hamburg, Bremen, and Liverpool in the north and Genoa, Naples, and Trieste in the south. Conditions in the steer-age sections in which most immigrants came were frightful, particularly on the vessels from southern ports, but at least in the age of steam the voyages were measured in days rather than weeks.

Contrary to the impression often given, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe did not begin to outnumber those from western Europe until the 1890s. Even in the first two decades of the twentieth century immigrants from western Europe were some two-fifths of all immigrants. Poles, Italians, and eastern European Jews were the dominant European immigrant groups from the 1890s, although every European nationality was represented. These later immigrants are often described as "new immigrants," a euphemism for "undesirable." The United States Immigration Commission, for example, in its 1911 report that was a stimulus for immigration restriction, described such immigrants as having "no intention of permanently changing their residence, their only purpose in coming to America being to temporarily take advantage of the greater wages paid for industrial labor in this country."

The charge of sojourning had been raised first against two non-European groups: the 250,000 Chinese who had begun to immigrate to California and the West Coast about the time of the gold rush of 1849, and the perhaps 500,000 French Canadians who poured into New England mill towns in the post–Civil War decades. While most Chinese immigrants were barred by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, French Canadian immigrants remained unrestricted. The antisojourner argument ignored both the positive economic contributions that each group made and the fact that many Chinese and perhaps most French Canadian immigrants made permanent homes in the United States. The 1920 census identified some 850,000 first-and second-generation French Canadians, and some 60,000 Chinese.

Many of the European immigrants of the industrial era did come as sojourners, and some came more than once. In one early-twentieth-century survey at Ellis Island, every tenth Italian reported having been in the United States before. Like their predecessors they were primarily motivated by economic opportunity; what set them off from most of their predecessors was that most found industrial rather than agricultural employment.

Poles are difficult to enumerate because immigration data reflect nationality rather than ethnicity and most Poles had German, Russian, or Austrian nationality. The best approximation of their number comes from the 1910 census, which showed nearly 950,000 foreign-born persons who said that their mother tongue was Polish. Poles settled largely in the industrial region around the Great Lakes, and were concentrated in cities between Buffalo and Milwaukee. Polish immigrants were chiefly employed in factory work, often in the dirtiest and most difficult jobs.

Between 1890 and 1920 more than four million Italians were recorded as entering the United States. No other group had come to the United States in such numbers in a comparable period of time. Their prime region of settlement was near the eastern seaboard between Boston and Philadelphia, with goodly settlements in Chicago and northern California. Unlike the Poles, Italians were concentrated in outdoor employment in road construction, railroad maintenance, and in the less-skilled aspects of the building trades. A significant number of young, mostly unmarried Italian and Italian American women were employed in the garment trades.

Like the Poles, eastern European Jews are difficult to track in the immigration data. Again in the 1910 census more than a million persons reported Yiddish or Hebrew as a mother tongue. (German Jewish immigrants would have reported German.) More than 850,000 of them were of Russian nationality, many of whom came from what is now Poland and the Baltic states; almost 125,000 came from some part of the Austrian Empire, and some 40,000 from Romania. Most had suffered some degree of persecution in Europe, and of all the immigrant groups in the industrial era, Jews were the least likely to sojourn. Almost all came intending to stay and did so. One scholar has calculated the remigration rate for European immigrants to the United States of various ethnicities in this era and found that fewer than 5 percent of Jews returned, as opposed to about a third of Poles and some 45 percent of Italians. Similarly, although there was a male majority for every European group of immigrants except the Irish, males were only about 55 percent of the Jews, while nearly two-thirds of the Poles and almost three-quarters of the Italians were male. For some of the other ethnic groups in this era both rates were even higher. Serb immigrants, for example, were calculated to have been 90 percent male and remigrated at a rate of almost 88 percent.

Table 5

The ten years before the outbreak of World War I saw the highest number of legal immigrants entering the United States than in any ten-year period before or since. These figures added fuel to the raging restrictionist fires. But, as the data in table 5 show, return migration was also heavy; the incidence of foreign born in the population remained remarkably constant, as was shown in table 4.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 transformed American migration patterns, both internal and external. The surge of Allied war orders beginning in the spring of 1915 plus the requirements of American "preparedness" and, after April 1917, war needs, increased the demands for workers in northern factories. The drastic drop in the numbers of European immigrants—from a million a year just before the war to an average of only about 100,000 annually between 30 June 1914 and 30 June 1919—helped to stimulate the so-called "Great Migration" of African Americans from the South to northern cities. This migration involved perhaps 500,000 persons between 1916 and 1918 and probably another million before the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

1920s to 2000

In the 1920s, despite President Warren G. Harding's call for "normalcy," immigration was not allowed to return to the essentially laissez faire pattern that had prevailed for everyone except Asians throughout U.S. history. The Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924 put numerical caps on European immigration while stopping Asian immigration except for Filipinos, who, as American nationals, could not be excluded. (Asia, as defined by Congress, did not include Russian-Soviet Asia, or nations from Persia-Iran east.) The onset of the Great Depression plus administrative regulations designed chiefly to stop otherwise unrestricted Mexican immigration, reduced immigration significantly, and World War II reduced it even further as table 6 demonstrates.

The steady reduction in the number of immigrants and the accompanying decline in foreign born from 13.2 percent in 1920 to 6.9 percent in 1950 mask three important wartime developments that helped to reshape the patterns of American immigration in the second half of the twentieth century. These were the beginning of the refugee crisis, repeal of the Chinese exclusion acts, and the increase of the Mexican presence in the American labor force.

The anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany that began in 1933 precipitated the refugee crisis, which was neither fully understood nor dealt with adequately by the nations of the West. Vice President Walter Mondale's 1979 judgment that the western democracies "failed the test of civilization" is a good capsule summary. Many have blamed this aspect of the Holocaust on the 1924 immigration act. But while many of the supporters of that act had anti-Semitic motives, the quota system it set up, while stacked against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, provided a relatively generous quota for Germany. Between 1933 and 1940, fewer than half of the 211,895 German quota spaces were filled. At the beginning of the Nazi era, few German Jews were ready to leave their native land; however, during much of the 1930s, willful obstruction by many American consular officials frustrated the attempts of German Jews to gain admission to the United States, often with fatal consequences.

The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which innovated in so many areas of American life, was conservative on this issue: there was no New Deal for immigration. Critics have correctly pointed to the undemocratically recruited foreign service as largely culpable in denying asylum to many, but the president himself, out of political caution, on several occasions refused to act. The failure to support legislation to admit Jewish children and the refusal to allow refugee passengers on the ill-fated German liner St. Louis to land even though the ship was in American waters are clear examples of Roosevelt's misfeasance.

On the other hand, once war came the president exercised his vaunted administrative ingenuity to assist refugees. The most significant example of this was his instruction to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins to allow refugees who were in the United States on six-month visitor visas to "roll-over" such visas indefinitely every six months, making them, for all intents and purposes, resident aliens. Later arrangements were made with Canada to allow many such persons to make pro forma exits from the United States and return immediately on immigrant visas. And, in 1944, as awareness of the dimensions of the Holocaust grew, Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board by executive order. Its function was to save Jews and other refugees in Europe, but its mandate did not include bringing them to the United States. In June 1944 Roosevelt invented a way to get refugees into the country: something he called "parole power." He used it only once, in what historians have called a "token shipment" of nearly

Table 6

1,000 persons, almost all of them Jews who were kept in a camp at Oswego, New York, in the charge of the War Relocation Authority, whose major function was to warehouse Japanese Americans. Although the "parolees" were supposed to go back to Europe after the war, only one did. Roosevelt's successors used parole power to bring in hundreds of thousands of refugees, very few of them Jews, until the Refugee Act of 1980 regularized such admissions. Between 1946 and 2000 more than 3.5 million persons were admitted to the United States as refugees of one kind or another and many persons who were in fact refugees entered in other categories.

The repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, which also made alien Chinese eligible for naturalization, presaged a retreat from the blatant racism that had characterized American immigration policies. Similar legislation was passed regarding "natives of India" and Filipinos in 1946, and in 1952 the otherwise reactionary McCarran-Walter Act ended all ethnic bars to immigration and made naturalization color blind. Between 1943 and 2000, perhaps 8 million Asians, most of them from the formerly "barred zone," legally immigrated to the United States.

A third wartime initiative with long-term consequences for immigration was the so-called bracero program, which brought some 200,000 "temporary" Mexican workers to the United States, about half of whom worked in California. The program was restarted in 1951 during the Korean War and continued until 1964. In 1959 alone, 450,000 braceros were brought to the United States. None of these were counted as immigrants; many stayed or returned, contributing to the illegal immigrant phenomenon that loomed large in later immigration and even larger in rhetoric about it. The cumulative effect of the bracero program plus legal and illegal immigration was to make Mexico the largest single national contributor, by far, to immigration to the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Since 1940 some 5 million Mexicans have either legally immigrated to the United States or been legalized later.

Tables 7 and 8 summarize the 26 million legal or legalized immigrants who entered the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. As table 8 demonstrates, not only did the total number of immigrants increase with each decade, but European immigration, which had always dominated American immigration, accounted for only one immigrant in five during the second half of the century.

Table 7

Table 8

Prior to the 1930s, almost all of the immigrants had come in at or near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, and this remained true for a majority of immigrants during the rest of the twentieth century. But, beginning with some of the distinguished refugees who fled from Hitler's Europe, a growing minority of immigrants came with educational credentials that surpassed those of most American natives. The so-called brain drain intensified during the latter decades of the century, as engineers and computer scientists were attracted to the various Silicon Valleys of America. At the other end of the spectrum, even larger numbers of immigrants came not to build America but to serve it. The service sector and agriculture, not the

shrinking manufacturing sector, were the major employers of immigrant labor, legal and illegal. California farms, Arkansas chicken processors, fast foodshops, and hotels and motels everywhere were among the largest employers.

Immigration policy since World War II. The shifts in American immigration policy that made the renewal of large-scale immigration possible are often attributed solely to the Immigration Act of 1965. As the foregoing suggests, this is a serious error. Between the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act and century's end, twenty-eight new substantive public laws revamped immigration and naturalization. Only a handful of the most significant can be noted here. Beginning with the hotly contested Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950—which brought some 400,000 European refugees, mostly gentiles, to the United States—a series of acts made taking refugees a part of the American consensus. By the end of the Eisenhower administration, the Fair Share Refugee Act symbolized the changed perception of American responsibility. Particularly noteworthy was the Carter administration's Refugee Act of 1980, which for the first time put the right to claim asylum into American law.

Two general statutes, the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act and the 1965 Immigration Act, transformed American immigration policy. While the most obvious innovation of the 1952 act was the ending of statutory racism in naturalization and immigration, it also eliminated overt gender bias in immigration. It seemed to continue the quota system much as it was enacted in 1924 but, because of other changes in the law, quota immigrants were only a minor fraction of legal immigration. Although the Japanese quota between 1953 and 1960 was only 185 a year—one-sixth of one percent of the Japanese population in the continental United States in 1920—a total of 46,250 Japanese legally immigrated in those seven years, almost all of them nonquota immigrants who were family members of U.S. citizens. European refugees, most of whom came from nations—or former nations—with tiny quotas were accounted for by "mortgaging quotas," mortgages that were never paid. When the quota system was abolished in 1965 the Latvian annual quota of 286, to give an extreme example, had been mortgaged to the year 2274.

The 1965 act ended national quotas and substituted putative hemispheric caps that seemed to limit immigration to less than half a million a year. At the same time, it so expanded family-based immigration and other non-quota immigration that the gross number of immigrants continued to rise steadily. By the late 1970s there was increasing concern in the media and in Congress about illegal immigration. After years of acrimonious debate, Congress passed a compromise measure, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). "Immigration Reform" had become a code phrase for reducing immigration. IRCA was widely hailed as a way to "fix" what was commonly called a "broken" immigration system, but the proposed fix exacerbated many of the problems that it was supposed to cure. The centerpiece of the bill was an "amnesty" supposed to legalize perhaps 3.1 million persons who had been illegally present in the United States since 1982. But congress set aside 350,000 "amnesty places" for "special agricultural workers" who need only have done 90 days of agricultural labor and lived in the United States since 1 May 1985. Subsequent Congresses increased the share for these agricultural workers significantly. Of the 2.68 million persons actually legalized under IRCA by the end of 1998 almost 1.25 million, some 47 percent, were "special agricultural workers" of one kind or another.

In the final analysis the amnesty provisions of IRCA not only increased significantly the number of legal immigrants in the United States, but also created a well-publicized precedent for future liberalizations, which would be impossible for Congress to resist. The legalization did not contribute to the number of immigrants present, but each person legalized could become, in time, a naturalized American citizen, some of whose relatives would be eligible for privileged admission status. A growing awareness of the failure of IRCA to achieve its goals—plus the conservative mood epitomized by the so-called Gingrich revolution resulting from the Republican sweep of the 1994 congressional elections—produced a spate of measures passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton. These measures "got tough" with legal immigrants by denying them all kinds of benefits—usually described as "welfare." Also, a number of statutes were designed to bolster the border patrol and, as the phrase went, "regain control of our borders." These measures had only transitory effects on stemming immigration, whether legal or illegal, but did, many authorities believe, discourage many persons illegally working in the United States from going back to Mexico, for fear of being unable to return.

At the same time, California voters overwhelmingly adopted the patently unconstitutional Proposition 187, which made illegal aliens ineligible for public social services including public school education, and required all state officials to report anyone suspected of being an illegal alien to the INS. Not surprisingly, the passage of Proposition 187—whose enforcement was immediately blocked by the courts—and a growing perception that much of the national legislation was unfair, produced some unintended consequences. Hispanic citizens mobilized to register and vote in increasing numbers, both the Republican Congress and the Democratic Clinton administration modified some of the anti-immigrant legislation and after California Democrats swept the 1998 elections the anti-immigrant consensus, which had seemed so strong just four years previously, disappeared. The 2000 presidential campaign saw both parties actively courting Hispanic voters. The early months of the administration of George W. Bush continued the positive attitude toward immigration that he had evinced as governor of Texas between 1995 and 2000—his White House Web site was available in Spanish—and a second, major amnesty program seemed all but inevitable. However, the terrorist destruction of New York City's World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 and the economic recession that had begun six months earlier put at least a temporary damper on such plans. Most students of American immigration expected that the same forces that had created the post–Great Depression boom in immigration—an expanding economy and an aging population—would, in the long run, create conditions in which large-scale immigration would continue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. An account of the varieties of the slave experience.

Bukowczyk, John J. And My Children Did Not Know Me. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. A brief history of Polish immigration.

Butler, Jon. Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. A striking analysis of the acculturation process.

Curtin, Philip D. The African Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. A pioneering survey.

Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. 2d ed. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. An analytic narrative text.

Daniels, Roger, and Otis Graham. Debating American Immigration, 1882–Present. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Dual approaches to twentieth-century immigration.

Diner, Hasia R. Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. A gendered analysis.

Dolan, Jay P. The Immigrant Church: New York's Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. An analysis of the civic functions of the Roman Catholic Church.

Garcia, Maria Cristina. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. A discriminating account of the Cuban American community.

Goodfriend, Joyce. Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. An analysis of the most polyglot American colony.

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. 2d ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. The classic account of American Nativism.

Kitano, Harry H. L., and Roger Daniels. Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities. 3d ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001. A survey of most Asian American ethnic groups.

Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. The standard account.

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Edited by Oscar Handlin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. An accessible biography of a seventeenth-century immigrant leader.

Reimers, David M. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. 2d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. The standard account of the structural change in American immigration in the post–World War II decades.

Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. The formative years of this community.

Wokeck, Marianne S. Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. An account of the transportation of German immigrants before the American Revolution.

Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. A gendered analysis.

RogerDaniels

See alsoChinese Exclusion Act ; McCarran-Walter Act ; Proposition 187 ; Refugee Act of 1980 ; Refugees ; andvol. 9:Maya in Exile: Guatemalans in Florida .

Preference Systems, 1952 and 1965 Immigration Acts

Immigration and Nationality Act, 1952

1. Highly skilled immigrants whose services are urgently needed in the United States and the spouses and children of such immigrants: 50%.
2. Parents of U.S. citizens over age twenty-one and unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens: 30%.
3. Spouses and unmarried children of permanent resident aliens: 20%.
4. Brothers, sisters, and married children of U.S. citizens and accompanying spouses and children: 50% of numbers not required for 1 through 3.
5. Nonpreference: applicants not entitled to any of the above: 50% of the numbers not required for 1 through 3 plus any not required for 4.

Immigration Act of 1965

Exempt from preference requirements and numerical caps: spouses, unmarried minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens.

1. Unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens: 20%.
2. Spouses and unmarried adult children of permanent resident aliens: 20%.
3. Members of the professions and scientists and artists of exceptional ability: 10% (requires certification from U.S. Department of Labor).
4. Married children of U.S. citizens: 10%.
5. Brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens over age twenty-one: 24%.
6. Skilled and unskilled workers in occupations for which labor is in short supply in the U.S.: 10% (requires certification from U.S. Department of Labor).
7. Refugees from communist or communist dominated countries or from the Middle East: 6%.
8. Nonpreference: applicants not entitled to any of the above. (Since there have been more preference applicants than can be accommodated, this category has never been used. Congress eventually adopted the so-called lottery provision to provide for such persons.)

IMMIGRATION

Introducing her story collection Children of Loneliness (1923), the immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska (1885–1970) remarks, "I saw that America was a new world in the making, that anyone who has something real in him can find a way to contribute himself in this new world" ("Mostly about Myself," p. 142). She contributes through writing, declaring, "the moment I understood America enough to tell her about herself as I saw her—the moment I began to express myself—America accepted my self-expression as a gift from me, and from everywhere hands reached out to help me" ("Mostly about Myself," p. 142). Beside these optimistic reflections, Yezierska's texts also uncover the challenges immigrants confronted, as the "loneliness" in her title implies. While immigrant texts often celebrate American opportunity, they contain much greater complexity, as critics have observed. Thomas Ferraro hails immigrant writers' artistic accomplishments, citing a "self-transformation" process through writing that may engage literary currents such as modernism yet does not necessarily entail cultural assimilation. William Boelhower recognizes a "demythification" process whereby the immigrant writer exposes an "underside" to a formerly idealized America. Indeed, turn-of-the-century American immigrant writers struggled to reconcile ideals and disillusionment as they recorded the lives of America's newest citizens. Yezierska, along with many turn-of-the-century immigrant writers, addresses several common themes of immigrant challenge: experiencing racism and discrimination, seeking education, negotiating intergenerational conflicts, defining gender roles, and finding fulfilling work.

RACISM AND DISCRIMINATION

Many American hands reached out to halt rather than to help immigrants, particularly eastern European Jews like Yezierska. From the late 1870s until the early 1920s, record numbers of immigrants arrived in the United States, mainly from eastern and southern Europe, countries such as Poland, Bohemia, Slovenia, and Italy. From 1900 to 1910 alone, 9 million arrived, exceeding immigration in any previous decade by 3.5 million. They found a limited welcome. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited entry of all Chinese except for merchants, scholars, diplomats, tourists, and teachers and prevented Chinese from becoming citizens. Increasingly restrictive quota laws adopted in 1921, 1924, and 1929 virtually eliminated immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Anti-immigrant agitators often cited undesirable immigrant cultures to justify restrictions, but anti-immigrant worries actually centered on race. The literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels argues that "culture" served as a cover for race, an exclusionary "way of preserving the primacy of identity while avoiding the embarrassments of blood" (p. 13). In his influential book The Passing of the Great Race (1916), the amateur anthropologist Madison Grant (1865–1937) describes immigrants as radically different from native-born, Anglo-Saxon Americans in physical appearance, religion, language, and customs, all factors he considered racial. As the historian John Higham explains, "nativists" such as Grant, who aimed to preserve America for those "native" to the United States, considered southern and eastern Europeans remote from Anglo-Saxon forms of government. The sociologist Edward Ross complains in 1914, "Now we confront the melancholy spectacle of this pioneer breed being swamped and submerged by an overwhelming tide of latecomers from the old-world hive" (p. 282). He argues that immigrant races would weaken the nation, bringing inferior hereditary traits and promoting the "race suicide" of established Anglo-Saxon Americans.

Contemporary periodicals ranging from the popular Saturday Evening Post to the middlebrow North American Review to the more intellectual Atlantic Monthly voiced racially based, anti-immigrant fears. Writing for the Atlantic in 1896, Francis Walker, commissioner general of immigration, condemned recent immigrants.

They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self care and self government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains.

Phrases such as "struggle for existence" and "descended from the tribes . . . of old Germany" reflect scientific theories that "non-Anglo-Saxon races" progressed too slowly. Politics, the "ideas" Walker cites, become a product of racial "aptitudes," and thus he dubs new immigrants inherently incapable of democratic participation. Immigrant writers needed to disprove racialist claims such as Walker's.

Walker, "Restriction of Immigration," p. 828.

However, Ross and other nativists represent only one strain in a vigorous debate. The philosopher, educator, and immigrant Horace Kallen (1882–1974) refutes Ross in his 1915 essay "Democracy versus the Melting-Pot": "What troubles Mr. Ross and so many other Anglo-Saxon Americans is not really inequality; what troubles them is difference" (p. 219). Declaring such "difference" nonhereditary, the anthropologist and immigrant Franz Boas asserts in his 1911 The Mind of Primitive Man, "There is no close relation between race and culture" (p. 196). Moreover, Boas also proclaims the independent value of various cultures as well as races, rejecting a ranked order for either. The scholars Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander Gilman identify a "critical tradition" among writers from groups "stereotyped by the sciences of the day" (p. 74), and this defensive posture responding to scientific racism characterizes turn-of-the-century immigrant literature. For instance, in her 1914 book They Who Knock at Our Gates, the Russian immigrant writer Mary Antin (1881–1949) protests: "What have the experts and statisticians done so to pervert our minds? They have filled volumes with facts and figures, comparing the immigrants of other days, classifying them as to race, nationality, and culture. . . . Granted that Sicilians are not Scotchmen, how does that affect the right of the Sicilian to travel in pursuit of happiness?" (pp. 9–10).

Depending on class and region, the nativists that Antin and other writers faced expressed their views through print media, political agitation, and even violence. Chinese in the western United States faced harassment, expulsion from towns, and even massacres from the 1850s into the 1880s. The Chinese immigrant writer Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton, 1865–1914) captures such incidents in her fiction, particularly the story "Her Chinese Husband" from the 1912 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance, a story that details the happy married life of a white woman and Chinese man cut short by his violent murder. Sui Sin Far's work contrasts with what William Wu has termed "yellow peril" fiction by such writers as Jack London and Frank Norris, which reinforced anxiety about "uncivilized" Chinese immigrants. Such fiction stereo-typed the Chinese as inscrutable, wildly excitable, and unintelligent (though sometimes unusually intelligent), with heartless husbands and women slaves. Typical plots involved Chinese invasions, revenge, lasciviousness, and opium addiction. Besides exposing anti-Asian violence, Sui Sin Far wrote to overturn race stereotypes of the Chinese by offering both fiction and journalism that provided multidimensional pictures of Chinese character. Her essay series The Chinese in America, which appeared in the 1909 Westerner magazine, offers a broad readership a sympathetic exploration of Chinese American family life, holidays, work, food, religion, and customs.

Immigrant writers often express awe over American educational opportunity. In her autobiography The Promised Land (1912), the Russian immigrant Mary Antin conveys the magical quality education held, when she recalls the day her father brought his children to school for the first time.

All three children carried themselves rather better than the common run of "green" pupils that were brought to Miss Nixon. But the figure that challenged attention to the group was the tall, straight father, with his earnest face and fine forehead, nervous hands eloquent in gesture, and a voice full of feeling. This foreigner, who brought his children to school as if it were an act of consecration, who regarded the teacher of the primer class with reverence, who spoke of visions, like a man inspired, in a common schoolroom, was not like other aliens, who brought their children in dull obedience to the law; was not like the native fathers, who brought their unmanageable boys, glad to be relieved of their care. I think Miss Nixon guessed what my father's best English could not convey. I think that she divined that by the simple act of delivering our school certificates to her he took possession of America.

Antin, The Promised Land, 1997, p. 162.

Besides exclusion and attack, immigrants endured other indignities, as the Italian immigrant writer Constantine Panunzio (1884–1964) recounts in his autobiography, The Soul of an Immigrant (1921). Though never guilty of any crime, Panunzio landed in jail three times; the third time, he was arrested for sitting on a park bench. Expecting an armed and dangerous Italian, others at his school mistook his comb for a knife. Panunzio ultimately overcame this discrimination and other "stumbling block[s] to assimilation" (p. 205) to succeed in school and in his career as a minister. In their attempts to assimilate successfully, immigrants confronted the prominent racial thinking that defined them as inferior. However, they might actually attempt to negotiate their way into its privileged levels. Matthew Frye Jacobson observes that "certain groups undergo a process of racial redefinition as shifting social and political circumstances require" and that "varying systems of 'difference' can coexist and compete with one another at a given moment" (p. 140). Immigrants could occupy what Jacobson terms a "probationary white" status on their way to fuller acceptance. Early in Yezierska's novel Salome of the Tenements (1923), the immigrant protagonist Sonya Vrunsky declares: "The Anglo-Saxons are a superior race to the crazy Russians. The higher life is built inch by inch on self-control. . . . They're ages ahead of us. Compared to them, we're naked savages" (p. 68). Sonya seems to have absorbed the nativist theories of Grant and Ross, but she also seems to perceive a racial/cultural mobility possible as she pursues marriage with the Anglo-Saxon philanthropist John Manning. Her apparently "probationary" status could solidify through her marriage; however, Yezierska has her heroine gradually reject this racial schema to instead "be what's inside of me" (p. 131). Though Sonya finally rejects a racial philosophy that demands that she remake or deny her identity, Yezierska illustrates the difficult choices immigrants faced within a racially hostile environment. In addition, her character's sudden reversal illustrates well a pattern Werner Sollors cites in ethnic writing: "Raising and thwarting initiation expectations, feeding the gullibility of readers and then pulling the rug from under their feet, or ironically undercutting the image of a presumably stable relationship between in-group and out-group are among the weapons in the rich arsenal of ethnic writers" (p. 252). In their often ambiguous and multilayered texts, immigrants challenged American conceptions of immigrant race and culture.

EDUCATION

In both fiction and nonfiction, immigrant writers chronicled efforts to gain American education, which became an elusive goal for some. The title character of Abraham Cahan's (1860–1951) novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) reaches financial success but largely by abandoning the "Temple" of his dream of higher education. Actually achieving education could also cause problems, such as alienation from family. In Yezierska's novel Bread Givers (1925), Sara Smolinsky chooses to pursue her studies, leading her Orthodox Jewish father to disown her. She also carries guilt over denying time away from studying to visit her mother. Despite such complications, educational achievement remained an important standard of success for many immigrants. In his autobiography A Far Journey (1914), the Syrian immigrant Abraham Rihbany views college education as a vital way to "relate myself to the higher life of America" (p. 253). Finding greater acceptance in preparatory school, Constantine Panunzio realizes there that he wants to become a citizen. For him, education represents the essence of America, the means for developing an "American consciousness" (p. 179). Education seemed to hold an almost mystical power. Immigrants often lacked the opportunity for sustained schooling in their native lands, but in America many school opportunities existed. Moreover, immigrants viewed education as a means to recast themselves as Americans.

The work of Mary Antin, a Russian immigrant from the Jewish Pale of Settlement, often revolves around immigrant education. Intellectual prowess and academic enthusiasm play important roles in her autobiography, as critics note. For example, William Proefriedt argues that Antin undergoes parallel processes of education and assimilation. Antin unfolds her own educational progress as an eager learner who began publishing at an early age, but she also celebrates the intellectual accomplishments of other immigrants. Addressing the pattern of immigrant achievement also allows Antin to critique racialist thinking. In her proimmigration treatise They Who Knock at Our Gates, Antin momentarily enters the mind of a native-born American: "The children of the foreigners outclass our own! They who begin handicapped, and labor against obstacles, leave our own children far behind on the road to scholarly achievement. . . . Is there a special virtue in their blood that enables them to sweep over our country and take what they want?" She explains simply, "It is a special virtue, yes: the virtue of great purpose" (pp. 129–130). Illustrating that playful quality in immigrant writing that Sollors notes, Antin responds to the predictable question of whether race or "blood" explains immigrant achievement, employing a subtle irony to shift the focus: "Purpose" is not an element of "blood," but diligence is definitely an immigrant "virtue." Race fades into the background, with only immigrant determination and effort bringing success to promising new citizens.

A prominent figure in New York's Jewish community, Abraham Cahan, who like Antin fled the Russian Pale, also emphasizes immigrant education to reduce the perceived threat from immigration. In an 1898 issue of the Atlantic, Cahan describes many Jews denied education in his homeland who complete studies in the United States to become doctors, dentists, and architects. Much like Mary Antin, Cahan underscores intellectual prowess to encourage goodwill toward immigrants, demonstrating that they will contribute important resources to their adopted nation. He counts the Russian Jewish immigrant "among the most ambitious and the quickest to learn both the written and spoken language of the adopted country, and among the easiest to be assimilated with the population" (p. 131). The historian Lloyd Gartner observes that public school became "the symbol and guarantee of Jewish equality and full opportunity in America" (p. 9). Cahan describes immigrant Jews flocking to public day and evening schools, which do not exclude them, and many also tutoring their fellow immigrants. Cahan, who became a longtime editor of the Yiddish daily newspaper the Forward, also acknowledged the role of journalism in schooling the immigrant in American customs, English language, and library use. While not all immigrants attended college or even progressed far in secondary schools, Cahan attests to significant numbers gaining formal education and an overall enthusiasm among immigrants to learn as much as possible.

The Serbian immigrant Michael Pupin (1858–1935) illustrates well this passion for education: he not only achieved high degrees but also helped to reform American education itself during his career. His autobiography, From Immigrant to Inventor (1923), traces his educational experiences from independent study and night courses at Cooper Union to undergraduate study at Columbia to graduate work abroad at Cambridge. Pupin merited a full scholarship to Columbia and succeeded so well in school that native-born students sought him as a tutor. Pupin consistently served others through his education, applying his own knowledge and abilities to enhance American life. While inventing the electrical resonator and developing other technologies, Pupin also helped to reinvent the American educational system. As an engineering professor at Columbia, he promoted more rigorous science courses with increased hands-on lab work to prepare the next generation of inventors. Immigrant literature established immigrant education not only as an ideal for the immigrant but also as a benefit for the entire nation.

INTERGENERATIONAL CONFLICTS

Israel Zangwill's (1864–1926) The Melting-Pot, the 1909 British play that established a catchphrase that many still use to imagine immigrant America, presents a quintessential conflict in the immigrant experience: alienation of one generation from another. David Quixano escapes an anti-Jewish pogrom and lands in America, where he falls in love with the Russian immigrant Vera Rivendal. His uncle rejects him for allying with a Russian, a member of the group that has persecuted David's people. David defies his uncle until he discovers that Vera's father actually started the pogrom that killed his family. Torn between his lover and their families' histories, David ultimately embraces Vera and stands by his declaration, "Each generation must live and die for its own dream" (p. 147). This idea became as much a part of American immigrant literature and thought as the concept of a melting pot of races and cultures. Negotiating histories, traditions, and expectations, newer generations of immigrants often clashed with their elders. Parental authority came into question in a new environment where rules seemed ever changing and multiple influences affected children. Priscilla Wald observes that the "strangeness of parenting one's parents is a common theme" of writing by women immigrants and those from "any culture perceived to be in need of 'Americanization'" (p. 191). Her comment suits men immigrant writers too.

Cahan's 1898 story "The Imported Bridegroom" illustrates several parent-child conflicts as two generations struggle to define their cultural identities in America. Asriel Stroon has largely abandoned his Orthodox Judaism and allowed his daughter, Flora, to have an American public school education, piano lessons, and her own library. However, later in life he determines to regain his piety and rethinks his parenting decisions, rebuking Flora for reading a "Gentile" novel while he prays. Asriel's sudden change of attitude confuses his daughter, who feels increasingly isolated from him. Hoping to reform his daughter and please God, Asriel "imports" a religious scholar from Russia as a bridegroom for Flora. The plan fails when the bridegroom chooses secular learning and socialism, rejecting both Asriel's religious program and Flora's scheme to make him a medical doctor. Cahan leaves this father alienated from both children and the young people disconnected from each other.

Sara in Yezierska's Bread Givers similarly chafes under the rule of a traditionally religious father. While her father arranges profoundly unhappy marriages for his other three daughters, Sara refuses this fate, leaving home to work her way through college and become a public school teacher. The dean of her college groups her among the "pioneers" (p. 232), but Sara's father sees her as a betrayer. Even with her new independent life she can never separate herself completely from her tyrannical father. Yezierska leaves an ambiguous ending to the novel, with Sara and her husband inviting her impoverished and sickly father to live with them. Sara finds that her father imposes an "old burden" that "dragged" her back (p. 295); however, she also acknowledges that she has inherited his strong will, which motivated her to establish her career. Critics are divided on the novel's resolution. Sam Girgus proposes that Sara ministers to her father out of strength, not weakness, that she has become a self-made woman. Carol Schoen similarly argues that Sara has created a working amalgam of traditions in this ending. However, Gay Wilentz asserts that the ending offers no successful synthesis of old and new traditions and that Sara has regressed into the old order. Magdalena Zaborowska concurs that traditional patriarchy ultimately reigns, with both Sara's husband and father ending her newfound independence. However one reads Yezierska's conclusion, she has captured well the intense intergenerational struggle many immigrants confronted and their difficulties in finding a satisfactory resolution.

While Cahan and Yezierska document the increased tension between domineering parents and rebellious children, other texts illustrate different approaches to intergenerational conflict. In her 1912 autobiography The Promised Land, Mary Antin reveals that her parents exerted far less parental control, perhaps because they themselves had abandoned many religious traditions. However, their struggles to earn a living and their perplexity over how best to Americanize their children also help determine this detached approach. Perceiving the "boundless liberty" that neighboring parents seemed to allow, the Antins followed suit (p. 213). Their children did encounter more varied cultural influences, but only as the parents relinquished the "throne of parental authority" (p. 213). This resulted in an "inversion of normal relations" that Antin retrospectively views ambivalently as her parents' "sacrifice" (p. 213). Sui Sin Far's parents (the Eatons) also distance themselves from certain conflicts, relying on their children to determine their own way. In her autobiographical essay "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian" (1909), Sui Sin Far discusses how other children verbally and physically abused her and her siblings because of their mixed racial background. While the Eatons comfort their children after these incidents, they avoid interfering directly to protect them. Sui Sin Far laments that since neither parent is biracial, they cannot understand the situation fully. She notes, however, that they seem to take greater interest in each children's "battle" than they reveal (p. 219). Quite likely the Eatons hoped that this parenting approach would strengthen their children for more challenging racial battles in the future.

GENDER ROLES

As the discussion above suggests, many immigrant conflicts over issues such as education and parenting involved gender ideas. Immigrants encountered new gender behaviors, demanding that they re-envision themselves, their spouses, their interests, and their opportunities. While it might be easy to imagine that America transformed immigrant gender conceptions, perhaps offering a feminist haven for women immigrants, the reality was much more complicated. Many authors reflect a synthesis of gender ideas occurring for the typical immigrant—a combination of old and new traditions synthesized to provide personal fulfillment. In addition, men's and women's experiences of immigration often differed greatly, and they struggled to communicate with one another about their experiences. For instance, in the novel Giants in the Earth (1927), by the Norwegian immigrant O. E. Rölvaag (1876–1931), Per Hansa finds homesteading in the Dakota Territory stimulating, imagining that wheat grains jump with life, while his wife, Beret, experiences depression, fearing that the family will become "savages" in an untamed environment. Failing to communicate effectively about their expectations, this couple finds their relationship steadily deteriorating. Offering a "critique from the margins" model, Magdalena Zaborowska discusses immigrant writers' gender-role critiques, which extend from old to new country patriarchal practices. As immigrant writing shows, both rural and urban women faced unique challenges in America, such as negotiating unstable gender definitions, seeking greater independence, and combating sexual exploitation.

Contradictory gender expectations could lead to tragedy, as Sui Sin Far demonstrates in her story "The Wisdom of the New." Like many immigrants, the Chinese husband in this story preceded his wife to America, in this case by seven years. The husband, Wou Sankwei, has adapted to America culturally in many ways, developing platonic friendships with a woman philanthropist and her niece. However, he makes little effort to help Pau Lin, his newly arrived wife, adapt, and he spends more time with his women friends than he does with Pau Lin. Despite his open conversations with the educated American women, he denies that his wife can develop intellectually or culturally: "The time for learning with her is over" (p. 47). While he attempts to maintain a more traditional Chinese marriage, wherein his wife cannot question his motives or share open communication with him, he continues very different relationships with his women friends, conversing freely with them and treating them as peers. Isolated and upset, Pau Lin further entrenches herself against any cultural change, fearing that she has lost her husband's affection and respect and that American ways will contaminate her young son. Too late, Sankwei recognizes his inconsistent treatment of the women in his life, for his distraught wife murders their son, believing that she has "saved" him from the "Wisdom of the New" American culture (p. 47). In this story Sui Sin Far emphasizes not the woman's failure to adapt but rather her lack of opportunities to learn about new cultural possibilities and different types of relationships between men and women. Pau Lin only experiences displacement by the other women in the story, not camaraderie.

In contrast to Wou Sankwei, Abraham Rihbany (1869–1944) adjusts more successfully to new gender roles. Initially he finds American women's "prominence in domestic and social affairs. . . . a strange and unnatural phenomenon," since he is accustomed to Syrian women being silent partners (p. 259). Open affection between spouses also distresses him. As he continues to socialize outside of the Syrian community, he observes that these novel relations between spouses promote a "harmonious" family and decides that "true civilization" arises from "equal rights" (pp. 260–261). Much like Rihbany, the Japanese immigrant Etsu Sugimoto (b. 1873) at first perceives an alarming clash over gender traditions. In her autobiography, A Daughter of the Samurai (1925), she explains that she gradually understands the common ground between Japanese and American women; women in both countries are "volcanoes" of understated power (p. 202). She fascinates her American-born neighbor with the story of the Japanese island of Hachijo, where women perform traditionally male duties such as making laws and cultivating rice, while men handle child care and washing. While Sugimoto becomes more comfortable reevaluating long-held traditions, she discovers that immigrants and native-born American women share many gender ideals and, ultimately, that neither America nor Japan yet has achieved gender equality.

Sugimoto's "volcanoes" erupt throughout immigrant literature, as immigrant women assert new independence. Yezierska's heroine in Bread Givers, Sara, dramatically establishes her rights in a pivotal battle with her father. When her father tries to forbid her from moving out on her own, she declares, "In America, women don't need men to boss them" (p. 137). Pitting her will against patriarchal authority, Sara affirms her rights to make her own decisions over housing, a career, and marriage. Sui Sin Far offers a similar example of an immigrant woman who finds greater freedom in America, away from a family that constricts her. Sui Sin Far's "The Story of Iso" supports "Americanization" in marriage customs and overall gender relationships. In China, Iso's family disapproves of her, a "talking woman," who speaks her mind too freely and flouts feminine conventions (p. 117). She resents her household duties, refuses to worship ancestors, and criticizes her arranged fiancé, disgracing her family. Iso eventually finds relief in America, for "in China, 'The woman who talks too much' is called by us 'The new woman'" (p. 119). Along with their native-born counterparts, immigrant women tested the boundaries of gender traditions, striking out into new territory literally and figuratively, and immigrant literature celebrates these changes.

However, immigrant women and other ethnic women faced persistent obstacles to obtaining such liberation. Both Yezierska and Sui Sin Far acknowledge the sexual exploitation that hampered immigrant women's efforts to reach greater independence. In "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian," Sui Sin Far reports confronting a naval officer who tries to seduce her, imagining that her Asian background makes her more receptive. Shenah Pessah, the protagonist of Yezierska's story "Wings," has a similarly demeaning experience. She becomes infatuated with the sociologist John Barnes, who kisses her passionately but then ignores her for days, while she pines away in confusion. The disillusioned Shenah Pessah realizes later that Barnes has taken liberties with her because he does not view her as "a lady alike to him" (p. 16). She sees that like many American men, Barnes follows different rules with the ethnic woman, treating her as sexual prey. While immigrant women struggled to shake off the chains of "Old World" patriarchy, they found that "New World" men threatened their progress in other ways.

Some "New World" men formed more serious relationships with immigrant women, but this type of interethnic relationship also brought challenges. In Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements, Manning emphasizes disturbing elements in his relationship with the immigrant Sonya, viewing their romance as a "mingling of the races. . . . The oriental mystery and the Anglo-Saxon clarity that will pioneer a new race of men" (p. 108). As Horace Kallen has noted, this racial amalgamation theory essentially reinforced Anglo-Saxon American identity to "improve" immigrants and their descendants. Sonya gradually realizes that the union, rather than evolving as a loving relationship, will degenerate into a scientific experiment. As Mary Dearborn observes, Sonya's relationship evokes Yezierska's own turbulent relationship with John Dewey, a reformer of Anglo-Saxon origin. Sonya wavers between attraction to and repulsion from her lover's ideals, wanting to be like him and wanting to retain her own unique qualities. For Manning, Sonya seems attractive as a mysterious, passionate, "primitive" woman, yet he suppresses the very expressiveness that draws him, to "raise" her into "civilization." Manning tries to limit her social life in order to reform her in his image. Zaborowska suggests that Sonya even attempts to suppress her sexuality to avoid appearing an oversexed ethnic woman. While the false distinctions between the Anglo-Saxon and the eastern European immigrant collapse in the narrative, the expectations they construct ultimately doom the marriage. Although gender became more flexible in America, immigrant writers reveal that enacting satisfactory gender roles still proved difficult, particularly for women immigrants.

WORK AND SUCCESS

If a strong work ethic involving patience, perseverance, and eventual reward characterized America's beginnings, this ideal equally characterized immigrant America at the turn into the twentieth century. By all accounts many hardworking immigrants strongly benefited the national economy. O. P. Austin, chief statistician in the Department of Commerce and Labor, reported in 1904 that immigrants contributed significantly to national wealth, particularly where they concentrated themselves, a finding that the historian Thomas Muller confirms. However, unfamiliar with American customs and language and needing work quickly, many immigrants accepted the most modest jobs in factories, manual labor, and petty retail. Racial prejudice also sharply limited opportunities, as immigrant writers emphasized. For instance, Mary Antin relates how prejudiced employers refused to hire her father due to his "Jewish appearance" and "imperfect English" (p. 229). Immigrant writers portrayed these challenges but also demonstrated inspiring career successes. While immigrants defined working success variously, definitions of achievement typically involved not only material success but also moral and creative growth as well.

One writer who found success not only as an author but also as an editor and publisher is Edward Bok (1863–1930). Embodying the Horatio Alger image of rags to riches, he worked odd jobs in youth, later networked with important mentors, and finally rose to prominence in the magazine publishing world, eventually narrating his progress in an autobiography. In The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After (1920), Bok suggests that immigrants may work harder than the typical native-born person, taking nothing for granted. He works his way up from window washer and delivery boy to stenographer to editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. Along the way this entrepreneur forms pivotal relationships that influence his progress, even keeping an autograph collection featuring such literati as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Louisa May Alcott. In Bok's definition of success, community service matters significantly. Having benefited from many mentors, he too hopes to assist others, for instance by establishing a scholarship program for his magazine employees. As Bok illustrates, immigrant writers define success as much more than monetary.

Abraham Cahan examines immigrant career success from a different angle in his well-known novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). Levinsky becomes a self-made man, rising in New York's garment industry to become extremely wealthy. However, Levinsky loses much in the process, abandoning his religious faith, giving up a college education, and avoiding meaningful personal relationships. He even chooses to exploit other immigrants for his own personal benefit, thwarting his employees' efforts to unionize. Cahan invites readers to view Levinsky's economic rise as a personal decline. Sanford Marovitz aptly describes the novel as "a moral tale that illustrates how not to live" (p. 139). Levinsky himself summarizes his life: "There are cases when success is a tragedy" (p. 529). This immigrant narrative examines closely what success entails and finds business accomplishment alone inadequate and sometimes at odds with moral and personal growth. Cahan's novel reminds readers that true career success occurs on multiple levels.

Anzia Yezierska's novels illustrate that immigrant career success need not even contain the dramatic financial gain that Bok and Levinsky enjoy. At the end of Salome of the Tenements, Sonya becomes a fashion designer who provides inexpensive but beautiful clothes for working-class women. This career offers a steady salary but more importantly provides a satisfying creative outlet and community contribution. Likewise, Sara of Bread Givers finds a rewarding career as a public schoolteacher with a modest salary. Both women achieve a professional balance that enables them to develop their talents while also helping others, an immigrant ideal that authors such as Bok, Pupin, and Panunzio also emphasize. Having transcended racism, gained a solid education, differentiated themselves from their parents, and forged professional lives, Yezierska's heroines indeed offer a compelling model for immigrant success. Turn-of-the-century immigrant writers showed that immigrants needed to overcome many obstacles, and understanding those challenges only makes their achievement more laudable.

See alsoAssimilation; Chinese; Jews; Labor; Migration; The Rise of David Levinsky; Social Darwinism; Socialism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Lori Jirousek

IMMIGRANTS

Panikos Panayi

The movement of people to Europe from beyond its shores does not represent a new phenomenon. Indeed, an attempt to trace the history of the peoples which now form the dominant ethnic population of individual nation-states would reveal that they all have origins outside the boundaries of the territories in which they currently live. For some nations, such as the English, who originated in north Germany, the original settlers did not have to travel far. Other groups, including the Hungarians and Finns, migrated over vast distances from their homeland in central Asia. Many of the peoples who now control European countries originally migrated one or more millennia ago.

MIGRATION TO EUROPE SINCE THE MIDDLE AGES

With the emergence of settled societies and monarchical states during the Middle Ages, migration into Europe from further east became highly problematic, as the Roma (Gypsies) discovered. Arriving in the Balkans in the thirteenth century, by the end of the sixteenth they lived throughout Europe. They faced intense hostility wherever they settled, resulting in deportation, murder, and enslavement. In contrast, the Turks, who arrived in the Balkans at about the same time as the Roma, did so as conquerors, which meant that they did not face the persecution endured by the Roma. By the sixteenth century they had settled throughout the Balkans, although not as immigrants in the contemporary understanding of the term.

From the close of the Middle Ages until the end of World War II, migration into Europe did not take place on any significant scale. This does not mean that people from beyond European shores did not settle on the continent. One of the main influxes consisted of African slaves, who differed from subsequent immigrants because the latter had some degree of choice in their decision to move. Significant numbers of Africans appeared in Britain during the eighteenth century because of Britain's centrality in the slave trade, although they had assimilated by the beginning of the nineteenth.

Imperial expansion after 1800, especially involving Britain and France, brought non-Europeans to these two states. In the case of Britain the numbers remained small, so that it is unlikely that the total of ethnic Chinese, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Indians ever exceeded 20,000 before World War II. In contrast, by 1931 102,000 North Africans were living in France, which had a higher proportion of aliens within its population than any other nation in the world. The vast majority of the immigrants in France consisted of other Europeans, pointing to the dramatic increase of migration within the continent during the nineteenth century, as a result of industrialization and population growth.

More immigrants have made their way to Europe since the end of the World War II than all previous immigrants since about 1500, due to a combination of reasons which have transformed modern Europe and its relationship with the rest of the world. Demographic factors have played a central role in this development. Population growth beyond Europe's shores has created pressure on shrinking land resources, resulting in rural and urban unemployment. For instance, Turkey, one of the main sources of labor supply for western Europe from the late 1950s, sending over 2 million workers abroad, has had one of the highest birthrates in the world since 1945, peaking at forty-four per thousand in 1960. In 1972 the country had a population of 36,500,000, which had increased to 55,000,000 by the end of the 1980s, when it was growing by 1 million a year. Economic development did not keep pace with the population explosion, which meant that the country may have counted 5 million unemployed by the early 1970s.

Overpopulation and underemployment beyond Europe has combined with the continuing economic growth of the continent, creating a demand for foreign labor for much of the postwar period. Most states made use of workers from their immediate periphery: for instance, over a million Irish people moved to Britain, while the main origins of newcomers to France have included Spain, Portugal, and Italy. But as these southern European states became wealthier, they needed to retain their own labor power, which necessitated the search for workers from beyond European borders. Colonial states such as France, Britain, and the Netherlands simply allowed the entry of people from the areas of the world which they currently on formerly controlled, which generally had much lower living standards. In 1967 the per capita gross national product was 125 dollars in Pakistan, 250 dollars in Jamaica, but 1,977 dollars in the United Kingdom. Those countries which did not have foreign possessions had to turn to other sources of labor. The Federal Republic of Germany, for instance, tapped the exploding Turkish population. By the middle of the 1970s, western Europe had stopped the relatively free admission of people from overseas. This has meant that Africans and Asians in particular started making their way to the Mediterranean. While those who moved to western Europe during the 1950s and 1960s generally did so with the full knowledge of the states to which they moved, a large percentage of immigrants to southern Europe have entered states such as Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Cyprus illegally, without the knowledge of the government. Relatively little immigration took place into the Soviet bloc before 1989, although East Germany did import people from other Soviet-backed regimes both within and beyond Europe, the latter including Vietnam, Cuba, and Mozambique.

Technology, more specifically its application to transport, has also made population movement easier. Before the advent of canals, modern road-building technology, railways, and steamships, movement of people over any sort of distance proved a hazardous process. Trains, ships, and, during the twentieth century, cars and airplanes have meant that human beings can travel over distances of all ranges extremely quickly.

Since the 1960s political factors have increasingly pushed people out of Africa, South America, Asia, and Turkey to European states, which have obligations toward refugees under the 1951 United Nations Geneva Convention. Consequently, despite increasingly tight immigration controls, people migrating from repressive regimes grew in numbers, including Kurds, Vietnamese, Iranians, Iraqis, Chileans, Afghans, Nigerians, Ethiopians, and Sri Lankan Tamils. While European policymakers have increasingly tried to distinguish economic migrants from political refugees, in reality most population movements have always occurred due to some combination of economic and political reasons in the homeland.

The concept of the immigrant and immigration has increasingly become an issue in industrial Europe as state power has grown. Just as the modern nationstate controls all aspects of the lives of those who live within its borders, so it also displays concern about the people it allows to enter its borders. "Immigration" (as a formal phenomenon) only exists where states become organized and, through the use of passports and nationality and immigration laws, can admit or exclude people. Since World War II, and especially since the 1970s, European states have increasingly tried to control and, more recently, keep out people from beyond the continent, especially as the European Union allows free movement of all citizens within its territories, therefore lessening the need for workers from other parts of the world. This reflects an increasing tendency to divide Europeans from other peoples and demonstrates a racial exclusion of people with black and brown skins. Before 1945 such implicitly or explicitly racist policies had not been necessary because few Africans and Asians wanted to move to Europe.

IMMIGRANTS IN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

With few exceptions, immigrants who have made their way to Europe since the Renaissance have remained, in the short run at least, distinct from the dominant populations. While their physical difference has played a large role in this process, their place in European society has also confirmed their differences. Newcomers to Europe have, initially at least, lived separately from the dominant populations, usually in worse accommodations, carrying out jobs which members of the dominant ethnic groupings shun, especially after 1945.

Immigrants in any European society have usually become ghettoized, largely because of their occupational patterns but also because of the hostility of members of the dominant society toward them. The Chinese community in nineteenth-century Britain, which evolved mainly from sailors, concentrated in London, Liverpool, and Cardiff. Similarly, black people, who also consisted largely of seamen, settled in Cardiff, Liverpool, Bristol, and North and South Shields. These groups remained concentrated in enclaves within these locations, as did the Algerians who settled in French cities from the late nineteenth century.

Such patterns intensified further in the postwar period. In the case of some states, including both West and East Germany, the housing policies of employers and the state made concentration inevitable. In both of these countries, many immigrants from all parts of the world found themselves initially accommodated in company barracks, in mostly all-male surroundings, with virtually no space or privacy. In France the lack of housing meant that shantytowns (bidonvilles) sprang up on the outskirts of many cities. One official inquiry from 1966 counted 225 of these concentrations of foreign workers, 119 of them in Paris. Altogether they housed seventy-five thousand people. In the British case immigrants from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent initially found accommodation in some of the worst inner-city areas, but many have subsequently made their way into wealthier suburban locations. The Japanese offer an exception to the above picture of immigrants confined to the poorest parts of cities. Arriving as professionals, they have settled in wealthy parts of European cities, as the example of the Japanese in Düsseldorf indicates.

Immigrants have tended to move to urban areas. Only 8.1 percent of foreigners in France lived in rural areas in 1981, compared with the 27.3 percent of the French population living outside towns. Immigrants often gravitate to capital cities. In 1982 Paris housed 39 percent of France's Tunisians, 37 percent of its Algerians, and 28 percent of its Moroccans. North Africans have also moved to many of the other large French cities, including Marseille, where they made up 6.9 percent of the population in 1982. Surinamese immigrants to Amsterdam have concentrated in two particular areas of that city. South Asian and West Indian immigrants to Britain have focused exclusively in urban areas, especially inner London but also many of the largest cities, notably Birmingham and Manchester, together with smaller cities such as Bradford and Leicester. In the latter, Asians form over a quarter of the population.

Immigrants from beyond Europe have clearly changed the demography of many European states, both because of the number of arrivals and, in the short run at least, their higher fertility. In this sense a vast difference exists between the few individuals who made their way to Europe before 1945 and the communities who arrived subsequently. By 1995 ethnic minorities in Britain totaled 3.2 million people, or 5.7 percent of the population. Most European states have a foreign population of between 5 and 10 percent, although in many of these the bulk of the minorities consist of other Europeans.

Most people who have moved to Europe from beyond its borders have been men. This was certainly true of colonials in Britain and France before 1945. This pattern continued after 1945, especially in the early postwar decades, because labor importation involved the exploitation of people to carry out some of the most unpleasant physical tasks, which also meant that mainly young people entered European states. In the longer run these patterns changed because many men who had migrated for the purpose of earning money to send back to their families eventually decided to bring over their wives and children instead. Thus the proportion of Turkish women to men in Germany increased from 6.8 percent in 1960 to 65.8 percent by 1981. Turks in Germany have certainly had a younger age structure than natives. In 1976 Berlin contained just 211 Turks over the age of sixty-five among the total population for this minority in the city of 84,415. In the short run immigrants had much higher fertility rates than natives, although these have evened out over time. Thus, while Algerian women in France produced an average of 8.5 children during the early 1960s, this figure had declined to 3.2 by 1990, although this was still higher than the figure of 1.8 for French women.

The majority of immigrants into Europe since 1945 have found themselves working in manual occupations, reflecting European countries' reasons for encouraging immigration and the racism expressed against immigrants. Many of the West Indians who made their way to Britain during the 1950s had qualifications of some sort, but these usually proved useless because racism forced them into employment such as factory work and bus driving. The same applied to immigrants from South Asia. A similar situation has existed in France and West Germany. In 1976 a total of 89.2 percent of foreigners in France worked in unskilled, semiskilled, or skilled manual employment. In the Federal Republic of Germany the majority of Turks worked in metal and textile manufacture and construction. Similarly, those who have immigrated to southern Europe since the 1960s have worked in manual occupations. In 1981, for instance, 47.6 percent of Tunisians in Italy labored in seasonal occupations connected with fishing, while 14.3 percent were employed in agriculture. In Greece immigrants from Egypt and the Philippines have worked in domestic service, cleaning, tourism, construction, and harvesting.

Some changes have taken place in the employment patterns of those who moved to western Europe in the decades directly after World War II. In the first place, many have seen a deterioration in their position due to the rise in unemployment caused by the oil crisis of 1974 and subsequent increasing mechanization. Racism has also ensured that their offspring have had more difficulties in securing employment than natives. Thus, in 1985, while the unemployment rate for Bangladeshi and Pakistani males between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five in Britain stood at 39 percent in 1985, the figure for whites was 18 percent. In 1990, when the total unemployment rate in France stood at 10.9 percent, the rate for Africans in France stood at more than a quarter.

While most immigrants in postwar Europe have experienced working conditions worse than those of natives, opportunities have presented themselves for social mobility in two areas in particular. The first of these is sport, especially for those who have grown up in Britain, France, and Holland. The most obvious illustration of this is the French soccer team that won the World Cup in 1998, which included many people of African origins. On a more mundane level, immigrants throughout Europe have opened their own, usually small, businesses. These often simply cater to people of their own community, where ethnic economies develop. In addition, foreign restaurants have also taken off, including those serving Indian food in Britain, Turkish establishments in Germany, and Chinese restaurants throughout the continent.

ETHNICITY

Most non-European immigrants who have moved to the continent have differed from the more established populations in terms of their appearance, language, or religion. While these three factors naturally distinguish foreigners from natives, ethnic leaders have used them to create communities since the Second World War. Those overseas migrants who moved to the continent before 1945 would have been marked by the same differences, but small numbers, as well as a less politicized climate and the absence of omnipresent and omnipotent states, meant that ethnic minorities did not organize themselves to the same degree as their successors.

During the past five hundred years, appearance has distinguished most overseas immigrants from the more long-term populations of the European continent. In terms of skin color, those who have arrived in Europe from Asia, Africa, and the West Indies are clearly darker than Europeans. Newcomers to Europe have also worn different clothing, at least at first. Islamic women, in particular, who have moved to all western European states since World War II, have introduced their distinctive dress into these countries. Similarly, many Sikh men and women, as well as Hindus, have continued to wear their traditional clothing. Furthermore, newcomers to Europe since World War II have brought their own food with them, which also marks their difference from the dominant groups. This applies especially to Muslims with dietary restrictions, but also to groups such as vegetarian Hindus. The development of ethnic concentrations has meant that such minorities can continue their dietary practices.

Language has also played a large role in distinguishing immigrant communities from dominant groups in modern European history. A large percentage of newcomers to Europe have little or no command of the language of the state in which they settle. In the early 1970s only 7 percent of Turks in West Germany described their command of German as very good. Ten years later over 50 percent of Turks still reported speaking bad German. The percentages had changed partly because, in the intervening years, Turkish children had gone through the German education system. But because so few immigrants have command of the language of the state in which they settle, they naturally bring their own form of discourse with them, which they can use when large communities develop. This has meant the introduction of all manner of languages into Europe since World War II. Among Asians in Britain, for instance, these have included Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi.

Postwar immigrants have brought new religions to Europe, to which many of them have turned even more than before because of the trauma involved in residing in a foreign land. During the nineteenth century the few colonial sailors living in British ports had great difficulties in practicing their religion due to their numbers, the temporary nature of their stay, and the activities of local Christian missionaries interested in converting them. Since 1945 larger numbers, more permanent settlement, and greater toleration from established Christian churches have helped immigrants to establish sophisticated systems of worship.

While religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism have made their first significant appearance in Europe since 1945, the faith which has really stood out in much of western Europe for the first time is Islam. In Britain, where the first mosque opened in the southern town of Woking in 1889, the number of mosques had reached 5 in 1966 and 452 by 1990. By 1991 Britain counted 1,133,000 Muslims, including 476,000 Pakistanis, 160,000 Bangladeshis, and 134,000 Indians. These Muslims, who do not form a homogeneous group, had established their own schools, which began receiving state support in 1998. By the middle of the 1980s France contained 3 million Muslims. A total of 1.7 million Muslims lived in Germany a decade later, 75 percent of whom were Turks. Mosques began to appear during the 1950s, often in flats, although minarets have subsequently been constructed. The Netherlands counted 450,000 Muslims in 1991, mostly Turks, Moroccans, and Surinamese. The Dutch government had actually constructed the first mosque in 1953. By 1989 the Netherlands contained about three hundred mosques and prayer halls spread over about a hundred urban locations throughout the country.

Immigrants to Europe have established their own politicized ethnicities which have gone beyond the religious basis of their distinctiveness. These developments largely represent a reaction against the all-embracing nationalism in the states in which immigrants settle, to which the newcomers cannot relate. Consequently they develop their own cultures and even form their own political organizations.

Early West Indian settlers in Brixton set up associations devoted to cricket, drinking, and dancing, as well as informal groups focusing upon unlicensed drinking, gambling, and ganja smoking. The size of the Turkish community in Germany has facilitated a wide range of cultural developments. Eleven newspapers existed by the early 1990s; the oldest of these, Hürriyet, had a circulation of 110,000, followed by Türkiye, with 35,000, and Milliyet, with 25,000. Since 1964 the German regional radio station WDR, based in Cologne, has broadcast radio programs in Turkish, which, in 1990, attracted an audience of 52 percent of Turks in the city on a daily basis. Turks also watched television programs provided for them by the regional broadcasting companies, and, with the development of satellite television, many tuned in to TRT-International, a station broadcasting from Turkey for Turks settled abroad, which made a third of its programs in Germany.

Immigrants into Europe have also become politically active. Before 1945 both African and Indian nationalists in Britain established all manner of associations. One of the most significant of these was the Pan-African Association, established in London in 1900. After 1945 some West Indians became involved in antiracist organizations. Asians established a variety of groups, according to their ethnic identification. Thus the Indian Workers Association, founded in Coventry in 1938, essentially represents a Punjabi working-class group. Meanwhile, a Supreme Council of British Muslims came into existence in 1991. North African immigrants in France have also become involved in a variety of organizations. In the first place, their homeland governments established associations for the immigrants. The Algerian state set up the Amicale des Algériens en Europe, with the aim of preventing the assimilation of those of its citizens who had gone overseas. The Moroccan government founded a group called the Amicale des Commerçants Marocains en France, with the aim of maintaining the loyalty of emigrants. More recently, a series of Islamic organizations aimed at North African immigrants have developed in France, including the National Federation of French Muslims and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France. Latin American refugees who moved to France during the course of the 1970s continued the activities which had caused their expulsion from their native lands. The political bodies which they established also had peñas, or social clubs, attached to them, where friends could meet and listen to music. In Germany Turkish immigrants have organized themselves across the entire political spectrum. One of the best-known organizations, formed by ethnic Kurds in Turkey, is the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which may have counted up to fifty thousand members in Germany by the middle of the 1990s.

While many immigrants in Europe have turned to formal methods of political activism, others, especially younger people, have resorted to street protest, including violence, in order to make themselves heard. This happened in Britain during the 1980s when West Indians combined with other groups to protest against inner-city poverty. In the same decade SOS-Racisme organized huge marches in France. After racist violence took off in Germany during the early 1990s and skinheads targeted the Turkish community, Turks participated in civil disobedience.

RACISM

All immigrants to Europe have faced hostility from the dominant community, although the interaction between natives and newcomers does not simply manifest itself in a negative manner. Overall the relationship largely consists of indifference, which, however, historians have difficulty in measuring. Fewer difficulties exist in documenting hostility toward immigrants, largely due to the attention which scholars have devoted to this subject. The development of European racism during the course of the nineteenth century has shaped attitudes toward non-European people. Negative views of non-European peoples had existed from the Renaissance, evidenced, for instance, by the destruction of indigenous civilizations by conquering Spaniards in Central America and the organization of the black slave trade by the British. Such hostility became ideologically racist from the middle of the nineteenth century in connection with two major developments. First, the transformation of Charles Darwin's theories of evolution into social Darwinism applied his ideas of natural selection among species of animals into natural selection among races of human beings, developing a hierarchy of different races. The other development which helped this process was the first major encounter of Europeans with Africa and its inhabitants as a consequence of imperial expansion, which reinforced ideas of a hierarchy of races.

Consequently, those people with darker skins who have moved to western Europe have faced a native population with preconceived opinions about them, even after the decline of overt ideological racism following World War II. In Britain, for instance, nineteenth-century popular literature presented negative stereotypes of Chinese, African, and Asian people. More seriously, anti-Chinese violence broke out in south Wales in 1911, while riots against black people occurred in nine locations at the end of World War I.

Since 1945 immigrants from beyond Europe have faced hostility in virtually all of the states in which they have settled. Responsibility for this situation lies largely with the nationalistic, xenophobic, and racist ideologies which continue to exist in European states. While overt racism has become unfashionable since the Nazi period, the actions of European nation-states toward immigrants and their offspring point to the centrality of an exclusionary ideology toward foreigners. Indeed, the very concept of a nationstate, with borders delimiting a "nation" as well as a "state," reinforces the will and ability of those within the boundaries to keep people out. As the twentieth century progressed, immigration laws became increasingly racialized, with the aim of excluding groups from the developing world. Nationality laws supported immigration controls, especially in states such as Switzerland and Germany, where people inherited their citizenship, which meant that individuals born of foreign parents on Swiss or German soil remained outsiders.

Throughout western Europe, immigrants have also been victimized by the police and judiciary. In Britain these issues reached the national stage in the early 1980s following the inner-city riots, while the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence also brought the issue to the fore in the following decade. In Denmark during the late 1980s and early 1990s many blacks in Copenhagen were warned to stay away from public places because of a suspicion, common throughout western Europe, that they were involved in drug smuggling. In Germany during the 1990s some police officers participated in acts of violence against minorities already facing attack from the population as a whole. Similarly, in France police officers have mistreated people whom they perceived as foreign. In fact, one of the worst instances of racism toward non-European immigrants occurred in 1961, when, in the context of the Algerian War of Independence, the Paris police murdered at least two hundred Algerians protesting against the implementation of a curfew against them.

Not surprisingly, European natives have followed the lead of their governments, especially as a racist press has also legitimized their actions. During the late 1950s and early 1960s newspapers in Britain regularly carried stories claiming that too many immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean had entered the country. In these decades immigrants faced regular hostility in their search for employment and accommodation. This hostility continues to exist in Britain and elsewhere.

The development of extreme right-wing political parties throughout Europe has given further credibility to racist attitudes. One of the most enduring of these groups is the Front National, a seemingly permanent fixture on the French political spectrum during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Its central aim consisted of keeping France free from foreign, especially African, influences. Similarly, the most successful of the German postwar racist groups, the National Democratic Party and the Republikaner, devoted much attention to Turks. In 2000 the anti-immigrant Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria) became part of a coalition government in Austria, a development that provoked concern and protest within Austria and abroad.

Racist violence has become endemic in postwar Europe. The 1958 Notting Hill riots against West Indians were the largest such incident in Britain, but since that time murders of members of ethnic minorities, taking place on a regular basis, have replaced rioting. The worst incident in France occurred in 1973, following the murder of a bus driver by a mentally disturbed Arab and resulting in death or serious injury to fifty-two people. The reunited Germany experienced an explosion of racist violence just after the new state came into existence in the early 1990s. More recently, murders of Africans have taken place in Spain and Italy.

MULTIRACIALIZATION

Immigrants and their offspring in postwar Europe have remained outsiders, whether because of social status or legal exclusion. But their position is not all negative, as most European states have made efforts to deal with overt racism, even if they continue to practice it. At the same time, immigrants have had a deep impact upon European life.

Most European states have signed the various international guarantees which protect the rights of minorities, including the United Nations-sponsored International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, ratified in 1965. Some states have their own antiracist legislation. Britain, for instance, introduced a series of acts during the 1960s, superseded by the Race Relations Act of 1976. Other states, such as Germany, have constitutional guarantees protecting everyone within their borders from discrimination. Such legislation does not eliminate prejudice, but it does make members of the dominant group conscious of their actions and therefore lessens animosity toward minorities.

Evidence of positive attitudes toward minorities is more difficult to trace than negative manifestations. Nevertheless, positive attitudes clearly exist. Mixed marriages represent one indication of acceptance. In Germany, for instance, 9.6 percent of marriages in 1990, 38,784 out of 414,475, involved a German and a foreigner. Similarly, while racist organizations have come into existence, so have associations to help newcomers. In Britain, for instance, virtually all of the refugee groups which entered the country during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have received some degree of assistance from natives.

Since World War II immigrants have had a profound impact upon European life. In Britain they have transformed culinary practices, dress codes, and popular culture. At the end of the twentieth century, virtually every high street in Britain had an Indian and a Chinese restaurant. At the same time, big supermarket chains and brand labels have jumped onto the bandwagon of ethnic food. Similarly, the presence of Turkish immigrants in Germany has meant that their cuisine has become widespread throughout the country. Furthermore, European women have taken up some aspects of the dress of the immigrant minorities, although this multiracialization of clothing is largely inspired by the international fashion industry. In Britain Afro-Caribbeans, taking their lead from America, have profoundly influenced the music and club scene.

CONCLUSION

Any overall assessment of the relationship between native white Europeans and overseas immigrants would have to note that newcomers have always retained an unenviable position in comparison with more established populations. The experience of many immigrants before the twentieth century does not offer very much hope to those who entered the continent after 1945, especially if the Roma are used as an example. In other cases, such as that of black people in Britain, they have either faced assimilation or deportation. Increasing multiracialization certainly suggests growing acceptance, although the greater influence of the state means that people from beyond Europe's shores have increasingly had problems entering the continent.

Ultimately, the relationship of European states with people from outside the continent's borders remains similar whether Asians, Africans, West Indians, and South Americans reside in Europe or remain in their homeland. Part of the problem lies in the legacy of imperialism—the underdevelopment and exploitation of many areas of the globe that had been controlled by Europeans. Once the colonial states left, many of the areas they ruled faced almost insurmountable political and economic problems. At the same time the racist mentality and ideology of imperialism has continued to affect the states and peoples of Europe and determines their attitudes toward foreigners moving to the Continent. The exclusion of black and brown people from European shores simply reflects the desire of European states to fix world markets in their own favor by controlling the world's resources. Allowing such people into Europe would, in the eyes of European policymakers, threaten the well-being of their own citizens.

How long this policy of exclusion will continue seems questionable for two reasons in particular. First, the continuing poverty of much of Africa and Asia compared with Europe makes the continent attractive as a destination for immigrants. In 1990 the developed world had a per capita gross national product twenty-four times greater than that of poor countries. Unequal birthrates also make future migration likely. On the one hand the faster growth of non-European peoples creates land pressure and consequent unemployment and poverty in the countries in which they originate. At the same time the increasingly aging and infertile population of Europe will need people to work and care for them, which, however, means that foreigners will continue to move to the Continent as a disadvantaged manual work minority. In this sense the unequal relationship between Europe and the rest of the world will continue.

See alsoMigration (volume 2);Labor Markets (volume 4); and other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Castles, Stephen, with Heather Booth and Tina Wallace. Here for Good: Western Europe's New Ethnic Minorities. London, 1987.

Castles, Stephen, and Godula Kosack. Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe. 2d ed. London, 1985.

Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London, 1984.

Hargreaves, Alec G. Immigration, 'Race,' and Ethnicity in Contemporary France. London, 1995.

Herbert, Ulrich. A History of Foreign Labour in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers, Forced Laborers, Guest Workers. Translated by William Templer. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990.

Holmes, Colin. John Bull's Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971. Basingstoke, U.K., 1988.

MacMaster, Neil. Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–62. London, 1997.

Nielsen, Jürgen S. Muslims in Western Europe. 2d ed. Edinburgh, 1995.

Panayi, Panikos. An Ethnic History of Europe since 1945: Nations, States, and Minorities. London, 2000.

Panayi, Panikos. Outsiders: A History of European Minorities. London, 1999.

Ramdin, Ron. The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain. Aldershot, U.K., 1987.

Shaikh, Farzana. Islam and Islamic Groups: A Worldwide Reference Guide. Harlow, U.K., 1992.

Solomos, John. Race and Racism in Britain. 2d ed. London. 1993.

Visram, Rozina. Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947. London, 1986.

Walvin, James. Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945. London, 1973.

Edited Collections

Abadan-Unat, Nermin, ed. Turkish Workers in Europe, 1960–1975: A Socio-Economic Reappraisal. Leiden, Netherlands, 1976.

Cross, Malcolm, and Hans Entzinger, eds. Lost Illusions: Caribbean Minorities in Britain and the Netherlands. London, 1988.

Brock, Colin, ed. The Caribbean in Europe: Aspects of West Indian Experiences in Britain, France, and the Netherlands. London, 1986.

Gerholm, Tomas, and Yngve Georg Lithman, eds. The New Islamic Presence in Western Europe. London, 1988.

King, Russell, and Richard Black, eds. Southern Europe and the New Immigration. Brighton, U.K., 1997.

Ogden, Philip E., and Paul E. White, eds. Migrants in Modern France. London, 1989.

Wrench, John, and John Solomos, eds. Racism and Migration in Western Europe. Oxford, 1993.

Articles

McDonald, J. R. "Labour Immigration in France, 1946–1965." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59 (1969): 116–134.

IMMIGRANTS, IMMIGRATION

Immigration is a major historical, yet current influence and integral part of how nations continue to grow and change in population and diversity. M. Fix and J. S. Passel (1994) list the principal goals of U.S. immigration policy as: social, economic, cultural, moral, and national and economic security (includes protection from infectious and animal-borne diseases, environmental hazards, food safety, terrorists, and various criminal acts). Canadian and European policies encompass similar goals, but with greater emphasis on the economic impact of immigration. In 1999 over 16 million legal immigrants in Western Europe earned more than $460 billion. However, despite the projection indicating that European countries face a dramatic population decline over the next 50 years, many European countries want to restrict immigration on the basis of economic reasons, including the fear of exacerbating the already significant problem of unemployment. Immigration policies are the responsibility of national governments, while the policies regarding how countries deal with immigrants are shared by the various levels of government—national, state, and local.

At the federal level in the United States, for example, several agencies play key roles in developing and implementing national immigration and immigrant policies. The principal immigration agencies are: the United States Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which is responsible for enforcing the laws regulating the admission of foreign-born persons(i.e., aliens) to the United States and for administering various immigration benefits, including naturalization and resettlement of refugees; and the Department of Treasury U.S. Customs Service, which is the primary enforcement agency protecting the nation's borders. Other federal agencies deal more directly with the public health dimension of immigration and immigrants. Although many countries have organizations dealing with immigrants and immigration issues, there are international agencies that act as important brokers regarding migration among countries. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is an intergovernmental body that is committed to the principle that humane and orderly migration benefits migrants and society. Since 1951, the IOM has acted with member countries (currently 79) to assist in meeting operational challenges of migration, to advance understanding of migration issues, to encourage social and economic development through migration, and to uphold human dignity and well being of migrants.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is another international agency which, since 1951, has played a significant role in responding to the world's growing refugee predicament. As one of the world's principal humanitarian organizations, the UNHCR provides international protection to refugees and seeks durable solutions to their plight. For the year 2000, there were about 22.5 million refugees and other persons of concern to the UNHCR.

HISTORY AND DEMOGRAPHICS

Immigration policies have directly influenced the demographic composition of the immigrating populations over the lives of the nations. The first immigration office in the United States and Canadian federal governments were created in the nineteenth century by laws intended mainly to encourage immigration. Later, the U.S. Immigration Act of 1891 provided for deportation of aliens living unlawfully in the country. About this same time, in 1882, the U.S. Congress asserted the first broad federal regulatory power regarding immigration by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. In Canada, although there was no law passed to exclude any particular group of immigrants, careful procedures were developed to ensure most applications submitted by black people were rejected. From the late nineteenth century to the year 2000, most North American, European, and Australian immigration policies have shifted from a focus on qualities of individuals(e.g., excluding illiterates, criminals, those with illnesses) to a focus on countries of origin with a more inclusionary focus using preference categories, to a sharpened humanitarian approach in admitting those in need (such as refugees) through permanent and systematic assessments. In European countries, various approaches for integrating immigrants are at work. Germany has developed special institutions and programs for foreigners, while France tends to stress general rather than foreigners-only programs. The European Union recognizes that immigrants are needed for demographic and economic reasons.

Census data indicate that the percent of foreign-born persons in the total U.S. population has waxed and waned from a high of 14.8 percent in 1910 to a low of 4.7 percent in 1970. In July 1999, the foreign-born resident population estimates totalled about 25.8 million, or about 9.5 percent of the total U.S. population. Likewise, Canada's peak year for immigration (1913) saw the arrival of about 400,000 people. Its 1996 census showed a continued growth in immigration with 17.4 percent of Canadian residents being first-generation immigrants. From 1990 to 1999, the United States foreign-born population increased. Hispanics increased from 8 to 11 million persons, and the Asian and Pacific Islander groups increased from4.5 to 6.3 million. More than 60 percent of the Asian and Pacific Islander populations in the United States and about 35 percent of Hispanics are foreign-born.

These statistics reveal how changes in immigration policies, especially within the past fifty years, have influenced the makeup of the foreignborn populations in the United States. For France, there have been several immigration priority shifts over the years. Initially priority was given to members of France's colonies, subsequently, to Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and, more recently, to North African guest workers. A shift of immigration priorities also occurred in Canada when, after its 1976 Immigration Act was passed, immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America were welcomed.

The late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century provided a different country-of-origin profile for immigration to the United States. Since 1820, Germany has been the greatest source of immigrants to the United States, with Mexico ranking second, Italy third, and the United Kingdom and Ireland a close fourth and fifth, respectively. Changes were evident in 1996 when the country-of-origin profile for immigration showed that of the top ten nations, four were Asian nations, three Latin American nations, two from the former Soviet Union, and one from the Caribbean. The United States Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 provided an amnesty for undocumented persons living in the United States under certain conditions, which resulted in about2.8 million persons attaining legal status—the majority of whom were Hispanic. The 1996 count used by the INS for "illegal alien populations" or undocumented persons is about 5 million, with about 2.7 million estimated to be from Mexico. Other countries in Europe indicate that 300,000 to 1,000,000 "unauthorized immigrants" reside within their borders.

Immigrant populations in the United States from the Asian and European countries have more years of education than immigrants from Latin American countries. Further 1999 estimates of the average age of foreign-born racial and ethnic groups range from seven to eleven years older than the U.S. total population estimates for the respective groups. The occupations of immigrants depend on their education and their proficiency in speaking English. It was estimated that in 1990 about 40 percent of immigrants were either operators/laborers/fabricators or service workers. Immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy not only in terms of labor force participation rates but also in terms of taxes paid and earnings spent for goods and service on their local economies. On the other hand, in 1997, the unemployment rates for immigrants were much higher in France than for French nationals. The French nationals' rate was 12 percent compared with 31 percent for immigrants from non-European Union countries and 50 percent among North Africans.

Geographic distribution of the foreign-born within the United States from the 1990 census indicates that most live in the West and are from Mexico. Immigrants settle and reside mainly in metropolitan areas such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami; this is also consistent with the living patterns of Hispanic and Asian populations in the United States. Projections of the immigrant populations by the Census Bureau at the low, middle, and highest series indicate that the largest growth will be in the Asian and Pacific Islander populations over the next fifty years. Using the 1990 base for population projections, the Census estimates that by the year 2045, foreign-born populations will grow to about 13.5 percent of the total population, compared to 9.5 percent in 1999. The distribution of immigrant ethnic groups in Canada shows people from the British Isles as the majority throughout Canada with the exception of Quebec where the French dominate. The West and prairie provinces include about 15 percent German and significant numbers (9 to 11 percent) of Ukrainians.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PUBLIC HEALTH

Although immigration policies are complex, much of the work of responsible public health professionals and organizations is to consider how best to serve the immigrant populations who arrive. As noted above, there are several public health agencies in the United States responsible for the health of the entering populations. Other nations and international organizations also help with caring for the education, social, and health needs of immigrants. For refugees, in particular, the resettlement process in the United States includes the federal agency working with local providers to ensure health services are provided. Other than refugees and asylees, immigrants must ensure that they do not become a "public charge," that is, dependent on the government for subsistence. Based on determinations of INS in consultation with the Department of Health and Human Services, United States federal health services programs can be provided to immigrants without being considered "public charges." There are other restrictions to public benefits that are part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which restricts access by some legal immigrants to certain programs and denies access by undocumented/unauthorized immigrants to many government funded programs. Federal and state programs affected under this law include Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Security Income, and food stamps.

For public health purposes, the state's restriction of certain public benefit programs must not inhibit the public health system in serving immigrant populations with interventions and services that target at-risk populations. Knowing the populations within the community is a fundamental requirement in public health. Assessments of immigrant populations must take into account the country of origin and its socio-political context, language use and level of language proficiency, age and educational profile, cultural nuances including specific gender practices and protocols, time in the country and familial ties, particular health practices and beliefs that may be common to the population, social and religious beliefs and practices, and the economic conditions of employment. Such assessments then include not only a quantitative epidemiological approach, but also a qualitative ethnographic inquiry as complementary data.

Policies developed for public health systems are critical in addressing the particular characteristics and needs of immigrant populations. Being consistent in serving the populations establishes a trusting environment for newly arrived and foreign-born populations who may have emigrated from countries where governments were not trustworthy. In keeping with the United States Healthy People 2010 report's second goal of eliminating health disparities, policies will also need to be flexible and allow for interpretation in the field.

Providing the proper interventions and services through culturally competent systems becomes a major challenge for the public health community, not just the public health government agencies. Generally, immigrants are not familiar with the variety of places (both private and public) from which services and promotion of healthy practices are derived. Getting to know the different sources of services is much more complex than immigrant populations may have experienced in the past. (Moreover, it is not unlikely that in some countries the systems are such that even the native-born populations are still unfamiliar with how their public health systems work.) Such coordination requires collaborative trust among providers and their respective organizations, and will help to build more confidence in the use of the system by the immigrant populations.

As a final point for the public health community in refining experiences with immigrant populations, there is the need to keep up with what potential public health issues are occurring globally, nationally, statewide, and, of course, locally. Experience has shown that refugees and other immigrants can quickly be placed in a community due to some type of international disturbance. Keeping informed of immigrant populations as part of the community allows for better decisions on what health improvements may be needed, and what actions should be taken when more immigrants arrive.

J. Henry Montes

(see also: Acculturation; Cross-Cultural Communication, Competence; Ethnicity and Health )

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