http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703460404575244693157268432.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_11Immigration restrictionists argue that they object only to those who are undocumented—
pejoratively, the "illegals." But the category is itself a creature of policy, arguably necessary for good social and economic reasons, but ever mutable and ever revised by economic conditions and public attitudes.
Until the passage of national immigration restriction laws in the 1920s, there were no illegal immigrants, with the exception of the Chinese, who were categorically excluded in 1882, and those who failed the health and character screens at Ellis Island. (Occasionally, it was reported, some Chinese snuck across the southern border disguised as Mexicans.)
In 1751, Benjamin Franklin described the influx of German immigrants who were moving into Pennsylvania as "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 any more than they can acquire our Complexion." The effect, he warned, was that "even our Government will become precarious." Those words could have been written yesterday about Hispanics.
Today's fears often focus on the supposedly difficult task of Americanizing the multitudes of Spanish-speaking Latinos. In his 2004 book "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity," the late Samuel P. Huntington argued that their low rates of assimilation "could eventually change America into a country of two languages, two cultures and two peoples. There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society."
Franklin would change his mind and Jefferson, in buying Louisiana from France, would bring in the largest single crop of little monarchists the nation had ever swallowed in one gulp.
By the 1830s, Pennsylvania would legalize bilingual education in German, something that became common (both in German and Polish) in a number of Midwestern states later in the 19th century. It continued until the anti-German fervor of World War I brought all things German to a rapid halt. In 1917, German measles briefly became "liberty measles." Sound familiar?
In the 1840s and 1850s, amid dark forebodings about Catholic plots against American democracy, the Know-Nothing political movement sought to keep immigrants from voting until they'd been in the country for 21 years, withhold "grave diplomatic and political trusts" from persons of foreign birth and impose "stringent penalties" for fraud in the naturalization process.
As the cliché goes, we are a nation of immigrants, some of them the most enterprising and creative people in our history. But almost inevitably, restriction is woven around that immigration like a double helix. In pushing the national-origins-quota immigration laws through Congress in the 1920s, the Immigration Restriction League, the American Legion, the Ku Klux Klan, the crafts unions and other anti-immigration groups—bolstered by the crackpot racial theories of the eugenicists of the first decades of the last century—effectively reduced immigration to a trickle. It wasn't until 1965, with the repeal of those laws, that immigration began to rise again—this time, to the surprise (and shock) of many, from Latin America and the Far East rather than Europe.
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