CONVERSATION Immigration: The Lure of America

Conversation
Immigration: The Lure of America

America is a land of immigrants. Unless you are a native American Indian, you are descended from immigrants. While the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw fewer than one million immigrants to the United States, most of them from the British Isles, the numbers increased dramatically in the middle of the nineteenth century. During the period between 1840 and 1930, nearly thirty million Europeans came to settle in America. In the first decade of the twentieth century, over a million people came per year.

But immigrants were not always welcome, and throughout our history certain groups have been excluded and citizenship restricted. The U.S. Naturalization Law of 1790 states that “any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof.” In 1875, the Page Act, named for California congressman Horace F. Page, specifically restricted Asian immigration in order to end “cheap Chinese labor.” The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was even more restrictive.

While these early restrictions were attempts to exclude Asians and Africans, new restrictions would apply to Southern and Eastern Europeans. In order to “preserve” the national and ethnic character of the country, the 1921 Emergency Immigration Act restricted the number of immigrants admitted from any country annually to “3 percent of the number of residents from that same country living in the United States,” and the Immigration Act of 1924 reduced that to 2 percent.

A national debate on this issue continues to rage today. How open do we want our borders to be? How restrictive should we be? How welcome are immigrants today? What threats do we perceive from immigrants? What contributions can we expect? Is the United States still a melting pot? Is this still the “Promised Land”? What continues to be the lure of America? Consider these questions as you read the sources and enter this Conversation on immigration and the lure of America.

Sources

Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus (1883)

Dennis Kearney and H. L. Knight, Appeal from California. The Chinese Invasion. Workingman’s Address (1878)

Joseph McDonnell, The Chinese Must Go (1878)

Joseph Keppler, Looking Backward (1893)

Robert H. Clancy, An Un-American Bill (1924)

Ellison DuRant Smith, Shut the Door (1924)

Mary Gordon, More than Just a Shrine (1985)

Charles Bowden, Our Wall (2007)

Christoph Niemann, Promised Land (2011)

Walter Russell Mead, America’s New Tiger Immigrants (2012)