It barred the entry of Chinese laborers and established stringent conditions under which Chinese merchants and their families could enter. Canada also imposed restrictions on Chinese immigration.
Nativism: The policy of keeping a society ethnically homogenous. That assumption is unlikely to be true. If it were sound, the Soviet Union would have been a great economic success. The world is full of people with modest initial credentials who could achieve great things in a society that offers them a meaningful opportunity to do so.
By excluding them, we shoot ourselves in the foot. Economic harm is far from the only cost of migration restrictions to American citizens. The law enforcement apparatus established to keep out and deport undocumented migrants unavoidably threatens the civil liberties of all Americans.
Because of weak due process protections in the immigration enforcement system, the federal government detains and sometimes deports thousands of U. Federal policy also permits the use of racial and ethnic profiling to enforce migration restrictions in so-called border areas, which actually encompass territory where some two-thirds of Americans live. This enforcement in border regions inevitably exposes large numbers of Americans to racial and ethnic discrimination simply because they are or appear to be members of the same ethnic groups as many undocumented immigrants.
Other American victims of immigrant restrictions include the thousands of U. Even Americans without close personal or economic relationships with would-be immigrants suffer from the loss of the opportunity to form them. The person who could have been the love of your life may be barred from entering the United States because of immigration restrictions.
The same goes for the teacher or professor who might have expanded your horizons, or the entrepreneur who could have helped you start a successful business. The coronavirus pandemic has also highlighted fears that migrants might spread communicable diseases. Such concerns cannot be lightly dismissed. But before using them to justify restricting immigration, we should take three considerations into account. First, is the harm in question real? There is even noticeable a rather severe public feeling regarding the admission of persons of any of the classes named above; perhaps one might say, a certain resentment at the attempt of such persons to impose themselves upon us.
We already have laws which cover a considerable part of this ground; and so far as further legislation is needed, it will only be necessary for the proper executive department of the government to call the attention of Congress to the subject. There is a serious effort on the part of our immigration officers to enforce the regulations prescribed, though when it is said that more than five thousand persons have passed through the gates at Ellis Island, in New York harbor, during the course of a single day, it will be seen that no very careful scrutiny is practicable.
It is true that in the past there has been gross and scandalous neglect of this matter on the part both of government and people, here in the United States.
For nearly two generations, great numbers of persons utterly unable to earn their living, by reason of one or another form of physical or mental disability, and others who were, from widely different causes, unfit to be members of any decent community, were admitted to our ports without challenge or question.
It is a matter of official record that in many cases these persons had been directly shipped to us by states or municipalities desiring to rid themselves of a burden and a nuisance; while it could reasonably be believed that the proportion of such instances was far greater than could be officially ascertained.
But all this is of the past. The question of the restriction of immigration to-day does not deal with that phase of the subject. What is proposed is, not to keep out some hundreds, or possibly thousands of persons, against whom lie specific objections like those above indicated, but to exclude perhaps hundreds of thousands, the great majority of whom would be subject to no individual objections; who, on the contrary, might fairly be expected to earn their living here in this new country, at least up to the standard known to them at home, and probably much more.
The question to-day is not of preventing the wards of our almshouses, our insane asylums, and our jails from being stuffed to repletion by new arrivals from Europe; but of protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe.
The first thing to be said respecting any serious proposition importantly to restrict immigration into the United States is, that such a proposition necessarily and properly encounters a high degree of incredulity, arising from the traditions of our country. From the beginning, it has been the policy of the United States, both officially and according to the prevailing sentiment of our people, to tolerate, to welcome, and to encourage immigration, without qualification and without discrimination.
For generations, it was the settled opinion of our people, which found no challenge anywhere, that immigration was a source of both strength and wealth. Not only was it thought unnecessary carefully to scrutinize foreign arrivals at our ports, but the figures of any exceptionally large immigration were greeted with noisy gratulation.
In those days the American people did not doubt that they derived a great advantage from this source. It is, therefore, natural to ask, Is it possible that our fathers and our grandfathers were so far wrong in this matter? Is it not, the rather, probable that the present anxiety and apprehension on the subject are due to transient causes or to distinctly false opinions, prejudicing the public mind?
The challenge which current proposals for the restriction of immigration thus encounter is a perfectly legitimate one, and creates a presumption which their advocates are bound to deal with. Is it, however, necessarily true that if our fathers and grandfathers were right in their view of immigration in their own time, those who advocate the restriction of immigration to-day must be in the wrong? Does it not sometimes happen, in the course of national development, that great and permanent changes in condition require corresponding changes of opinion and of policy?
We shall best answer this question by referring to an instance in an altogether different department of public interest and activity. For nearly a hundred years after the peace of opened to settlement the lands beyond the Alleghanies, the cutting away of the primeval forest was regarded by our people not only with toleration, but with the highest approval.
No physical instrument could have been chosen which was so fairly entitled to be called the emblem of American civilization as the Axe of the Pioneer. As the forests of the Ohio Valley bowed themselves before the unstaying enterprise of the adventurous settlers of that region, all good citizens rejoiced. There are few chapters of human history which recount a grander story of human achievement. Yet to-day all intelligent men admit that the cutting down of our forests, the destruction of the tree-covering of our soil, has already gone too far; and both individual States and the nation have united in efforts to undo some of the mischief which has been wrought to our agriculture and to our climate from carrying too far the work of denudation.
In precisely the same way, it may be true that our fathers were right in their view of immigration; while yet the patriotic American of to-day may properly shrink in terror from the contemplation of the vast hordes of ignorant and brutalized peasantry thronging to our shores. Before inquiring as to general changes in our national condition which may justify a change of opinion and policy in this respect, let us deal briefly, as we must, with two opinions regarding the immigration of the past, which stand in the way of any fair consideration of the subject.
These two opinions were, first, that immigration constituted a net reinforcement of our population; secondly, that, in addition to this, or irrespective of this, immigration was necessary, in order to supply the laborers who should do certain kinds of work, imperatively demanded for the building up of our industrial and social structure, which natives of the soil were unwilling to undertake.
The former of these opinions was, so far as I am aware, held with absolute unanimity by our people; yet no popular belief was ever more unfounded. Space would not serve for the full statistical demonstration of the proposition that immigration, during the period from to , instead of constituting a net reinforcement to the population, simply resulted in a replacement of native by foreign elements; but I believe it would be practicable to prove this to the satisfaction of every fair-minded man.
Let it suffice to state a few matters which are beyond controversy. The population of was almost wholly a native and wholly an acclimated population, and for forty years afterwards immigration remained at so low a rate as to be practically of no account; yet the people of the United States increased in numbers more rapidly than has ever elsewhere been known, in regard to any considerable population, over any considerable area, through any considerable period of time.
Between and the nation grew from less than four millions to nearly thirteen millions, — an increase, in fact, of two hundred and twenty-seven per cent, a rate unparalleled in history. That increase was wholly out of the loins of our own people. Each decade had seen a growth of between thirty-three and thirty-eight percent, a doubling once in twenty-two or twenty-three years.
During the thirty years which followed , the conditions of life and reproduction in the United States were not less, but more favorable than in the preceding period. Important changes relating to the practice of medicine, the food and clothing of people, the general habits of living, took place, which were of a nature to increase the vitality and reproductive capability of the American people.
The decline of this rate of increase among Americans began at the very time when foreign immigration first assumed considerable proportions; it showed itself first and in the highest degree in those regions, in those States, and in the very counties into which the foreigners most largely entered.
Rarely do users of this argument explain to whom the U. How can that be? The standard Weberian definition of a government is an institution that has a monopoly or near monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a certain geographical area.
It achieves this monopoly by keeping out other competing sovereigns. Our government maintains its sovereignty by excluding the militaries of other nations, by stopping insurgents, and interrupting the plans of terrorists. However, U. The main effect of our immigration laws is to prevent willing foreign workers from selling their labor to voluntary American purchasers. If the United States would return to its immigration policy then foreign militaries crossing U.
Allowing the free flow of non-violent and healthy foreign nationals does nothing to diminish the U. There is also a historical argument that free immigration and national sovereignty are not in conflict. From the federal government placed almost no restrictions on immigration. At the time, states imposed restrictions on the immigration of free blacks and likely indigents through outright bars, taxes, passenger regulations, and bonds. States did not enforce many of those restrictions and the Supreme Court struck down the rest of them in the s.
However, that open immigration policy did not stop the United States from fighting three major wars: the War of , the Mexican American War, and the Civil War. The U. Those who claim the U. To argue that open borders would destroy American sovereignty is to argue that the United States was not a sovereign country when George Washington, Andrew Jackson, or Abraham Lincoln were presidents. We do not have to choose between free immigration and U. Furthermore, national sovereign control over immigration means that the government can do whatever it wants with that power—including relinquishing it entirely.
It would be odd to argue that sovereign national states have complete control over their border except they that cannot open them too much. Of course they can, as that is the essence of sovereignty. After all, I am arguing that the United States government should change its laws to allow for more legal immigration, not that the U. This is an argument used by some Republicans and conservatives to oppose liberalized immigration.
They point to my home state of California as an example of what happens when there are too many immigrants and their descendants: Democratic Party dominance. They would further have to explain why Texas Hispanics are so much more Republican than those in California are. Nativism has never been the path toward national party success and frequently contributes to their downfall.
In other words, whether immigrants vote for Republicans is mostly up to how Republicans treat them. Republicans should look toward the inclusive and relatively pro-immigration policies and positions adopted by their fellow party members in Texas and their subsequent electoral success there rather than trying to replicate the foolish nativist politics pursued by the California Republican Party. Although some Texas Republicans have changed their tone on immigration in recent years, they have focused primarily on border security rather than forcing every state employee to help enforce immigration law.
My comment here assumes that locking people out of the United States because they might disproportionately vote for one of the two major parties is a legitimate use of government power—I do not believe that it is. The resultant weakening in economic growth means that immigrants will destroy more wealth than they will create over the long run. This is the most intelligent anti-immigration argument and the one most likely to be correct although the evidence does not support it.
Economists Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett lay out an enlightening model of how immigrants from poorer countries could theoretically weaken the growth potential of the countries that they immigrate to. Their model assumes that immigrants transmit anti-growth factors to the United States in the form of lower total factor productivity.
However, as the immigrants assimilate, these anti-growth factors weaken over time. Congestion could counteract that assimilation process when there are too many immigrants with too many bad ideas, thus overwhelming assimilative forces. Clemens is rightly skeptical that this is occurring but his paper lays out the theoretical point where immigration restrictions would be efficient by balancing the benefits of economic expansion from immigration with the theoretical costs of degradation in economic growth.
Empirical evidence does not point to this effect either. In a recent academic paper , my coauthors and I compared economic freedom scores with immigrant populations across over countries over 21 years.
Some countries were majority immigrant while some had virtually none. Immigrant countries of origin did not affect the outcome. These results held for the United States nationally but not for state governments. States with greater immigrant populations in had less economic freedom in than those with fewer immigrants, but the difference was small. The national increase in economic freedom more than outweighed the small decrease in economic freedom in states with more immigrants.
Additionally, large shocks into specific countries result in vast improvements in the economic freedom score. Large immigrant populations also do not increase the size of welfare programs or other public programs across American states and there is a lot of evidence that more immigrants in European countries actually decreases support for big government.
Although this anti-immigration argument could be true, it seems unlikely to be so for several reasons. First, it is very hard to upend established political and economic institutions through immigration.
Immigrants change to fit into the existing order rather than vice versa.
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