Most important, the immigrant communities fought back. The 1.5 million members of the German-American Alliance rallied with the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Irish bosses in the Democratic Party to oppose further immigration restrictions. The rapidly assimilating Jewish community lobbied against rigid quotas and anti-Semitic attacks. President Teddy Roosevelt tried to assuage those concerns, and during the historic three-party election in 1912 all three presidential candidates worked to win support in the immigrant communities.45
The end of World War I, however, brought a wave of isolationism that would keep America out of the League of Nations and end America’s open door to immigration as we know it.
As the country slipped into recession, the upheaval in Europe sent massive numbers of immigrants to the United States. By one estimate, 119,000 Jews arrived in the one-year period between 1920 and 1921—including some of my family—to escape persecution in Eastern Europe. American consuls in Europe described the Jews as “unassimilable” and “filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” The Communist revolution in Russia and a surge of union-organized strikes in the United States elevated the worries about what would happen here. Exploiting that red scare, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched raids first in eleven and then thirty-three cities to expel hundreds of Russian immigrants and Communists.46
This time the revulsion with the new Jewish immigration, the eugenicists’ urgent insistence that America’s Anglo racial mix was at risk, and the victory of the Ku Klux Klan in the Democratic South produced a rising demand for “100 percent Americanism.”
In 1921, the anti-immigrant forces elected Republican president Warren G. Harding, who called Congress into special session to pass a two-year delay on new immigration, with a singular exception for immediate family reunification. In 1924 the tide was stronger, and President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act into law. The House Committee described the purpose of the law as an effort to “maintain the racial preponderance” of the country. The law restricted immigration to 287,000 people a year, barred Japanese and Chinese immigrants altogether, and most importantly, commanded that all future immigration reflect the national origins of the United States beginning in 1929.47
These restrictive laws would govern America’s ethnic and racial character over the next four decades, though not always as intended by those trying to protect America’s Anglo-Saxon character.
Despite the restrictions on immigration, the 1920s was a period of dizzying economic growth, and businesses figured out new ways to carry on that would further America’s growing diversity. The black population had remained in the cotton and tobacco sharecropping areas of the South in the half century following emancipation from slavery. Before World War I, nine out of ten blacks still resided in the former slave states. But between 1910 and 1930, a million blacks moved north en masse. They left Alabama and Mississippi first, and after the war, they began to flee the eastern states of Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. They moved along rail lines and where relatives preceded them, pausing in border cities such as Baltimore, and arrived in large numbers in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Detroit.48
For the black sharecroppers, the South never offered much more than subsistence and political repression, though it was the spread of the boll weevil that created depression-like conditions in the Deep South. Labor agents recruited workers, and black city papers with job listings, such as The Chicago Defender, were widely circulated in the rural areas, taunting: “Have they stopped their Jim Crow cars? Can you buy a Pullman sleeper where you wish? Will they give you a square deal in court yet?” Blacks coming to the North found themselves at the bottom of the totem pole and crowded into neighborhoods with the worst conditions.49
Businesses also began to recruit Mexican labor in larger numbers to work on the railroads, in mines, and in other industries: 750,000 Mexicans came here legally by 1929. The Spanish-speaking were already part of America’s ethnic mix. The Mexican-American War and America’s westward expansion in the late nineteenth century brought almost half of the territory that had been Mexico into the United States, as well as many Mexican migrants and nationals, concentrated mostly in Texas and New Mexico.50
The Central Mesa of Mexico was dominated by haciendas that were consolidating the land and deepening the servitude of peasants who faced rising debt. But the bloody Mexican Revolution of 1910 and protracted upheaval would free six million from serfdom; 650,000 legally migrated to the United States by the end of the twenties. Many worked in the fields, but a growing number lived and worked in cities such as Los Angeles.51
That influx was suspended with the advent of the Depression, and almost a half million Mexican immigrants were expelled from the United States. The same would happen during the Korean War, when “Operation Wetback” deported one million Mexicans without working papers.52
After World War II, the tide of Mexican immigration became unstoppable. The Bracero Program, which gave visas to Mexican workers to work mostly in farm labor, allowed almost half a million Mexican workers into the country by the mid-1950s, and Mexico, exempted from the immigration quotas, sent about 50,000 new immigrants to the United States a year legally by 1963. Latinos were working in farming areas in California and Texas and moving to border cities such as El Paso, San Antonio, and Los Angeles. Other Latino immigrants came from Cuba and Puerto Rico and went to Miami and New York City.53
Black migration also stalled during the Depression, but in the two decades beginning with World War II, three million blacks fled the South for war-boom cities of the North and West Coast states such as California in one of the most massive labor migrations in the country’s history. The mass migration leveled off in the mid-1960s, and when it was done, as many blacks lived outside the South as in it, and 70 percent lived in cities. It was a massive and sudden upheaval, perhaps as big as the flight from the potato famine in Ireland or from poverty in the south of Italy. These migrants quickly settled in segregated black neighborhoods where the churches, fraternal orders, and Democratic Party would play important roles, as with previous immigrant communities.54
Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in Beyond the Melting Pot, described New York City as “a merchant metropolis with an extraordinarily heterogeneous population.” The cities in fact looked less like a “melting pot” and more like a checkerboard of culturally distinct and separate lower-income, poor, and working-class communities that tried to find stability in their own mutual aid societies, churches, schools, businesses, foods, and traditions. As with the waves of immigration before, those from the poorest rural areas faced the opposition of the more established locals, whose control of city hall and the local Democratic Party reinforced the segregation and hierarchy. The blacks and Hispanics put pressure on the Poles, Jews, Italians, and Irish who had come to dominate different neighborhoods and caused some to join the white flight to the suburbs. Racism played a big role in shaping the black urban ghettos, the locations and conditions of public housing, and discriminatory rental and housing practices.55
The 1950s and 1960s were a period of rapid economic growth and mobility, though it was politically disruptive and produced violent resistance, riots, and simmering race relations in cities across the country.
When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he observed to his closest advisers, “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” That came to pass, but so did a change of attitudes that is central to this whole story of American exceptionalism. Public opposition to racial discrimination in voting, public accommodations, housing, employment, and even marriage grew steadily over the three decades from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s.56
While Lyndon Johnson will properly be remembered for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and the War on Poverty, his passing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was just as transformative. It opened a new chapter of immigration that changed the character of the country and made possibl
e the economic and cultural changes described in this book. One in five global immigrants would not be living in the United States, and half of our most talented engineers would not be living in Silicon Valley but for that 1965 law.
For four decades, immigration had been capped at 150,000 a year. The immigrant composition was based on a country-of-origin formula that unsubtly meant that 70 percent of the new immigrants came from three countries—the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany—and the remainder from Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Poland. Under the 1965 immigration law, by contrast, the ability to immigrate to the United States was based on family reunification and needed job skills, with special visas for professionals, scientists, and artists of exceptional ability. President Johnson assured the country that this was a way to maintain control, but the new law immediately doubled the number of legal immigrants and eventually tripled it. Barely six million immigrants had been admitted in the three decades prior to the 1965 reform, but eighteen million entered in the three decades after its passage.57
What was tectonic about the shift was the global reach and diversity of those who would come to America. Four in every five of the new immigrants would come from Asia or Latin America—and in almost equal proportion. Just about 10 percent of immigrants in the following decades would come from Europe. The die was cast.58
President Johnson signed the new law at Liberty Island in sight of the Statue of Liberty, and his speech reflected a renewed consciousness about a multicultural America that was “built by a nation of strangers.” “From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.” Diversity, he declared, would unite and strengthen America.59
And once the new policy reopened the gates, human inventiveness and resolve would have its way in America’s coloration. That was most evident in the case of Mexicans. The new immigration law virtually ended the Bracero Program; guest-worker permits fell from 400,000 in 1959 to 1,725 in 1979, and resident visas declined to 20,000. Demand for Mexican workers, however, was still high and produced the wave of undocumented “illegal” immigrants that has become central to the U.S. political debate. Border arrests climbed from 55,000 in 1965 to 1.7 million in 1986.60
While Ronald Reagan was a staunch opponent of the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, and affirmative action, he was more a traditional Californian when it came to immigration. He would play a major role in promoting the cultural changes that had been unleashed. In 1986, Reagan embraced amnesty for three million illegal immigrants living in the country. Following Lyndon Johnson’s example, he signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act at the Statue of Liberty, observing: “We have a statue in New York Harbor … of a woman holding a torch of welcome to those who enter our country to become Americans.… She represents our open door. All of the immigrants who came to us brought their own music, literature, customs, and ideas.… In fact, what they brought to America became American. And this diversity has more than enriched us; it has literally shaped us.”61
The new law traded amnesty for increased border security, as demanded by the law’s opponents, though that only increased the number of undocumented workers who stayed in the country and encouraged many to move to metropolitan areas away from the traditional border states. Historically, many of the immigrants to the United States chose to return to their home countries. Between 1900 and 1924, when immigration to the United States was quite open, for example, about 40 percent of immigrants returned to their home country. In 1980, right before the passage of Ronald Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act, 46 percent of undocumented Mexicans returned home within twelve months. With the enhanced border security in place, however, many of the undocumented immigrants chose not to risk returning. By 2007, only 7 percent of undocumented immigrants were returning to their home country. Not surprisingly, the Hispanic community began to ask, with increasing insistence, how the growing undocumented population could gain legal status.62
That history has colored America, so that Hispanics are nearly one in five in the population and will likely be one in ten of those who vote in 2016.63
The Republican Party has led a two-decade-long battle since 1994 to get control of illegal immigration, focusing heavily on the growing unlawful and permanent Hispanic population. Governor Pete Wilson of California led the party’s anti-immigration effort by backing passage of Proposition 187, which barred illegal immigrants from using public services, including education and health care, and required all state and local officials to report illegals to law enforcement. It passed handily, with 59 percent of the vote, though federal courts ultimately declared the referendum unconstitutional and kept the law from ever being implemented. Whether to bar illegal immigrants from getting driver’s licenses became the next hot issue in California and New York.64
It was Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona who picked up the torch and led the Republican Party into the closing years of this battle, signing S.B. 1070 into law during the summer of 2010. The law required state law enforcement officials in the process of carrying out their duties to detain suspects if there was reasonable suspicion that they were illegal immigrants. The law imposed penalties on those sheltering, hiring, or transporting “unregistered aliens,” and the stated intent was to achieve “attrition through enforcement.” Arizona’s passage of the toughest immigration law in the country gave Republican-controlled states the mandate to act. Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Alabama passed laws based on the Arizona model, and all but seven states passed anti-immigration measures that same year. But in the summer of 2012, the Supreme Court overturned the Arizona law as an infringement of federal constitutional prerogatives regarding immigration.65
Mitt Romney ran for president as the toughest Republican on immigration, attacking his weak-kneed opponents who allowed the undocumented to avail themselves of in-state tuition prices at state universities. He promised unwavering policies that would lead the undocumented to “self-deport”—very much reflecting the most extreme anti-immigration posture of the Republican Party. Democrats swept the Hispanic vote on Election Day.
The Republican Party’s official postmortem said, “If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e., self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy,” and “among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”66
In 1964, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party traded the support of black voters for white voters in the South and the suburban North. This time, the Republican Party traded in Hispanics, Asians, and new immigrant voters—Democrats now win close to 70 percent of these votes—and the GOP got the Tea Party in return.
The politics of immigration today take place within a normative and material posture acknowledging that immigrants and immigration contribute to and are good for the country. A huge 80 percent majority of Americans favors granting legal status and an eventual pathway to citizenship for the more than 11.7 million immigrants not here legally.67
Dial testing focus groups among 44 swing voters in Denver, Colorado, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, January 28, 2014.
During President Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address, the president’s statement that it is time to “fix our broken immigration system” earned him support rather than cost him in dial-meter research conducted by Democracy Corps. As you can see in the overlay of lines that represents the minute-by-minute reaction of voters, everyone dialed up, regardless of party.68
Republicans are still thinking more about borders than legalization and inviting new immigrants, though they could only stall the president when he issued an executive order that allowed five million of tw
elve million currently undocumented immigrants to remain in America and made them eligible for legal status. The president made clear his purpose and underlying values: “When people come here to fulfill their dreams—to study, invent, contribute to our culture—they make our country a more attractive place for businesses to locate and create jobs for everybody.”69
When Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention a decade earlier, the then Senate candidate reflected on his kaleidoscopic biography:
My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roofed shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British. But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before him.… And I stand here today grateful for the diversity of my heritage … knowing that my story is part of the larger American story.70
AMERICA’S RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
America is a religious country to be sure, though that is not why it is exceptional. America is religiously pluralistic, with a vast churn across untold types of Protestants alongside ethnically diverse Catholics, Muslims, Mormons, and myriad types of Jewish congregations. Americans experience their faith in congregations that make religion more important for them, yet the dominant faiths are mostly nonjudgmental and tolerant. That combination, in turn, allows for more religious diversity and denominational mobility and less enduring sectarian conflict.
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