by Dan Rather
As we all know, however, the immigration debate isn’t only about policy and economics; it is also about culture, race, and religion. We are at a particularly ugly juncture in this regard, but we have been here before. In the early days of the republic, the country needed settlers, so nearly anyone could immigrate. Then, as the United States started to grow and be seen as a land of opportunity, a big wave of immigration began in the decades before the Civil War. Most were from Northern and Central Europe, and many were Catholics—particularly from Germany and Ireland. This sparked a fierce backlash and the rise of the American Party, nicknamed the Know-Nothing Party. Its ranks were driven largely by anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiments. The ugly echoes of their intolerance can be heard today, and it is ironic that some who question the “Americanness” of more recent arrivals are themselves descendants of those who were labeled “un-American” in the nineteenth century.
In the mid-1800s, the United States also saw an influx of immigrants from China, drawn by the rush for gold in California and the need for labor and entrepreneurial energy that accompanied the miners. Even though Chinese laborers undertook the dangerous work of the western half of the transcontinental railroad, discrimination against them was intense. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States. Japanese immigration expanded to fill labor demand no longer being provided by Chinese immigrants, and it grew rapidly after the turn of the century up and down the Pacific coast. But a so-called gentleman’s agreement between the U.S. and Japanese governments soon limited formal immigration from that country as well.
At the same time, new waves of immigrants were hitting the eastern shores from Southern and Eastern Europe, including millions of Catholics and Jews. This shift in the makeup of the United States citizenry sparked an effort to make America look more like it once did. Congress passed sharp quotas on immigration in the 1920s, favoring people from Northern Europe, which set the stage for one of the most shameful chapters in our history. As refugees started to pour out of Europe to escape fascism, the United States tightened its borders and even turned some ships away, sending men, women, and children back to their deaths.
This xenophobia at the time of World War II also affected how Americans viewed their fellow citizens. The internment of over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans came from misplaced fears that they might sabotage the war effort. Fear has often been a powerful motivator for exclusion and persecution. German Americans were ostracized—and some even detained—during the First World War (much less so during World War II). These days, Muslims find themselves particularly under attack, not only by discriminatory new government immigration policies but also in schools, public spaces, and other avenues of daily life where their fellow citizens often make negative assumptions about their religion and reasons for being here. Never mind that immigrants are rarely responsible for violent acts. Seldom do they attempt to undermine the values of our country.
Instead, we have seen time and again that immigrants and their children are eager to serve their new nation, and often at great sacrifice. While Japanese Americans were being interned during World War II, an infantry regiment was formed of Japanese American soldiers—mostly the sons of immigrants from Hawaii. Because of the sheer numbers of Japanese Americans living in Hawaii, it was unfeasible to send most of them to internment camps (demonstrating the capriciousness of the policy). Thousands of young Japanese American men enlisted in what became known as the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The 442nd saw fierce fighting in Europe and is, by some estimations, the most decorated group of soldiers in American history. As a Texan, I was keenly aware of their service when, in October 1944, they rescued the so-called Lost Battalion (a unit of the Texas National Guard), which had been surrounded by the Nazi army in the Vosges Mountains of France. After a hellacious winter battle, 211 of the 275 men in the Lost Battalion walked out alive, while the 442nd suffered 800 dead and wounded in the fight.
In recent years, when I reported from distant and dangerous military outposts in Iraq and Afghanistan, I saw a great diversity of surnames stitched into uniforms—and the pride of service in diverse faces. It was renewed proof that we are a nation of immigrants who believe in service. I have had a similar experience reading the names etched into marble in Arlington National Cemetery. Patriotism and sacrifice know no ethnicity, race, or religion. And it has always been thus. Whether it’s the more than 40 percent of the Union soldiers in the Civil War who were born overseas or had a parent who was an immigrant, or the late Humayun Khan, a U.S. Army captain who died in a suicide attack in Iraq and then became a potent symbol in our current political debate, there should be no question about whether our newest Americans are willing to sacrifice for their adopted country.
When I moved to New York in 1962, most of the immigration was still European. Certain nationalities coalesced around certain trades, and I found that the soundmen’s union was almost exclusively Eastern European (they would often merge German and English, saying “mitout sound” instead of “without sound”). The cameramen seemed to be mostly Irish, and there were all sorts of other accents I had never heard before. Around the CBS newsroom, at drinks after work, and out on assignment, much of our banter was hardly politically correct, and there was a lot of ethnic stereotyping in our jokes. But I remember being struck by how collegial it all felt. In the news business, like the army, you can’t get much done if you don’t work together.
This was also the first time I really got to know Jewish Americans, starting when Bernie Birnbaum took me under his wing. He was different from me in every way imaginable—native New Yorker, the son of Russian immigrants, Fulbright Scholar. We instantly became dear friends. Bernie was a fast talker, and I remember struggling to keep up with his flow of words, and his accent. I had never even heard of kosher food, so Bernie took me to the famed Carnegie Deli, where he explained the concept in the midst of a sea of tables filled with other fast talkers. Bernie had nothing for clothes and his socks would sometimes be mismatched. In my naïveté, I remember thinking this was what all Jewish people were like. Ernie Leiser, who had hired me after seeing my coverage of Hurricane Carla for the CBS affiliate in Houston, was everything Bernie was not: well tailored, calm, and soft-spoken. I had no idea that he was also Jewish until Bernie told me. I was learning that real people didn’t fall neatly into stereotypes, a lesson that many need to revisit these days.
The immigrant spirit that coursed through the hallways of CBS News was seen as one of our core strengths. Blair Clark, the vice president of CBS News, was about as traditional American stock as you could get, Harvard-educated from a prominent white Protestant family. But he was a true progressive and would later become editor of the Nation magazine. With a nod to the dapper CBS News correspondents of the day, Clark advised me to “dress British and think Yiddish” if I wanted to be successful. A comment like this might seem offensive or anachronistic in today’s world, but I certainly don’t think that was his intention and it was not how I took it.
What we didn’t know at the time was that a sea change was coming that would transform the United States forever. On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson traveled to Liberty Island in the harbor of New York and signed a sweeping change to America’s immigration laws. At the feet of the monumental statue that had welcomed so many of the huddled masses to our shores, Johnson undid a system that had been in place since the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1920s.
The new law eliminated immigration quotas based on race, ethnicity, and nation of origin. Instead, it set up different preferential criteria, such as having a relative who was a U.S. citizen or legal resident and working in a profession with specialized skills. Johnson framed the bill in rousing language: “[The old system] violated the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. . . . Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more the
y have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.”
For all the soaring rhetoric, there was a feeling at the time that this 1965 law would not change America too drastically. (Johnson himself said it was “not a revolutionary bill.”) The preference for immigrants with family members already living in the United States was seen by many as a way to ensure that a predominantly white country stay that way. In reality it has had the opposite effect, as individuals from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and many other far-flung locations have immigrated to the United States, and their extended families have followed. The resulting change in American demographics has been revolutionary. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1965, 84 percent of Americans were non-Hispanic white. By 2015, that number had dropped to 62 percent. And they estimate that “by 2055, the U.S. will not have a single racial or ethnic majority.” That is a staggering shift. Think about the paintings of our Founding Fathers, the presidential portraits, the old black-and-white newsreels and photographs of Americans at work and play. The faces in all of those are predominantly white. That America is fading, and we will become more diverse in the future.
Over the course of our nation’s history, waves of immigration have time and again expanded the definition of what it means to be an American. And each time, eras of permissive immigration were bracketed by eras of deep restrictions. Those who wished to bar the Eastern and Southern Europeans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the Catholics, the Jews, and now the Muslims and so many others have all used some version of the same argument: America will no longer be America.
They have always been wrong. We have attracted some of the best scientists and inventors and entrepreneurs and artists and athletes and every other category you can think of because we are a place where people of all kinds can be Americans.
But we cannot deny that change can create feelings of anxiety and unease among those who see America, as they know it, slipping away. We should not succumb to bigotry, but we should also have empathy for those who are worried about their future. There are legitimate concerns, but if politicians of all persuasions tried to speak to audiences beyond their own voting base and argued that we must root for prosperity among all Americans, I suspect much of this anxiety could be diminished. That can’t happen easily or quickly. It will require time and tolerance. It is one of our most difficult challenges of the twenty-first century.
We have been able to reach consensus on immigration, even relatively recently. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan oversaw the passage of a bill that allowed millions of people living in this country without documentation to come out of the shadows. Two years earlier, President Reagan had said, in a presidential debate against Walter Mondale, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” Imagine: The patron saint of the modern conservative movement made the case for a concept that today would have him pilloried by the right-wing press and those cynical politicians who have learned to exploit division for their own electoral success. But with the right leadership, I believe we could find similar compromise today.
I remember a moment late in the 2008 presidential campaign when Barack Obama returned to his birth state of Hawaii for a vacation. Some pundits criticized this decision for the optics, arguing that our fiftieth state might strike some voters as exotic and foreign. At the same time, there was also a candidate on the ballot from the forty-ninth state, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The glaciers and tundra of the Last Frontier are just as exotic as the beaches and palm trees of Hawaii, but I don’t remember hearing that Alaska was somehow bad for campaign optics. What I think was at issue wasn’t geography but race. Hawaii is the most diverse state in the Union, the result of waves of Asian immigration. By contrast, Alaska is predominantly white, save for a considerable population of Native Americans.
These states are two of the most marvelous and welcoming in our nation. Their natural wonders are matched only by the friendliness of their inhabitants, and I have enjoyed my time in both immensely. But when you look at the demographic trends of the United States, Alaska is more a throwback to the past, and Hawaii a glimpse of the future. We are destined to look and live more like Hawaii, a multiethnic society where racial lines are blurred through intermarriage, and cultural heritages combine into a new America. Even my hometown of Houston is now one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the country.
Today we see an eagerness among some of our elected officials—buoyed by passionate segments of the voting public—to erect new barriers to immigration. But these efforts will not stop the demographic momentum already underway in the United States. If anything, I believe that demonizing the most recent arrivals to our shores will only, over time, galvanize the political will of the majority of Americans who understand the true legacy of our history.
When I walk around this great land, in small towns and big cities, bus stations and airports, baseball stadiums and art museums, I see an America that has expanded beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. We are a people of energy and purpose, a blended land of ever-increasing diversity that so far has proven the strength and wisdom of our great experiment. We must find a way to defeat the forces of intolerance. If we do, we will emerge a better, stronger nation.
EXPLORATION
Science
The legendary New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.” I shudder to think what the late senator would make of America today. God forbid, but if this nation ultimately fails, I believe it will be because opinions, propaganda, and superstitions replaced facts as the basis for our governance. By doing so, we will have undercut a key strength of the United States over the course of its history, one that receives too little attention: science.
When I say “science,” I mean more than simply the study of biology or physics, or how much we fund basic research. Fundamentally, science is about a method of understanding our world through observation, experimentation, and analysis. It’s about allowing facts to win out over prejudice, no matter how deeply entrenched. We are seeing these values under attack—from climate-change denial to the questioning of our own government’s statistics when they prove to be politically inconvenient. This state of affairs is putting the future of our nation at risk.
The United States was born in the spirit of science: What are we, if not a great experiment? Our Founding Fathers, shaped by the age of reason, cast aside blind faith in kings for a bold hypothesis: Could a representative democracy based on “certain unalienable rights” succeed? Like any scientific hypothesis, our governing philosophy has been challenged, most notably by the Civil War. (President Lincoln called that conflict a test of whether “any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”) But we have kept our experiment viable by altering it through new laws and amendments to our Constitution, just as scientific theories change to reflect new knowledge. It should come as no surprise that many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence had a profound interest in science. Benjamin Franklin was a brilliant experimentalist; Benjamin Rush was an accomplished physician; and Thomas Jefferson had a voracious appetite for all things science: paleontology, astronomy, agricultural sciences, and mathematics. Some scholars even argue that the phrasings Jefferson used in the Declaration of Independence, especially the famous “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” owe their construction to the axioms of Euclid.
As president, Jefferson would launch Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on a transcontinental expedition of discovery. Abraham Lincoln established the National Academy of Sciences. Theodore Roosevelt pioneered modern conservation. Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to appoint an official science adviser. And John F. Kennedy set the United States on the path to the moon.
A scientific approach hasn’t only shaped our government; it has forged our economic might as wel
l. In Chicago, there is a Museum of Science and Industry, and I have always felt those two disciplines go well together. We couldn’t have built our mighty bridges, dams, and skyscrapers without science. And when you look at the great innovators of American history, the vast majority were men and women who believed in the benefits of testing preconceived notions through experimentation. This was the spirit that led Andrew Carnegie to revolutionize the production of steel, George Washington Carver to develop new crops, the Wright brothers to conquer flight, Henry Ford to pioneer the assembly line, and Steve Jobs to change the definition of the computer. If we are to continue as a nation of prosperity, we need to encourage this spirit of ingenuity.
But science has always had to struggle against the forces of superstition. So it would be a mistake to think that the antiscience currents we face today are entirely new. Back in 1980, the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ ” It is what the comedian Stephen Colbert dubbed “truthiness,” a feeling that an erroneous opinion that “sounds” true is just as valid as the actual truth. But while these forces have always been present in American society, I have never seen them infect our national discourse as much as they do now. Sadly, science has become another political football in our bifurcated United States. There was a time, not that long ago, when the Republican Party enthusiastically supported science and research. But recently many of its elected officials have embraced truthiness to guide their rhetoric and, even more damagingly, their policies. And lest we think this falls on only one side of the political divide, there is plenty of fearmongering among Democrats on issues such as genetically modified organisms.
