Immigration Three-Step

An issue that is fast heating up and requires discerning moral judgment, although it will more likely elicit clashing moralisms, is that of immigration policy. A while back, I discussed in some detail Samuel Huntington’s important book, Who Are We? (August/September 2004). On the pro-immigration side of the argument, Huntington is depicted as a nativist, which is unfair. He is alarmed about the huge and growing wave of immigrants from Latin America, chiefly Mexico, that is, he persuasively argues, unprecedented in both size and character. The title question of his book is a question that any people has to ask if they are to sustain their identity as a people. The alternative is to abandon any idea of what it means to be an American. As I wrote earlier, I am not convinced by Huntington’s argument, but it is an argument that needs to be engaged if we are to be prepared for the storm of controversy about to burst upon us.

President Bush has repeatedly said that political capital is there to be spent. With the deep disagreements over his policy in the Middle East, and with apparent failure in other initiatives, such as Social Security reform, some may think he has little capital left. But what he has he is now apparently prepared to spend in tackling immigration reform. While the details will have to be worked out by Congress, the president’s proposal has three parts: securing the borders, ensuring sufficient immigration to sustain the economy, and making it easier for immigrants to become citizens.

The proposal throws into confusion the usual liberal/conservative alignments. For the playing out of this reform, new scorecards will be required to identify the players. The first part of the game, securing the borders, is widely popular. It does not seem to be a top priority issue with most Americans, but there is a commonsensical assumption that a nation worthy of the name should be able to control who is and who is not admitted. That assumption does not go undisputed. While it does not come right out and say so, the Wall Street Journal would seem to favor the abolition of national borders altogether. Many Catholic bishops share that view, although it is not the public position of the bishops conference.

There are politicians who believe that tough talk about securing the borders (not meaning the border with Canada, you may be sure) will pay off on election day. That is perhaps why President Bush kicked off his reform campaign last December with the stern assurance, “We are going to protect the border.” He announced that during his time in office there had been a 60 percent increase in spending on securing the border and an addition of thousands of new border guards, with 4.5 million illegal immigrants caught and returned home.

“Send Them Back”

But, of course, there are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country. Not long ago I was speaking at a convention in the Southwest. The person sitting next to me at dinner was trying to persuade me that we should “send them back.” I asked him to look around the ballroom where about a thousand people were being served by hundreds of waiters and busboys, all of them, so far as I could see, Latino, and probably a large percentage of them here illegally. The same immigrant preponderance would likely obtain among the kitchen workers, the truck drivers who delivered the food, and those who had gathered and prepared it for shipping. My tablemate was unmoved.

Here in New York, in my daily walk to Immaculate Conception and to this magazine’s office, I pass dozens of businesses, along with construction sites, hospitals, and nannies caring for children, all reflecting the city’s dependence upon Hispanic immigration. They are here because immigrants are, as the president says, doing the work that Americans don’t want to do. To which some, including much of organized labor, say that, if so many immigrants weren’t here, Americans would do the same work, at higher wages and with benefits. I rather doubt it. In times of prosperity, such as the present, unemployment among American citizens is practically non-existent. (The official and very low unemployment figure includes a majority of people who are voluntarily between jobs or simply taking time off from work.) Very few Americans are lining up to wash dishes, mop floors, or deliver pizza. The economy and everyday life of New York and other cities would grind to a near halt in the absence of Hispanic immigrants. Not to mention what would happen to the vast agricultural enterprises of California and other states.

It is hard to argue with Andrew Ferguson, who writes: “Restricting that flow of willing workers would cause an economic calamity that no federal official will seriously contemplate. Nor would anyone in a position of responsibility pretend it is plausible to round up the 11 million illegal immigrants who are already in the U.S., ship them back to their homelands and then seal the border against their otherwise inevitable return.”

The three parts of the Bush proposal are to secure the border, establish something like a “guest worker” program, and then give those who participate in the program an easier way to become U.S. citizens, once they have completed the terms of the program and returned to their native country. Whatever the details worked out by Congress, opponents are likely to attack the proposal as a gussied-up “amnesty” for illegals. When the great majority of immigrants speak the same language, Spanish, we are inevitably on the way to becoming a bilingual society, critics say. They note, with considerable justice, that the history of societies divided by language and culture is not a happy one. They point out, in addition, that many immigrants, Mexicans in particular, do not want to be citizens. They are here only to take advantage of opportunities for work, along with social and educational benefits. They are, in effect, cross-border commuters. Other Mexicans make no secret of their aim to reconquer the vast territories stolen by the Yanqui imperialists.

True Faith and Allegiance

To prepare for the debate that is heating up, a helpful primer is True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism. The title of the book is, of course, from the oath of allegiance taken by new citizens, and the author is Noah Pickus, who teaches ethics and public policy at Duke University. The value of the book is not so much in the specific policies proposed—Pickus is careful, sometimes almost annoyingly careful, not to seem partisan—as in its providing a history of American immigration policies and a taxonomy of current positions on what should be done. With respect to the latter, it is something like the aforementioned scorecard.

“Civic nationalism” is the idea around which Pickus thinks most of us can rally. “It offers,” he says, “our best chance to incorporate immigrants, sustain a robust American nationalism, and foster a meaningful democratic form of citizenship.” Pickus does not blithely assume national myths, such as the notion that we are and always have been a “nation of immigrants.” He refers to Huntington only in passing, but Huntington’s presence is close at hand throughout the book. Huntington is withering in debunking the “nation of immigrants” myth, and Pickus knows that Huntington is right in contending that there is another way of thinking about what it means to be an American, and that that other way still has considerable salience.

John Jay, for instance, wrote in the second of the Federalist Papers: “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in manners and customs.” The venerable Benjamin Franklin was not at all happy with so many Germans and Dutch in Pennsylvania: “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become 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?”

That sounds today like raw nativism and chauvinism. A hero in the Pickus account is Theodore Roosevelt who, while welcoming immigrants, was adamant that they conform to the given American type. There was no room for “hyphenated Americans”—German-Americans, Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans, et al. There is room only for those who are prepared to be Americans, period. After World War I, following decades of massive immigration, the nation was in a mood for a pause, just as today some urge that, after decades of even more massive immigration, we need a pause to assimilate people already here.

In the 1920s, the Americanization movement often turned virulently anti-immigration, and leading liberals joined in deploring a social experiment that had ended up with too many who were too different. In 1921, John Dewey said, “The simple fact of the case is that at present the world is not sufficiently civilized to permit close contact of people of widely different cultures without deplorable consequences.”

Today, says Pickus, the debate about immigration is largely about different ideas of what it means to be a citizen. There are, he says, four ideas of citizenship in contention: immigrant rights, minority representation, cultural nationalism, and universal nationalism. The first need not involve citizenship at all. It champions the rights of immigrants simply because they are here. The second involves citizenship only to the degree that it is necessary to participate in political and other activities aimed at building coalitions and advancing multicultural policies in order to achieve equal rights and representation for minorities. The third understands citizenship to be a matter of being deeply embedded in a culture that is identifiably American. The fourth—sometimes invoking the idea that America is the first “universal nation”—views citizenship as a matter more of consent than culture. One becomes a citizen by agreeing to abide by the American political “creed” as embodied in the ideals and institutions of the founding.

In contradiction to the first two ideas of citizenship, and in contrast to the second two, Pickus calls for “a new civic nationalism.” His approach is more irenic than polemical, and his proposed alternative therefore takes on the appearance at times of being a melange of conflicting ideas in play. “Today,” writes Pickus, “Americans face the difficult task of sustaining a civic nation in the absence of a dominant culture, ethnic identity, or consensus on the meaning of constitutional values. These absences make the challenge of forging unity out of diversity even more difficult than at the Founding or in the Progressive Era. Yet Americans possess something that was missing from those periods—a real history [quoting David Hollinger] ‘a record of specific tragedies, successes, failures, contradictions, and provincial conceits.’“

In sum, we are bound together by a history of muddling through and may reasonably hope that we can continue to muddle through. After all the discussion of history, principles, and diverse schools of thought, Pickus is inclined to expect more of the same. “It remains unclear, however, whether any fundamental changes will occur in U.S. policy regarding the numbers and origins of immigrants seeking entry to the country, their rights and benefits once admitted, and the requirements governing access to citizenship.”

This may seem like a limp response to the alarums raised by Huntington’s Who Are We? or Victor Davis Hanson’s Mexifornia. But there are obviously those who think it is about the best that can be expected. It would appear that President Bush is not among them. His three-part reform may shake up conventional alliances in Congress and the political class. By virtue of the proposed reform, the border may be somewhat more secure, and the millions of illegals now in the country may see benefits in becoming legal under the guest worker program. Whether that means they will become citizens is another matter. President Vincente Fox of Mexico has said that most Mexicans in the United States are “not going to become American citizens, nor do they want U.S. citizenship. What they are interested in is having their rights respected.”

One reason citizenship is not the prize it once was is the growth in the number of official and de facto dual citizens, and even multiple citizens. Also among the elite leaders of globalization, it is increasingly common for people to carry the passports of two or more nations. At the bottom and at the top of the economic hierarchy, more and more people are Americans when it is convenient. It is far from clear how the White House or Congress will address that problem, if indeed it is seen as a problem.

Noah Pickus’ case for civic nationalism is brimming over with intelligence and good will, but one is left with the distinct impression that “true faith and allegiance” is not likely to mean in the future what it meant in the past according to the mythology of this “nation of immigrants.” As long as there is a steady flow of workers and parishioners, the editors of the Wall Street Journal and the bishops of the Catholic Church will probably not be losing any sleep over that prospect. Many others, however, will regret the passing of the day when they thought they more or less knew what it meant to be an American.