ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9603290112
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS
IN A COUNTRY built by immigrants and their descendants, immigrant-bashing seems a peculiar pastime.
In an era when the primacy of the English language is entrenched, not only domestically but also in the arenas of international commerce and technology, English-only laws seem a peculiar passion.
In a nation self-consciously founded on an ideology of allegiance to republican principles of liberty and equality, rather than on the basis of ethnic or cultural homogeneity, bias against immigrants by reason of their particular country of origin seems a peculiar prejudice.
It's enough to make you a cynic - even when, or maybe especially when, you think the anti-immigration people may have a point or two.
Noting the ironies of the issue is easier than deciding what to do about 'em. Showing up Pat Buchanan as a bigot is easier than dismissing out of hand the possibility that immigration today serves mainly, for the people already here, to add to the comforts of the comfortable and the afflictions of the afflicted.
Anti-immigration sentiment can present a lot to condemn. My immigrant forebears were OK because they were of hard-working (insert a nationality from which you are descended) stock, too many people seem to think, while today's immigrants are not OK because they are of lazy (insert a nationality from which you are not descended) stock.
What gets overlooked is that virtually all immigrant groups were targets of similarly discriminatory stereotypes when they first arrived, and were thought to possess characteristics inferior to the groups that had beat them here by a few years. Given man's capacity for ethnic-based inhumanity to man, it's probably to America's credit that such prejudice has been no worse than it has, and as a rule has faded away within a couple of generations.
That rule has its exceptions. Descendants and their cousins of the first European immigrants, for example, have never quite known what to make of the people who met their forebears at the shore.
For centuries, these aboriginal Americans were called "Indians," as if the European newcomers and their descendants had yet to figure out that crossing the Atlantic didn't get you to Asia. But the politically correct term of recent years, "Native American," raises problems, too: Isn't everyone born in this country a "native American"?
A mere quibble about a linguistic inadequacy? Probably. But it just might reflect, in a small way, a lingering insecurity about who really qualifies as an American - a slight hesitancy, perhaps, about the egalitarianism that presumably underlies the meaning of America.
The most blatant violation of this country's egalitarian ideology has been, of course, the place assigned Americans of African descent. At the same time the Founding Fathers were jawing about the natural rights of man, many of them owned human slaves. Some even saw, and were troubled by, the disconnect between their high-flown rhetoric and the nasty reality.
Another immigration irony, however, is that a majority of black Americans and even a slight majority of Hispanic Americans - a group that accounts for much of the recent wave of newcomers, both legal and illegal - favor clamping down. Not all calls for immigration curbs, Michael Lind observes in a recent column in The New Republic, can be dismissed as examples of racism and xenophobia.
Economic interest also influences the debate. Low-wage workers are right in viewing immigration as an economic threat, Lind argues, just as it's no surprise that the affluent classes perceive their interest to lie in looser immigration restrictions. Competition from immigrants, according to a 1995 Bureau of Labor Statistics study cited by Lind, accounts for about half the recent decline in wages among unskilled American workers. The greatest income gains among the American middle and working classes, he notes, came during the era of most severe immigration restrictions, the 1920s through the 1960s.
Maybe that's just coincidence. Isn't it plausible, though, that the law of supply and demand has not been repealed? That U.S. labor costs - which is to say, wages and salaries - are being held down in part by the expansion of the labor supply resulting from America's willingness to take in half the world's immigrants?
In theory, open borders seems to square with American egalitarian principles. But the practical consequence of liberal immigration policies seems to be a widening of the gap between rich and poor that threatens those same principles.
One more irony, I suppose.
LENGTH: Medium: 82 linesby CNB