American Immigration in Historical Perspective

Randall Stephens



On Sunday, August 1, Peter O'Dowd reported on NPR that "Arizona's controversial immigration law went into effect this week, or at least parts of it." In a summary that looked at the reaction of church groups and religious leaders, O'Dowd noted "Despite significant support for the bill in the state, critics have been loud and organized." This comes on the heals of a Federal Judge's blocking of the more controversial aspects of the law last Wednesday. Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction on sections of the law that called for law enforcement officers to check a person's immigration status or require suspects to prove they were in the country legally.



Like abortion, gay marriage, or taxes, little divides Americans like the issue of immigration. And this historic conflict keeps repeating itself.



Unlike a variety of European nations, the US has had relatively open policies on citizenship. (Naturalization rates, as well, have remained high in Canada, the US, and Sweden.) Through much of the 19th century the new nation needed laborers and settlers. Still, the question of just who was or was not an American tended to exercise the masses and energize politicians. Sometimes the matter stirred up intense feelings.



Numerous Easterners in the 1850s and 1860s worried about the "wild Irish hordes" that descended on coastal cities. Millions would have agreed with English essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, "Ireland is like a half-starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it--by heavens--squelch it." Nativism and the Know-Nothing Party made great political hay of the "Papist Menace." Samuel F. B. Morse--who helped invent the telegraph and a code for transmitting words over vast distances and also crafted his own brand of virulent xenophobia--was particularly adamant on the subject. In 1835 he wrote: "O there is no danger to the Democracy; for those most devoted to the Pope, the Roman Catholics, especially the Irish Catholics, are all on the side of Democracy. Yes; to be sure they are on the side of Democracy. They are just where I should look for them. Judas Iscariot joined with the true disciples. . . . They feel themselves so strong, as to organize themselves even as foreigners into foreign bands, and this for the purpose of influencing our elections. . . . That they are men who having professed to become Americans, by accepting our terms of naturalization, do yet, in direct contradiction to their professions, clan together as a separate interest, and retain their foreign appellation."



In the 1880s anti-Chinese legislation gained wide support in the American West and fueled the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law read, in part: "That the master of any vessel who shall knowingly bring within the United States on such vessel, and land or permit to be landed, any Chinese laborer, from any foreign port or place, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars for each and every such Chinese laborer so brought, and maybe also imprisoned for a term not exceeding one year."



Most famously, though, the Immigration Act of 1924 raised the bar so that undesirable immigrants would have a difficult time entering the country. One stipulation ensured that old-stock white immigrants would receive special preference. "The annual quota of any nationality shall be 2 per centum of the number of foreign-born individuals of such nationality resident in continental United States as determined by the Untied States census of 1890, but the minimum quota of any nationality shall be 100."



Many of the exclusionary policies were changed for good when President Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, supported heavily by the late Senator Ted Kennedy. That landmark legislation did not end the debate or the ongoing contest over immigration.



The Arizona Law may or may by like or unlike earlier immigration laws. But it certainly lends itself to significant historical questions of legal matters, national identity, ethnicity, class, and more. Plenty for the general public and for students of history to consider.



For more on the history of immigration and the changing shape of the law, see the following helpful sites:



On the Arizona Law

Randal C. Archibold, "Judge Blocks Arizona’s Immigration Law," New York Times, July 28, 2010.



John Davis, "History Repeated: Arizona Immigration Law No Different from the Past," Texas Tech Today, June 4, 2010.



Chris Bray, "Light Tea, Heavy on the Milk," Cliopatria: A Group Blog, April 29, 2010.



Larry McMurtry, "The Trouble with Arizona," NYR Blog, June 24, 2010.

Immigration: General History, Legal History, Etc

Aspiration, Acculturation, and Impact: Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930. Harvard University Library Open Collections Program.



United States Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia Library.



Immigration Law: An Overview. Cornell University Law School.



Milestones: 1921-1936. The Office of the Historian, US State Department.



Immigration Legislation On-line, University of Washington-Bothell.



Who Was Shut Out?: Immigration Quotas, 1925-1927. History Matters, George Mason University.

American Character?

Sarah E. Igo reviews Claude S. Fischer's book Made in America in American Prospect, July 15, 2010. "A half-century ago," says Igo, "writing in the crucible of the early Cold War, American historians were convinced that something ran deep among U.S. citizens linking them to one another--a national personality or fundamental essence that made Americans American. . . ."

Igo isn't quite convinced. "Concerned as it is with the contours of American character as well as culture, it is hard to read Fischer's book as other than an argument for consensus history." Still she finds quite a bit to praise in this sprawling book.

Alien Invastion -- Joshua, the Biblical Conquest and Manifest Destiny

I have been reading with great interest the five guest postings by Dr. Daniel Hawk at Allan Bevere's blog.  Dan is an Old Testament professor at Ashland Theological Seminary and author of a new commentary on the book of Joshua entitled Joshua in 3-D (Cascade, 2010).  I'm intrigued because Dan brings the story of the conquest of Canaan into conversation with the Anglo-European colonization of North America, and the emergence of the ideology of Manifest Destiny to justify the expansion of this invasion.  Dan has been playing with the movie Avatar, but in this final post, which I've received permission to republish in full, he brings in the idea of the impact of alien invasions in general.  Note that in this conversation he suggests that American apologists for Manifest Destiny rarely used Joshua to justify/explain the expansion, and yet there are important parallels that require our attention.  I hope that you will find this a helpful conversation, and will engage the subject in focused conversation.  

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Alien Invasion

L. Daniel Hawk

I would like to take this opportunity once again to thank Allan for his invitation to post to this blog and for those who have responded with thoughtful and incisive comments. It’s been a pleasure to participate in this web-exercise with Allan, whose theological and cultural acumen I deeply respect

Renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has recently cautioned against trying to contact extra-terrestrial life, warning that aliens advanced enough to reach the earth might be looking for a world to conquer and colonize. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” he says. “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans."

Hawking is speaking to a theme that has acquired increasing cultural prominence in the last twenty years. Avatar is the latest in a flurry of alien invasion narratives that have proliferated in the movies (e.g. Independence Day, War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Signs, among many others), television (V, X-Files, Alien Nation, Invasion, etc.), and popular culture (e.g. UFO sightings, alien abductions). The current interest is matched only by its original manifestation in the sci-fi films of the late 50’s and early ‘60’s, when the United States emerged into a position of unparalleled global influence and cultural dominance.

I began this series by suggesting that the stories we tell reveal much about how we look at ourselves, our world, and our place in the world. What does America’s present preoccupation with alien invasion motifs, now exemplified by Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time, say about what might be going on in our national psyche?

It is not uncommon to encounter the claim that the United States used the biblical book of Joshua as a template to legitimize the conquest of the continent. On the face of it, this seems self-evident. The earliest Puritans saw themselves as a new Israel birthed by deliverance from oppression, a passage through the sea, and entrance into a Promised Land. The early Republic then took up Exodus imagery as a way of identifying America as a new people, delivered from tyranny and destined to be a beacon of liberty and emancipation for all nations.

The Exodus, however, is incomplete without the Conquest. Even a cursory acquaintance with American history reveals that the United States replicated the mass killing, ethnic cleansing, exclusion – often with appeals to destiny – that tell the tale of Israel’s conquest of Canaan. It thus seems a foregone conclusion that America, “the New Israel,” looked to Joshua as its paradigm for westward expansion.

The truth of the matter is that references to Joshua have been virtually absent from America’s religious and civic discourse from the colonial period to the present. Whereas expansionist America readily identified with the Israel of the Exodus, it could not seem to face the fact that, in practice, it was more like the Israel of the Conquest. In other words, the United States explicitly and consistently defined itself as an Exodus people, a beacon of salvation and freedom to all, but it repressed actions that suggested it behaved like a Conquest people.

While we easily recognize how repressed memories and impulses influence individual attitudes and behavior, we find it more difficult to recognize how this may also true of corporate entities. Memories repressed by a people, like those repressed by individuals, don’t fade away. Left to themselves, they lurk within the corporate unconsciousness, warping perspectives and practices, until they bubble to the surface in a time of crisis.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that invasion motifs have surfaced in America during a period of economic instability, decline in global influence, and a war on terror, just as it was no coincidence that they arose when the Cold War and the prospect of nuclear annihilation confronted the U.S. What does our preoccupation with alien invasion manifest? repressed guilt and remorse? anxiety that in a just universe, “what goes around comes around”? a realization that the God who gives is also the God who may take away?

It’s time for the Church to enter the public arena with the words and practices of repentance that open the path for healing from the sins of the past and their residue in the present. Native Americans continue to suffer the effects of a centuries-long program to rob identities, cultures, lands, and dignity. The rates of poverty, unemployment, suicide, alcoholism, and diabetes, to name but a few social ills, are many times the national average. It’s time to acknowledge the full scope of what was has been done and to make tangible moves to reverse course and begin to repair what has been damaged or destroyed.

As Israel reflected on its memories of conquest, it could not get around the violent stories and events that had shaped its national identity. But at a later time, in light of its own experiences of suffering and salvation, the nation realized that the dehumanizing and violent impulses associated with those traditions were not consistent with the nation God had called Israel to be. If the American Church is inclined to follow Israel’s example, it might enter this moment with the prophet’s challenge to name America’s original sins, turn from the perspectives and practices they have generated, and bring a justice long denied. In doing so, the body of Christ might more fully reveal the Prince of Peace to a watching world.