Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future (22 page)

“Congress was saying in its debates, ‘We need to open the door for some more British doctors, some more German engineers,’” Klineberg said.
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It seems that nobody considered that there were going to be Egyptian doctors, Indian computer programmers, and Chinese engineers, all who would be able, for the first time, to immigrate to America because the act had abolished national origins quotas.

Despite the appearance of a call for radical social change within the United States, the new act was not met with much favor. In a 2006 report by National Public Radio, Karen Narasaki, head of the Asian American Justice Center, said the new law was not popular with the public. “It was not what people were marching in the streets over in the 1960s,” she said. “It was really a group of political elites who were trying to look into the future. And again, it was the issue of, ‘Are we going to be true to what we say our values are?’”

Then, with the closing of the decade, a backlash to the monumental social changes occurred, ultimately leading to a transformation of American society. While one segment of society—liberal to moderate, mostly urban and suburban—embraced the change, another segment—mostly conservative and religious—viewed the changes as abhorrent. Unlike the liberals and moderates, they did not view the social and political movements as progress toward a better nation, but rather they considered it as anti-American, contrary to American ideals, and instigated by foreign influences or “outside agitators.”

Some of those who reacted against the changes were known as “the silent majority,” a term Richard Nixon, elected president in 1968, used to build a conservative voting base of support. They decried the campus unrest, the antiwar protests, and the challenges to authority; they protested the proliferation of pornography that appeared in movie houses and magazine racks across the nation; they rallied against U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as
Engel v. Vitale
, which ruled organized prayer in public schools as unconstitutional and declared the government had “taken God out of the classroom.” They demanded a return to what they believed was normal American life, something that existed in the 1950s. Conservative columnists such as George Will championed such views, dismissing the movements in the 1960s as nothing more than drugs and thoughtless federal welfare policies, which create a culture of victimization.

Though the country was split between the conservatives who wished to return to the 1950s and the liberals who led the 1960s charge, both groups of people largely seemed unconcerned with foreign affairs. The two oceans that separate the United States from most of the world, the Atlantic and Pacific, gave many Americans a feeling of security. They believed these vast waters kept their enemies, real and imagined, from their shores, even though intercontinental ballistic missiles waiting in Soviet silos should have disabused them of such naive notions. These great oceanic barriers did not isolate them from attack, but it did allow them to isolate their thinking about the rest of the world. Unlike people in countries where close borders require some degree of identification and a more than superficial knowledge of your neighbors, many people in the United States felt little need to better understand what was going on in other countries.

Rabbi Menachem Mandel:

Intolerance lies at the core of evil. Not the intolerance that results from any threat or danger. But intolerance of another being who dares to exist. Intolerance without cause. It is so deep within us, because every human secretly desires the entire universe to himself. Our only way out is to learn compassion without cause. To care for each other simply because that “other” exists. 
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With Americans questioning social and political values and the country’s place as a great nation, by 1970, the nation began to turn into itself. Despite some initial backlash, the socially progressive values that began in the 1960s, such as increasing political awareness and political and economic liberty of women, continued to grow.

But by the end of the 1970s, America’s confidence and the image it had of itself as a beneficent power and leader of freedom was shattered by events in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The Vietnam and Yom Kippur Wars, the Lebanese civil war, the Iranian Revolution, and the Arab-Israeli conflicts, in addition to an economic recession due to an oil crisis resulting from the oil embargoes of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, all contributed to a sense of malaise. It certainly did not help that the U.S. people also saw their first president resign over the Watergate scandal.

The 1980s were an era of tremendous population growth around the world, with rates of natural increase close to or exceeding 4 percent annually in a number of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian countries. In the United States, immigrants made up one-third of the population growth, marking the greatest change in population since the early part of the twentieth century. Nearly six million arrived, bringing the total number of foreign-born people to almost twenty million. The largest percentages of arrivals came from Mexico and Asia, with Eastern Europeans trailing behind.

This time period also saw great social, economic, and general change, as wealth and production migrated to newly industrializing economies. As economic liberalization increased in the developed world, multiple multinational corporations associated with the manufacturing industry relocated overseas. America was starting to look like a different place.

“International newcomers accelerated the extraordinary growth in the West,” according to “Immigrant Tide Boosts Population,” a December 1990 article in the
Washington Post
. “At the same time, newcomers from abroad replaced a rapidly departing native-born populace in a band of states stretching across the Midwest and Northeast, stemming or reversing what could have been devastating population losses.”
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Meanwhile, developing countries across the world faced economic and social difficulties, as they suffered from multiple debt crises, requiring many of these countries to apply for financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Partially because of this, many people from these countries tried to immigrate to America through both legal and illegal means.

During this time, legal immigrants did not concern Americans as much as illegal immigrants did. In an attempt to mitigate the problem of illegal immigration, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) established a process for employers to verify an applicant’s eligibility to work in the United States. But the new law did not stop fraudulent documentation or employers choosing to ignore the law for cheap labor. IRCA also created a pathway through which undocumented immigrants residing in the United States since January 1, 1982, or working in agriculture for ninety days in a one-year period beginning on May 1, 1985, could eventually obtain citizenship.

Though most Americans were chiefly concerned with undocumented immigrants, all immigrants in general were dimly viewed by Americans, some of whom criticized U.S. policies for contributing to a lower “quality” of immigrant, one who lacked skills and education and preferred welfare to work.

“More and more of America’s unskilled workers are immigrants,” wrote George J. Borjas, an economics professor, in a 1990
Wall Street Journal
op-ed. “Immigrants accounted for just 12 percent of all high school dropouts (persons with less than a high school education) in the U.S. labor force in 1975. By 1985, the proportion of high school dropouts who were immigrants had almost tripled—to 32 percent.”
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A national survey taken in 1986 by
CBS News
and the
New York Times
found only 8 percent of respondents supported an increase in immigrants, according to social historian Joel S. Fetzer, author of
Public Attitudes toward Immigration in the United States, France, and Germany
. “U.S. data suggests that Americans view immigrants in general with very lukewarm affection,” Fetzer wrote. “The American mass public’s view on immigration policy appears equally ambivalent, if not outright anti-immigration.”
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Yet the general public was not the only one to strike up concerns with immigration. Although Reagan’s administration was responsible for IRCA, which arguably granted amnesty for illegal immigrants, it “often framed unauthorized immigration as an issue of national security.”
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And clearly national security was one of President Reagan’s main priorities, as he was responsible for establishing a military buildup during the 1980s to thwart the Soviet Union. This buildup consequently raised fears it could lead to nuclear war between the two superpowers. Late in the decade, though, changes occurred quickly that calmed concerns. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. He ended economic aid to Soviet satellites; then he and Reagan agreed to remove all intermediate nuclear missiles from Europe. A year later, they signed a treaty to remove all medium- and short-range nuclear missiles.

The pace of historic change picked up speed in 1989, a year that became one of the most significant in modern history: Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan. Poland became independent, followed by Hungary. The Berlin Wall crumbled. And the communist governments in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania fell; some quietly, others, like Rumania, brutally. The Soviet empire was no more. It was a dizzying year, and Americans now had new hope and confidence for the future. Their optimism had been renewed. The national economy had boomed, and jobs appeared plentiful and well paying, although real wages were actually declining.

As fast and vast as the changes occurring were, many Americans were not ready to embrace them. Nostalgia for a past believed to have been simpler rippled throughout the country. This sentiment was only heightened by the rugged cowboy image President Reagan promoted of himself, his vision of a simpler America—one that was happy at home and distant from the rest of the world and its problems. Now, a conservative-embracing society found security in that vision.

In keeping with the image Reagan projected, Americans, in many respects, remained emotionally disengaged with the rest of the world. Despite rapid developments in computer technology, and in particular information technology—making the world smaller and faster, hyperdriving the pace of life, Americans did not often communicate or collaborate with people from other countries. Telecommunication had, as social scientist John Thompson noted, eliminated a sense of context. “The advent of telecommunication thus resulted in the uncoupling of space and time,” Thompson wrote in
The Media and Modernity
. “It became possible to experience events as simultaneous despite the fact that they occurred in locales that were spatially remote.”
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Although many Americans largely dismissed the rest of the world, their attitude did not stop foreigners from desiring to immigrate to the United States. The record-high immigration rates of the 1990s, of more than thirteen million people entering the country, was comprised of about half from Latin America and many from Asia. Yet the new influx was of former Soviet citizens. Immigrants also continued a trend that began in the 1970s of concentrating in six destination states: California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois. By 2000, more than two-thirds of the country’s foreign-born population lived in these states.

As a more diverse group of people immigrated, however, American demographics continued to change, which also consequently ushered in a change in attitude. Though white Europeans were still a majority in the country, they seemed to become a less dominate ethnic group, as American culture and media began to embrace different races and cultures. America was no longer a melting pot. It was a soup swirling with flavors that sought to complement each other.

If change went into hyperdrive in the 1980s, it went into light speed in the 1990s, as computers dominated the home and office; cell phones started to replace landlines in homes; and the Internet reduced the globe to the size of a monitor screen. Even though technology was helping to smash old notions about simplicity in life and relationships, there were many Americans who still resisted change. Some of them blamed foreigners and projected that blame onto immigrants, legal and illegal, for the loss of a job that was sent overseas by a company or a corporation seeking to cut labor costs and improve profit margins on their inability to get a job. According to
New York Times
journalist Thomas Friedman, thirty-five years ago, it was clearly better to be a “B” student in Bethesda than a genius in Bangalore, but that has now started to change. This change sparked even greater discontent for anyone living in America who could be identified as a “foreigner.” A pamphlet “Facts Have Faces,” issued in the mid-1990s by the National Council of Churches, stated, “A majority of this nation [is] of immigrant origin, yet a 1993 poll revealed that 60 percent of Americans believe immigration is bad for the country. What’s happening? A troubled economy, the end of the Cold War and abiding racism contribute to a resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment. This mentality is not new. Throughout our history, those already here feared new arrivals might threaten their jobs, security, and safety.”
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