How grandma got legal
'MADE IN America -- by immigrants" and "We too have a dream" read signs at the May 1 marches across the country. By invoking an American ideal, today's newcomers are staking their claim as the latest generation of nation-builders. But their critics object to this appeal to history; they resent comparisons to previous generations of immigrants, who were legal.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), for example, says his grandparents -- Dutch immigrants who settled in Nebraska -- didn't try to get ahead by breaking the law. Rather, they made it through "frugality
Such comparisons between past and present miss a crucial point. There were so few restrictions on immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries that there was no such thing as "illegal immigration." The government excluded a mere 1% of the 25 million immigrants who landed at Ellis Island before World War I, mostly for health reasons. (Chinese were the exception, excluded on grounds of "racial unassimilability.")
What's more, statutes of limitations of one to five years meant that even those here unlawfully did not live forever with the specter of deportation.
In the early 1900s, immigrants from Europe provided cheap, unskilled labor that made possible the nation's industrial and urban expansion. They shoveled pig iron, dug sewers and subway tunnels and sewed shirtwaists. Even then, people born in the U.S. complained that the newcomers stole jobs, were ignorant, criminal and showed no desire to become citizens. The rhetoric was often unabashedly prejudiced against Italians, Jews, Poles and other "degraded races of Europe."
In the conservative climate after World War I, Congress slammed shut the golden door. For the first time, the U.S. imposed numerical limits on immigration. Congress gave the smallest quotas to Eastern and Southern European countries and excluded all Asians; it also created the U.S. Border Patrol and eliminated statutes of limitations on deportation. It exempted countries of the Western Hemisphere, however, in deference to agricultural labor needs and the State Department's tradition of pan-Americanism.
These quotas created illegal immigration as a mass phenomenon. And since that time, Americans have been of two minds about the problem. We want restrictions on immigration, but we hesitate to execute mass deportations. Congress has thus pursued border control, on the one hand, and legalization of the undocumented on the other.
