The Newest American Nativism

“Writing this book has been difficult at times,” begins David Reimers in his careful history of contemporary immigration debates. “Many persons debating immigration resort to emotional and vague generalizations” (p. 1). Unwelcome Strangers represents a conscientious effort to cut through the emotion, to bring some order and specificity to this chaotic universe of polemical and highly charged generalization. Following a brief overview of immigration policy and debate “from the earliest days of European colonization,” Reimers walks readers through the gallery of figures and organizations who have dominated discussion in recent decades. Their major arguments are rendered under four thematic headings: immigration is bad for the environment; the governmental systems for regulating and overseeing immigration have broken down; immigration poses an economic threat, either in terms of jobs unfairly taken from citizens or public monies unfairly expended on non-citizens; and immigration poses a threat to the cohesiveness of American culture and institutions. This is a neat delineation of otherwise untidy strains of public discussion, an enlightening roadmap to American politics at the end of the twentieth century. One is struck throughout by the strange bedfellows which the immigration debate has created (liberal and left-leaning multiculturalists, the Christian Right, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Rifle Association all oppose immigration restriction, for instance, though for very different reasons).

The newest American nativism has been marked by a rising organizational infrastructure including groups like Save Our State (SOS), Tri-Immigration Moratorium (TRIM), and Stop the Out-of-Control Problems of Immigration Today (STOPIT); by popular nativist publications like The Immigrant Invasion, Alien Nation, and The Path to National Suicide; and by legislative initiatives like California’s Proposition 187 in 1994. The critical context for this resurgence of nativist sentiment, as Reimers carefully elaborates, is not only an overall increase in immigration (from roughly 250,000 per year in the 1940s to a high of 1.8 million in 1991 alone—excluding undocumented immigrants), but also a shift in the racial make-up of the incoming populations. By the 1980s Europeans represented only 10 percent of the incoming immigrants; Asians constituted 40 percent, with the balance consisting primarily of Mexican, Central American, and Caribbean arrivals. It is among the ironies of the 1965 Immigration Act, a goal of which was the reunification of transoceanic European families, that it dramatically liberalized the terms of entrance from many Asian nations. Reimers wryly notes that the “diversity” visas recently devised by Congress were in fact an attempt to boost the European (primarily Irish) percentages among the current arrivals.

Sheer numbers alone have been enough to spur some anti-immigrant sentiment. The environmentalist strain of debate emerged in the wake of Paul Ehrlich’s sensational book, The Population Bomb in 1968, and crystallized in groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Zero Population Growth (ZPG) over succeeding decades. Former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm recently voiced the environmentalist concern in dire tones, attributing “intolerable traffic, unhealthy smog, inadequate water, ethnic conflict . . . acid rain, climate change, loss of ozone, disappearance of species, [and] loss of habitat” all to the “root” cause of overpopulation (p. 54). For Lamm and others, immigration policy is a chief instrument in population management.

A second dimension of the argument from the standpoint of sheer numbers concerns the impact of rising immigration upon the very governmental and bureaucratic machinery which is meant to regulate and manage it. By these lights, even if the environment itself can indeed withstand the onslaught, the administrative capacities of the republic cannot. According to members of the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF) and others, the combination of rising levels of “legal” immigration, ill-advised asylum and refugee policies, and massive waves of undocumented immigrants through “illegal” channels has overwhelmed, clogged, or even “broken” the system. The border patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) do not have the capacity to administer the flow of traffic, and hence have lost control of the border; the...