Transforming Politics, Transforming America: The Political and Civic Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States

Introduction

Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our settlement, and, by herding together, establish their language and manners, to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion? —Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.” What then is the American, this new man? . . . He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He has become an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. —Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer The idea of America as a “nation of immigrants” harkens to well before the country’s founding, with thousands of settlers and slaves pouring into the Colonies from England, continental Europe, and Africa . As the epigraphs from Franklin and Crèvecoeur suggest, there has been little consensus throughout our history on the consequences of this idea of a nation of immigrants. The concept has often embodied competing visions of the desirability of immigration and its likely Introduction Taeku Lee, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Ricardo Ramírez 2 Taeku Lee, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Ricardo Ramírez consequences for civic and political life in the United States. Crèvecoeur ’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) at the close of the eighteenth century presents an optimistic picture of assimilation and amalgamation, with immigrants coming to the “great American asylum ” to shed their skin and their customs and transform into a “new race of man.” Franklin’s “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” (Ziff 1959) by contrast, cautions that immigration would balkanize the New World rather than assimilating into the established Anglo culture or even amalgamating with existing settlers to create a new race of Americans. The immigration of Germans to Pennsylvania was seen by Franklin as an excessive incursion that tarnished the “complexion” of America, a threat similar to that posed by the forced migration of Africans to the New World. These debates over immigration and its likely impact on civic and political life in the United States have continued through each successive wave of immigration—from German and Irish immigrants of the 1800s to later arrivals from Italy, Eastern Europe, Mexico, China, and Japan. Immigration was a particularly salient issue in the early twentieth century, as hundreds of thousands reached American shores and the foreign born accounted for more than one in seven residents (figure 1). Concerns grew during this era about the civic and political incorporation of the foreign born and their native-born children. These concerns found expression in various political campaign speeches, such as Theodore Roosevelt’s declaration in 1915 that there was no room in this country for “hyphenated Americans.”1 They also found expression in various legislative measures such as the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned immigration from most Asian countries and limited the entry of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. With the onset of the Great Depression and World War II, immigration levels dropped drastically and so did concerns about the civic and political incorporation of immigrants.2 The 1965 Hart-Cellar Act amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 have led to a profound transformation in immigration that has rekindled debates about the economic, social, civic, and political adaptation and incorporation of immigrants into the United States. In sheer volume, we are witnessing the largest influx of immigrants since the early twentieth century. According to Census Bureau statistics, immigrants and their children compose close to one in four Americans today, with more than 34 million foreign-born and almost 32 million second-generation immigrants in the United States in 2002 (U.S. Census Bureau 2002). These numbers compare to 9.6 million foreign-born residents and 24 million second-generation immi- Introduction 3 Number of immigrants Share of resident population 2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 0 16% 14% 12% 10...