[lg policy] US: Favoring Immigration if Not the Immigrant

Tue May 10 14:36:48 UTC 2011

May 8, 2011

Favoring Immigration if Not the Immigrant

By JASON DePARLE

WASHINGTON — So deeply has the phrase “a nation of immigrants” seeped
into the American psyche that millions of people reflexively use it
while few know who coined the phrase. (It was Senator John F. Kennedy,
in a 1958 book by that name.)

Susan F. Martin, a historian at Georgetown University, embraces the
term even as she warns that it hides more than it reveals. Her book —
titled, yes, “A Nation of Immigrants” — argues that the United States
historically has favored immigration more consistently than it has
immigrants.

Three competing models evolved in the original colonies, she writes,
each with a different vision of what purposes newcomers would serve.
Elements of each have persisted since.

Virginia sought workers but found them in slaves.

Massachusetts sought believers but punished dissent.

Pennsylvania sought citizens, and built them from foreign stock
(despite gripes from residents as cosmopolitan as Benjamin Franklin).

Each model was pro-immigration, Ms. Martin argues, but not necessarily
pro-immigrant.

“They had very different ideas about what would happen after the
immigrant entered the country,” she said in an interview.

All three models have taken contemporary shape, not only in the United
States but also across the globe, at a time when migration is a
growing force and Ms. Martin one of its leading academic chroniclers.
While her book is confined to American history, she said the armies of
guest workers in Dubai reminded her of Virginia in its indentured
servant phase, while the French campaign against Islamic headscarves
had echoes of Salem.

Ms. Martin champions the Pennsylvania model in her book, published
this year by Cambridge University Press: political unity, cultural
diversity and equal rights. But almost unwittingly her book shows how
improbable and precarious that model is. It is utterly foreign to much
of the world, where citizens are born, not made, she said, and
threatened at home by the reliance on illegal workers who lack rights.

“The Pennsylvania model is not dead, but it is under severe
challenge,” she writes.

Ms. Martin finds many to blame for this: the left (for opposing tough
enforcement), the populist right (for strains of prejudice) and
employers (for seeking cheap labor). “One of my concerns about illegal
immigration is that it undermines legal immigration,” she said.

Ms. Martin said her interest in immigration comes in part from her
roots. Her father arrived in the United States in 1906, fleeing the
persecution of Jews in a Polish shtetl called Milejcsicz. Ms. Martin
visited there as a college student and discovered that all the Jews
who stayed behind had died in the Holocaust.

She trained as a colonial historian at the University of Pennsylvania
and acquired policy credentials as a staff member of two high-level
government commissions on immigration policy. For her first assignment
she read the mail and found that all the major complaints — immigrants
bring crime and disease, they refuse to learn English — were prominent
in earlier debates.

“There’s a tendency to say that our ancestors were the good
immigrants, but there are problems with the contemporary ones,” she
said.

Ms. Martin’s mentor, Lawrence H. Fuchs, first identified the colonial
archetypes in his 1990 book, “The American Kaleidoscope: Race,
Ethnicity and the Civic Culture.” But he saw the Pennsylvania model as
historically dominant and politically secure. Ms. Martin (who has
dedicated her book to him) sees a constant battle among the three
models, and peril in the present.

The Virginia model began with commercial motivations: Jamestown
settlers sought plantations on the river, not cities on the hill. When
the colony could not attract enough indentured servants to export
tobacco, it imported slaves. Though chattel slavery has disappeared,
Ms. Martin emphasizes that the exploitation of immigrant labor has
not.

“The high levels of tolerance for unauthorized migration represents a
return to the Virginia model of disposable workers with few rights,”
she writes.

In Massachusetts the Puritans came to affirm their faith. Compatriots
were welcomed but expected to believe, and dissidents like Roger
Williams were banished. Ms. Martin finds the fear of alien views
reappearing in episodes as old as the Alien and Sedition Acts and as
recent as post-9/11 laws that increase the government’s power to
detain foreigners. “The problem with Massachusetts isn’t those it
includes but those it excludes and the basis on which it excludes
them,” she said.

William Penn arrived in the colonies six decades later, after being
jailed in England for his Quaker beliefs. Like the Virginians he too
wanted to make money — in his case by selling land — but sought out
buyers far and wide, with translations of his pamphlets reaching the
Rhine. Pluralism was part of his faith and part of his business plan.

That is not to imply that harmony always reigned. A second tradition
that traces back to Pennsylvania is the fear that non-English speaking
immigrants will fail to assimilate. The “most ignorant Stupid sort,”
Franklin called the Germans, upset at bilingual street signs.

Historians may quibble that Ms. Martin’s model exaggerates the
differences between colonies: Puritans sought profit too, and
Virginians prayed. She readily acknowledges the overlaps. “There are
elements of each model in each colony,” she said.

In contemporary debate her views can be hard to categorize. She is
less worried about how many immigrants come than about what rights
they have. Like most in the high-immigration camp she favors a
legalization plan for illegal immigrants, which opponents say will
encourage more people to come. But like most in the low-immigration
camp she is skeptical about guest worker plans, at home or abroad,
seeing a slippery slope to exploitation.

Certainly such programs have been abused. But millions of poor people
across the globe find them preferable to poverty at home. Would Ms.
Martin stand in those people’s way?

Tamar Jacoby, the president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a business group
that supports guest worker programs, argues that Ms. Martin’s
resistance to temporary visas would suppress immigration to the
detriment of immigrants and the economy alike. “Not all labor market
migration is exploitative,” she wrote in a recent issue of The New
Republic.

Ms. Martin, who directs Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of
International Migration, calls that criticism a “fair avenue for
debate.” But she said she had traveled widely in Europe, where the
descendants of 1960s guest workers have formed an alienated
underclass. European colleagues often ask her how the United States
has remained a “nation of immigrants and not just a collection of
them.”

Imagine the curious looks she gets when she starts talking about William Penn.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/books/a-nation-of-immigrants-susan-f-martins-book.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=immigration%20models&st=cse

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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