Immigration in Context
To my readers: I have not posted for a long time but hope to do so more frequently in the coming months. Various medical adventures and other distractions of living on the west coast through the pandemic have kept me from focusing on this blog. My grandsons are now teenagers; actually on a college tour as I’m writing this. And a lot of my time has been spent sorting through boxes of family papers that have some interest outside this family and sending them “home” to archives in New York, Arizona, Southern California and Virginia. More on these papers soon. In the meantime, thank you all for hanging in here. I came across this post that I wrote in June 2018. Unfortunately, it seems to resonate even more today. For some of us, the current situation in the United States is discouraging and quite scary right now, whether we are recent immigrants or had families arrive centuries ago.
While exercising in a pool several years ago, I noticed a small brown beetle floating in the water that was still alive. There was a toy football on the edge of the pool, so I let the beetle climb on it and placed it in the shade. It seemed relieved. Not two minutes later a four-inch lizard came out of the bushes and grabbed the beetle; it stood staring at me for quite a while with the creature in its mouth. Then it flicked a sassy tail and proudly carried it away. Relief? Pride? Is this too much anthropomorphic thinking? In any case, what a no-win situation for a desperate beetle.
I’d been watching the news before I went to the pool that day. (Oh how I miss that condo and pool.) Perhaps inappropriately, this little incident made me think of all the anguished parents and children struggling to stay alive in perilous conditions, coming here to the USA to be rescued and not finding a safe haven; instead they have been swallowed up in our chaotic bureaucracy. And now, in 2025, they face even more peril.
Yes, immigration has been on our minds lately. (And it’s even more on our minds seven years later.) The unending humanitarian crisis is one that, for most Americans, tears at our heartstrings. Still it is useful to put this refugee crisis in some historical perspective and to understand the way our debates over this subject in the past reveal who and what we are as a nation. Two articles I came across gave some broader context to the thousands of men, women and children streaming into the U.S. from Central America. Yesterday’s New York Times (6/23/2018, B1) looks at migrants on the rise around the world and the myths about them that are shaping our attitudes. One conclusion is that “people perceive there are more immigrants than there really are.”
The late Peter J. Duignan wrote a thoughtful survey of the complex history of immigration in America (1780-2003) for the Hoover Institution. No matter what your perspective is on what we should do about immigration, the historical background provided in this study is invaluable in 2025 just as it was in 2018.
I was also curious about attitudes towards those who hoped to escape from persecution by coming to the U.S. during the late 1930s when my mother Jane Hall worked on screenplays for Louis B. Mayer in Hollywood. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, after World War I, “America’s restricted immigration laws reflected the national climate of isolationism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and economic insecurity.” The 1924 Johnson Reed Act—in place until 1965—set quotas on the number of visas available for specific countries. “The quotas were calculated to privilege ‘desirable’ immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. They limited immigrants considered less ‘racially desirable,’ including southern and eastern European Jews. Many people born in Asia and Africa were barred from immigrating to the United States entirely on racial grounds.” And there was no formal refugee policy at all. In late November 1938, 72% of Americans responded “no” to this question: “Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?” And, after July 1941, when “the State Department centralized all alien visa control in Washington, DC . . . emigration from Nazi occupied territory was virtually impossible.” We know how that turned out. And in the light of recent comments by our current vice president made in Germany in the last week, maybe we should pause and reflect on this history again.
These brief forays into our immigration past revealed that much of the language being used in 2018 and even more in 2025 in our heated and bitter current debates, both pro and con immigration, is language that has been used before. Those who wanted to put the most stringent limits on immigration have often stoked fear in the minds of Americans that their jobs will be taken away, or that their neighborhoods will be threatened by crime. But the opposite of anthropomorphizing is dehumanizing. In none of the bare-bones research that I did was there any reference to an American president who described families seeking freedom and safety within our borders as “animals” who want to “infest” our country. That was seven years ago. And it’s heartbreaking to hear the language being used by the same president now in power again. We have a border crisis that must be solved. With humanity.
A note: For those of you wondering where moral leadership and the “better angels of our nature” lie in these divisive times, I STILL highly recommend Jon Meacham”s best seller The Soul of America.
