Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future Read Online Free PDF Page A

Protestants resented newly arriving “Papists,” and even in colonial Maryland, a supposed haven for them. Roman Catholics were nonetheless forbidden to vote and hold public office.
    Once independent, the new nation began to carve its views on immigrants into law. In considering New York’s constitution, for instance, John Jay—later to become the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, suggested erecting a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.”  5
    During the boom economic years in the last quarter of the last century and the coinciding period of deregulation, the undocumented immigrant population grew from less than one million in 1980 to a peak of nearly twelve million in 1996. Between 2007 and 2009, however, the undocumented population declined by one million, coinciding with the economic downturn. The current estimate of the undocumented population is 10.8 million: approximately 19 percent entered the United States prior to the 1990s; 44 percent entered during the 1990s; and another 37 percent entered since 2000. All told, undocumented immigrants (adults and children) only make up approximately 4 percent of the total U.S. population.
    A host of opinions about immigration today is based on a set of beliefs about this country’s past. Yet these opinions are most likely distorted because they are based upon a sanitized version of our nation’s history. We believe our country was founded on the principle of equal rights, and while we acknowledge that these rights were gradually expanded to include new groups of people (Native Americans, African Americans, and women, for example), we believe that we have finally achieved this high ideal.
    As we can see by the incremental inclusion of these new groups, however, each generation had rationales for maintaining legal inequality; so, too, we have our own rationale for excluding non-native residents from equal rights. Our individual lenses color the way we see things that are really black-and-white.
    A Chinese student studying at Penn State University remarked, “I did not know what discrimination based on race was until I came to the United States.”
    IMMIGRATION LAWS
    Ignorance and racism guided the nation’s first law regulating immigration. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” and to people of “good moral character.”
    Africans and Asians, as well as free blacks and indentured servants, were left out. Despite several appeals of the law, racial barriers remained in place and were not removed until 1870 for Africans and 1952 for East and South Asians.
    Perhaps the most egregious of statutes regulating immigration came about after an economic boom in the western United States, when fortunes and jobs dried up at the end of the Gold Rush and work on the transcontinental railroad in the mid-1800s ceased.
    The tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants mining gold and laying rails across the great expanse were tolerated during those flush years, but when the rare metal’s vein was tapped, the Chinese were forced from the mines. They resettled in cities, working in laundries and restaurants.
    As the post–Civil War economy declined, public sentiment in West Coast states turned against the Chinese. In 1882, Congress passed and President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which kept out “skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese mining employees.” It was the nation’s first law to restrict free immigration.
    Ironically, according to historian David Hackett Fischer, Congress passed the law “while Chinese laborers were actually at work on Bedloe’s Island, helping build the pedestal for America’s great icon of liberty. Saum Song Bo wrote angrily in 1885, ‘The word liberty makes me think of the fact that this country is the land of liberty for men of all nations except the Chinese. I consider it as an insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute toward