Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [3]
At the end of his presidency, Reagan was still invoking Winthrop. “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,” he remarked in his 1989 farewell address to the nation. “But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
It’s true that in 1986 Reagan signed the Immigration Control and Reform Act, which included employer sanctions and more border security, but he also insisted on a provision for legalizing immigrants already in the United States. Which is to say, he supported “amnesty.” In his signing statement, he said, “We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.”
SAME OLD, SAME OLD
Most every anti-immigrant argument rolled out today is a retread. Benjamin Franklin was complaining about bilingual sign posts and “swarms” of unassimilable Germans migrating to Pennsylvania 250 years ago. Later, in the nineteenth century, people like Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph and a leading nativist of his day, would pick up Franklin’s banner. Morse was a founder and generous financier of the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing movement, and in lieu of Germans he railed against Irish immigration in the antebellum decades. In his 1835 treatise against the political influence of Catholicism, Morse argued that poor, uneducated Irish Catholics were subverting the values and ideals of Anglo-America and should therefore be kept out of the country.
Opposition to Asian immigration came next. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, “Yellow Peril” was all the rage, stoked by increased Chinese migration to the American West. A famous 1881 illustration first published in The Wasp, a San Francisco-based literary magazine edited by Ambrose Bierce, depicts Lady Liberty as a Chinese coolie gripping an opium pipe. The rays of light emanating from the statue’s head are labeled “Immorality,” “Filth,” “Disease, ” and “Ruin to White Labor.”
Henry George, who would later become an influential political economist, first gained prominence denouncing what he called the “Mongolization of America.” In 1881, George wrote of “the supreme law of self-preservation which justifies us in shutting out a non-assimilable element fraught for us with great social and political dangers.” He warned that Asians “will introduce into the life of the republic race prejudices and social bitterness.” He said they would “reduce wages and degrade labor, and widen the gulf between rich and poor.” And like today’s nativists, George was concerned that “the Chinese, if free play be allowed their immigration, [will] supplant the white race.”
SLOUCHING TOWARD GUATEMALA?
Modern-day restrictionists either don’t know this history or are hoping the public doesn’t know it. But what’s most relevant about these time-honored arguments is that those spouting them have a perfect record of being wrong. Immigration alarmism