The topic of immigration seems to have settled into the public consciousness as inseparable from any political arena—it is a question asked at every debate, a demand made at each ballot, and a hot topic at any fragmented dinner table.
And on the biggest stage, this salience has been successfully exploited for political power. In alignment with centuries of conservative anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump and his GOP colleagues have brought forward a slew of blatantly xenophobic and ethnocentric narratives targeted at nonwhite immigrants, demonstrating that such rhetoric can be fundamental in electoral success. This push of immigration as a threat has been so effective that a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found immigration to be the second most important issue to Republican voters, only ranking behind economic concerns.
Despite its dominance of the political sphere, however, the debate about immigration often lacks concrete substance. That is to say, its participants have a tendency to give platitudes backed by nothing but “common sense” or data of narrow scope, both sides speaking past each other and ultimately concluding very little in the way of anything but “stolen jobs” and dog whistles of “safety” concerns. As if written in response to those inane debates, Professor Leah Boustan’s new book Streets of Gold is an impressively extensive research project years in the making which seeks to address this very dearth of reliable and complete data about immigration.
In a conversation with journalist Matt Yglesias, Professor Boustan elaborated on some of her and co-author Stanford Professor Ran Abramitzky’s findings, and how they can introduce solid evidence into such discussions going forward. Of them, she pointed out a few as the most intriguing. Here, we only get into some of the more politicized findings, but for an unprecedented collection of research on immigration, Streets of Gold is surely an engaging read.
Over time, sentiments about immigration have shifted drastically. Boustan and Abramitzky’s investigation on the language used in political speeches revealed a firm negative slant from both parties in speeches regarding immigration. However, starting in 1940, due in large part to Truman and JFK’s messaging, both parties began speaking positively about immigrants. Nonetheless, by 1965, the all too familiar pattern of polarization we know today was beginning to show. The data actually indicates that, today, Republican speeches on immigration are about as negative as they were in the 1900s.
The notion that immigrants today are not as homogeneous as the Ellis Island cohort, is, first and foremost, based on modern notions of whiteness and non-whiteness. During the late 19th century and early 20th century wave of immigration, immigrants we now deem unequivocally white, including Italians, Germans, Irish, and European Jewish immigrants, were readily discriminated against with almost as much vitriol as non-white immigrants today. Not to mention, Boustan and Abramitzky find that the recent cohorts of immigrants are, in various measures, working just as hard to assimilate as their past counterparts, such as adopting Americanized first names for their children and in their high levels of English proficiency.
One of the main concerns brought up by anti-immigration proponents is the plight of the American worker in the face of cheap, readily available migrant labor. Through repeated investigation, however, Boustan and her co-author reach a conclusion that corroborates a host of evidence due to the greater benefits provided to the economy. In most cases, American workers actually see a net benefit from immigration.
As much as the concerns above may paint the broader discourse around the issue as negative, the reality is that while the Republican platform has regressed to a pre-1940 state in its treatment of immigration, the persisting difference from then to now is that the positive expressions on immigration from the Democratic Party we hear today simply did not exist. In fact, polls find 75% of the current American public to be supportive of immigration.
There is an argument to be made that—at least to a degree—the political relevance the immigration debate enjoys was and continues to be crafted by the GOP to tap into the reservoir of latent racism inherent to a considerable proportion of the American public. Even so, it is important to remember that immigration itself, and not just the racist rhetoric around it, is and always has been at the heart of this country.
What Lady Liberty (and Emma Lazarus) knew more than a century ago about America is exactly what conservatives today forget when they get tied up into a fear-laced narrative of crime and xenophobia. America, since its founding, has never been a country protected from immigrants—after all, it is almost entirely constituted of them.
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