The Tired and The Poor

I was on the phone with a friend of mine and the subject of illegal immigration came up. I should mention the friend lives in Colorado while I live in New Jersey, over 1000 miles away. She was dismayed about several incidents of late, occurring in the Denver area, of criminal activity associated with illegal immigrants and the difficulty involved in assigning responsibility or negligence to people without citizenship or green cards. It invited some thought.

According to the Center of Immigration Studies, the 1990s and early part of the 21st century saw the highest numbers of immigration, legal and not, in US history. It stands without saying that the issue of immigration is a tricky thing, especially considering that most of us are the descendents of immigrants to this country how many years ago. It seems we must balance the American credo, “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…,” with other constraints and conditions, the reality of this modern age, that influences how all Americans view immigration nowadays. The vision in Emma Lazarus’ sonnet, of the world’s orphans arriving on our shores broken but strong-hearted, the salt of the earth, is not the romantic notion is might have been once.

Until the late 1800s, immigration to American was unregulated save for health exams and those sorts of things. Anyone could come to America, it was a big place, room for everybody. My ancestors, for the most part, immigrated from Germany and Ireland in the 1850s, the result of political upheaval and famine in their own countries. Industrialization and growth of American cities attracted immigrants from abroad, but also caused a worsening in social conditions in urban areas, so in turn, the US government decided that the influx of immigrants needed to be better controlled and regulated. (Incidentally, the Immigration Act of 1882 specifically prohibited lunatics and idiots from entering the country and the Immigration Act of 1891 bars the entry of those “convicted of crimes of moral turpitude.” Those sound like pretty good laws to me.)

Until the 1990s, the largest number of immigrants to pour across American borders was between 1901 and 1910, a substantial percentage of them coming from Eastern Europe, Russia and Italy. In the 1920s, the US government instituted the national-origins quota system that put a cap on the number of immigrants that could come from each county. This policy and many others regarding immigration were consolidated into the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 which to this day, outlines American immigration policy.

A person is allowed to immigrate to this country for several reasons. A person is allowed to stay in order to work (they have skills that are needed here), to join family in the U.S. already naturalized, to attend college or technical school, to escape abhorrent conditions in their own countries (asylum seekers), to serve as diplomats, to marry an American, or as a benefit of the visa lottery program. Of course, if you are lucky enough to be born here, you become an American as soon as you leave the birth canal (thanks to the fourteenth amendment to the US Constitution). A non-native must do many things before he or she can obtain permanent residency and even naturalized citizenship.

On average, around 800,000 people immigrate to the U.S. using legal means – they have permanent resident status – every year. On the other hand, estimates put the number of annually arriving illegal immigrants at around 1 million, and the estimated total illegals in the country now is somewhere between 12 and 20 million people. More than half of the population of illegal immigrants lives in California, New York, New Jersey, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Arizona. At least that many people live in what is called the “mixed status” family, meaning they are part of a household in which some members are legal and some are illegal. This applies to immigrant families in which one or more children are born in the U.S. and thus are naturalized citizens, while the parents are not.

So what does it all mean? What is the impact of illegal immigration and how should Americans, the descendents of immigrants respond?

Obviously, I myself can only speculate as to the impact of illegal immigration on the economy and society. I do support immigration in a general sense. I consider myself lucky to live in a first world country; I haven’t been hungry, I have great medical care, I have sound shelter and opportunity. Certainly, people without much of a chance in life because of their circumstances should have a fair shot at success and happiness, or in some cases, mere sustenance. However, illegal immigration for one, calls in to question the fairness of those who gain residency legally and those who do not. I am a big proponent of making all things equal.

But I have bigger concerns. I worry about the way in which the health care infrastructure of this country is able to manage the influx of illegals. Many of these folks are coming from countries where inoculation from deadly disease, the kind that disappeared from the U.S. years ago, is simply not done. I worry about the strain additional uninsured puts on clinics and hospitals that can’t hope to be paid for services rendered. I worry about how the impact a proliferation of cheap labor is going to affect working and middle class Americans over the long haul.

This is not the first time Americans have felt contentious over the issue of immigration. The Nativists, the New York City centered anti-immigrationists of the 1850s, sank to criminal means in an attempt to rid New York ports of the Irish scourge. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 actually barred Chinese from immigrating to America. Despite this history, I still feel that we're facing something new here, with mass immigration considered to be illegal. We face not only the quandary of a crisis in health care and labor standards, but the juxtaposition of two worlds that have no cause to mingle.