If you are a liberal, you will love this long graphics heavy read from Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post. If you are a conservative, you might not like the piece, but we would recommend that you read it to understand how the journalism of the future will look like – combining graphics, animation and text, combining fact with opinion to create an exhilarating experience for the reader/viewer. Hopefully, someone reading this piece will bring this format of journalism to India.
The central message of the piece is that for over a century now, right wing American politicians have been agitating to shut the door on immigrants and yet, for all their jawboning, they have not managed to make any progress. Eduardo Porter writes: “Immigration was perceived as a problem a century ago, too. Large numbers of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe flocked to the United States during the first two decades of the 20th century, sparking a public outcry over unfamiliar intruders who lacked the Northern and Western European blood of previous migrant cohorts.
On May 15, 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which would constrain immigration into the United States to preserve, in Smith’s words, America’s “pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock.”
“It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries,” Smith continued, speaking of America not 40 years after the Statue of Liberty was erected in New York Harbor, with its open arms for all humankind. Immigration, Smith noted, should be shaped “to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and in her power.”
The act set the rules of who’s in and who’s out.”
The Johnson-Reed Act did not work. America today is more diverse, more immigrant heavy and richer than it was 50 years or 100 years ago. This trend is more generally true of free market democracies. So why does America stay an open society inspite of the best efforts of certain leaders? Mr Porter writes: “The public conversation over immigration that has raged at least since the days of the 1924 Johnson-Reed law can explain Washington’s policy failure: There is no way America can reconcile the sentiments embodied by the Statue of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor,” etc. — with its deep-seated fear that immigrants will reshape its ethnic makeup, its identity and the balance of political power.
Try as they might, policymakers have always been unable to protect the White America they wanted to preserve. Today’s “melting pot” was built largely with policies that didn’t work. Millions upon millions of migrants have overcome what obstacles the United States has tried to put in their way.”
Mr Porter explains that in virtually generation conservative politicians have come up with arguments to keep the foreigners out. And they have failed – every time! The failure of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act has already been mentioned in this piece. Here is another cycle of bigotry and failure:
“Two years after the Johnson-Reed Act, sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild published “The Melting-Pot Mistake,” a reiteration of the racial logic that undergirded all the new restrictions. By 1970, immigrants made up less than 5 percent of the population, down from nearly 15 percent in 1910.
There can be “no doubt that if America is to remain a stable nation it must continue to be a white man’s country for an indefinite period to come,” Fairchild wrote. “An exclusion policy toward all non-white groups is wholly defensible in theory and practice, however questionable may have been the immediate means by which this policy has been put into effect at successive periods in our history.”
And yet perhaps the most important lesson to flow from this moment is that the levee didn’t hold. Today, immigrants are back at 14 percent of the population. And despite the repeated efforts over the decades to preserve the ethnic purity proposed in Johnson-Reed, the pot filled up with undesirables again. Migrants from Europe accounted for three-quarters of the foreign-born in 1960 but only 10 percent in 2022.”
An even deeper reason for the failure of bigotry to take permanent hold of the American psyche is economics – for America Inc there is simply too much at stake in large, resource rich country to leave immigrants out in the cold for an extended period of time: “The Statue of Liberty is arguably the nation’s most prominent symbol, representing America as a land of opportunity and refuge. But the nation’s tolerance of outsiders has mostly been shaped by baser instincts, a tug of war between the hunger for foreign labor to feed a galloping economy and the fear of how the newcomers might change what it means to be American.
Immigration restrictions relax when the immigrant population is comparatively small and jobs plentiful, and they tighten when the foreign footprint increases and jobs get relatively scarce. Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute points out that even recent migrants turn against newer cohorts, fearful that they may take their jobs and transform their communities….
Immigration has reengineered U.S. politics. Non-White voters account for some 40 percent of Democrats. Eighty-one percent of Republican voters, by contrast, are both White and not Hispanic. The nation’s polarized politics have become, in some nontrivial sense, a proxy for a conflict between different interpretations of what it means to be American.”
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