Immigration

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Many black officials and intellectuals who fear that immigration is harming the black lower class recite the economic arguments about depressed wage rates and competition for entry-level jobs. But when they spoke to me with greatest passion, they were not talking about immigrants at all. Rather, they were explaining that their deepest fears arise from the cleavage within black society.

"Some people seem to think that all blacks are poor and dispossessed," says Marvin Dunn. "It's not true. There are two black Americas. One is doing very well, better than ever. It is taking advantage of the system, moving up. The other is getting larger as a group, and it is sinking deeper into the quagmire of despair. That is the group that threatens the rest of America, black and white."

It becomes a self-perpetuating system," Dunn says. People who have grown up in single-parent families, especially boys without fathers, are less likely to have a sense of family responsibility when they grow up. The high volume of children who are growing up outside a family network could ultimately cause the destruction of the black family structure."

"This is the black man's black problem," says T. Willard Fair, of the Miami Urban League, an imposing, flamboyantly outspoken man with a shaved head. Fair is a leading advocate of restricting immigration; he has allied himself with Roger Conner's organization, FAIR. He argues that immigrants' gains have been black Americans' losses, especially in Miami, where Cubans and Haitians have made blacks politically and economically "dispensable" to whites. He has recommended a one percent sales tax in Dade County to finance black self-improvement. But, he says, though more money and fewer immigrants are necessary conditions for black self-improvement, they will not be sufficient unless the pathological culture of the black lower class is directly confronted.

"White America created that problem," Fair says, "but they are not in a position to solve it. I am concerned that we are on the verge of losing a generation of children. They have no ambition, no hope for a better future. They live for the now. We have got to understand that unless we [blacks] as a people put some basic values back in place, all the other stuff we talk about—the high joblessness, the housing shortage—won't mean anything."

Strictly speaking, the lower-class cultural problem is not directly connected with immigration, except as the flow of willing foreign workers gives employers even less incentive to find a place for black teenagers. But if our attitude toward immigration ultimately turns on our notion of what makes a society cohere, then it invites speculation about the other ingredients of cultural cohesion. I, at least, have been left with the feeling that our major social challenge will not be assimilating the Minhs and the Garzas, no matter how many of them might come. Rather, it will be coming to terms with that part of American society most estranged from the rest, giving its members a reason to feel that they belong.

Twice in its history, the American government has undertaken a top-to-bottom re-examination of its immigration laws. The first time, the process took more than twenty years to complete. It began in 1907, with the appointment of the Immigration Commission, chaired by Senator William Dillingham, of Vermont, and continued through the late 1920s as successive "national origins" acts were passed.

The Dillingham Commission was able to write on a blank slate; when it began its celebrations, there was virtually no immigration law to revise. But by the time Congress approved the creation of a Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, in 1978, the immigration code had grown until it was exceeded in complexity and length only by the internal-revenue laws.

The original chairman of the Select Commission was Reubin Askew, the former governor of Florida. When he resigned, in 1979, to accept President Carter's nomination as the U.S. trade representative, he was succeeded by Theodore Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame. The fifteen other members of the Select Commission included four Cabinet members; four senators; four congressmen; and a state supreme court judge, a labor leader, and an official of the Los Angeles city government who were, respectively, of Mexican, Cuban, and Japanese descent. In all, half of the Select Commission's members could trace their lineage to the New Immigration. They included former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, and former Representative Elizabeth Holtzman. By contrast, all the members of the Dillingham Commission were descendants of Englishmen or Scots.

The Select Commission held public hearings in a dozen cities, from Albany to Phoenix. Like the Dillingham Commission, it hired scholars and consultants for studies of the economic, linguistic, demographic, and cultural implications of continued immigration. In March of 1981, it released its final report and recommendations; since then, these have focused the political deliberations about controlling immigration.

The legislative vehicle for the Select Commission's recommendations has been the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, named for its two sponsors, Republican Senator Alan K. Simpson, of Wyoming, who served on the Select Commission, and Democratic Representative Romano L. Mazzoli, of Kentucky, who did not. The bill passed the Senate last year, but a flurry of amendments kept it from coming to a vote in the House. It died at the end of that congressional session, but was reintroduced early this year. It has once again passed the Senate and is still awaiting action in the House.

The premise of the Select Commission's report and of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill is that legal immigration is good for the United States but illegal immigration is bad. Immigrants work hard, save and invest, and create more jobs than they take," said Theodore Hesburgh, when presenting the Select Commission's findings to a congressional committee in 1981. "The children of immigrants, according to our studies, acculturate well to American life and actually seem to be healthier and to do better in school on the average than those of native-born Americans." Therefore, "it is in the national interest of the United States to accept a reasonable number of immigrants and refugees each year. . . regardless of the color, nationality, or religion of those admitted." But illegal immigration creates a climate of lawlessness. Its victims, Hesburgh said, include not only the working-class Americans whose wages are depressed but the illegal immigrants themselves ("the ones who are victimized by unscrupulous employers, those who die in the desert, or in the ballast tanks of ships") and those would-be immigrants denied admission ("the ones who are waiting patiently in line for so many years to come to the United States through the normal legal immigration channels").

Before this general principle can be applied to creating specific policies, three questions must be answered. First, can the U.S. accept as many immigrants as would like to come—that is, could it handle illegal immigration simply by legalizing the entire flow? Second, if it must exclude some potential immigrants, how can it most effectively do so? Third, how, then, should it choose which immigrants to admit?

There is almost no dissent on question number one. The population of the Third World nations is expected to increase by 1.6 billion in the next twenty years; more than 80 million additional people will enter the Latin American labor force before the end of this century. Perhaps Mexico will discover a way to feed and employ its rapidly growing population; but for the moment the flow of Mexican emigrants is on the rise. As Central America's population soars, its nations are disrupted by warfare and revolution.

In the face of such pressures, the U.S. has no choice but to limit immigration. The environmental consequences of a larger American population cannot be conclusively proved. What can be proved is that successful absorption of immigrants is largely a matter of proportion. The annual flow of legal immigrants has ranged between 400,000 and 800,000 through the past decade. Even those levels, so modest by comparison with the ones reached during the New Immigration, have provoked widespread uneasiness and concern. The Select Commission staff recommended that future net immigration be set at 750,000 a year. But after the Cuban and Haitian landings of 1980, the commission decided to recommend 500,000 a year, which was reflected in the original version of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill.

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