America the Generous: A Lost Story of Citizenship

America the Generous: A Lost Story of Citizenship
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Copyright by The Editorial Observer
May 27, 2007

When people bicker over immigration, it's often not long
before the topic turns to My Family Came Here Legally.
People whose roots go to Ellis Island or deeper like to say
that. It fills their family trees with hard-working people
who were poor but played by the rules, who got with the
American program. It draws a bright line between upstanding
Americans and those shadowy illegal workers hiding one big
secret and who knows how many others.

It's that line . that moral chasm between Us and Them, and
between an idealized history and the muddled present . that
informs the worst parts of the Senate immigration bill.
It's not only the provisions that create an incredibly
grudging path to citizenship for illegal immigrants .
charging them $5,000 apiece and requiring them to jump
through pointless and punishing hoops that include
a "touchback" trip home to Mexico, say, or Manila. It's
also the belief that immigrants with little to offer us but
their toil and sweat should be brought in only as guest
laborers, with no hope of becoming citizens, and that the
paths to entry for immigrants' relatives must be narrowed.

Congress has taken the week off from the debate, with
members going home to districts that have already been
inflamed by the loud and loony right, which has decided
that the bill is that filthy thing "amnesty" and that the
nation's character would be defiled if it ever forgave
illegal immigrants for coming here to do our worst jobs, or
let too many more people in to put down roots. You could
call that view unkind and uncharitable. You could also call
it unwise, given economic realities.

I would add un-American.

My view has been informed by "Americans in Waiting," a book
by Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at the University of
North Carolina, about what he calls a lost story of a
confident young country that opened itself to newcomers in
ways that seem unthinkably generous today.

For about 150 years, Professor Motomura writes, from
shortly after the country's birth to the end of the Ellis
Island heyday in the 1920s, when there were no numerical
limits to immigration and the flow was mostly from western
Europe, new immigrants could gain many of the rights of
citizens by signing a document declaring their intention to
naturalize. They became Americans in waiting, able to work,
vote, buy land and clear homesteads.

The elegant idea was that immigration was simply the
beginning of an inevitable transition toward full
membership in a growing country. The ancestors of so many
Americans, including today's immigration hard-liners,
benefited from it.

It's important not to romanticize that history. The doors
were more open for white Europeans than for members of
other groups, like the Chinese and Japanese, who were
almost entirely shut out. Many white immigrants . the
Irish, Italians, European Jews . suffered profound
discrimination once they arrived. Over time, the era of
Ellis Island gave way to quotas, country and employment
categories, and long waiting lists for everyone. With long
waiting lists came people desperate enough to jump them.

The newcomer, once a citizen's near equal, has come to be
viewed as a perpetual outsider. The dominant view of
immigration is no longer what Professor Motomura
calls "immigration as transition" but immigration
as "contract" and "affiliation." Immigrants must meet ever-
more-demanding terms of entry and slowly forge connections
here before equality becomes an option.

Professor Motomura does not argue that "immigration as
transition" is the superior or only model, but rather that
it should be restored to its place beside the other two. He
would go much farther than today's politicians in giving
rights to new legal immigrants . even granting government
benefits . but on the condition that they take advantage of
the chance to become citizens after five years. Those who
do not would revert to a more limited status.

Professor Motomura contends that the machinery of
assimilation will work if we let it. Immigrants who are
unduly insecure, he says, who are worried not only about
jobs, health and finances but also contractual obligations
that the United States could revoke at any time, naturally
retreat to ethnic enclaves. Those who are confident in
their welcome, he argues, are more likely to plunge
headlong into American life.

Professor Motomura, whose parents immigrated from Japan, is
convinced that immigrants will cherish citizenship more if
it is easier to get. Maybe that's crazy. But it's American,
and reflects a confidence in this country that the
architects of the restrictive parts of the Senate bill have
lost, if they ever had it.