Standing Strong: America has been Built by Immigrants

The United States of America is now and always has been a country of immigrants. Aside from descendants of the nation’s original inhabitants (now only about 1.8 percent of us), we Americans can trace our ancestry to those who came from elsewhere.

In recent years, immigrants have been disparaged by nativists like Donald Trump. The nation’s president demonizes them as criminals, rapists, and murderers. He claims other nations have emptied their jails and mental hospitals to fuel immigration. His homeland security apparatus has unleashed masked storm troopers to round up undocumented individuals and those not deemed white enough.

Nevertheless scholars who have studied the issue can document that immigration benefits this country. It has been a source of strength for the U.S. economy and has the potential to boost our economy more in the future.

Studies available from both the Economic Policy Institute and the George Bush Institute  have confirmed that immigration expands the nation’s GNP and is good for economic growth. Immigration also is positive for the balance of taxes and spending at the federal level. Immigrants pay substantial amounts of taxes and yet are excluded from deriving benefits. People who migrate increase the stock of human capital and ideas, ingredients for long-term growth.

The Bush Institute concluded that immigration provides a boost we cannot afford to overlook. Immigrants typically flow into industries where there is a relative need for workers. They also tend to be more portable than native-born workers, more willing to move to areas where they’re most needed.

Moreover, immigration has strong ties to innovation. A stunning 44 percent of the nation’s medical scientists are foreign born, as are 42 percent of software developers. Immigrants comprise a large percentage of college professors, engineers, mathematicians, nurses, doctors, and dentists. This record of achievement by the nation’s foreign-born leads to questions over limits to immigration. True, there are some short-term downsides. It is true that an influx of laborers may temporarily depress wages for native-born workers. But given overall gains, there is ample reason not to ban but to manage immigration.

Throughout the nation’s history, the United States has experienced successive surges in immigration beginning in the colonial period dating from 1607 to 1776. From 1783-1815, 250,000 European immigrants arrived. This was followed by second and third waves. Many immigrants paid for their passage signing on as indentured servants, obligated to work without pay for a set number of years — typically seven.

Meanwhile, Africans from 50 ethnic and alignment groups continued to be subjected to forced immigration to the Americas by the Atlantic slave trade. This nation’s earliest encounter dates from the 1619 landing of 20-30 Africans at Pt. Comfort in Hampton, Va. By the end of slavery in the 1860s, 10 million Africans had been brought to the United States.

Second and third waves of immigration were driven by the Irish potato famine in 1845 and the European revolutions of 1848, both of which pushed immigrants to the United States. The emigrants were mainly Germans, Irish, English, and Canadian. The progressive era,  1861-1890, saw millions of immigrants arrive from South and Eastern Europe — Italy, Poland and Russia. The numbers were twice the size of previous waves which mostly involved Western and Northern Europeans.

Along with immigration flows, there were periodic revolts against foreign arrivals. Nativist resistance arose to new Catholic immigrants spawning The American Party, also called the Know Nothings. Asian emigrants prompted passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Early in the 1990s, some argued that immigrants impeded the achievement of an ideal society, committed crimes, and abused welfare. In 1921, the Emergency Quota Act established a cap on admissions from the Eastern Hemisphere and established limits with widespread notions of eugenics, nationalism, and xenophobia.

The nation’s history shows continual floods of immigrants alternating with counter-resistance to arrivals. The nation’s foreign wars — World Wars, Korea and Vietnam — led to upswings in immigration and to shameful responses like the Japanese interment in 1942.

The truth is that each of us (tribal natives excepted) has an origin story, the tale of a grandparent, great grandparent or great-great who opted to come here from somewhere else. Take our immigrant-denigrating president, Donald Trump, whose grandfather (Friedrich Dumpft) emigrated illegally from Kallstadt in Bavaria, not having served the mandatory two-year military service. After landing in New York City and working as a barber, Friedrich went west and acquired a restaurant in Seattle before moving on “to mine the gold miners” and manage a hotel/bordello in the Yukon.

Selling out to a partner, Friedrich returned to New York City and then went to his native Kallstadt to acquire a bride. The couple were kicked out due to Friedrich’s youthful draft dodging. They relocated in New York City where Friedrich acquired more real estate before dying of the Spanish flu. After the first World War, Friedrich’s real estate legacy enriched the Trumps, who tried to deny their Germanic origins. Writing in The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump falsely claimed his grandfather “came here from Sweden as a child.”

The Trump bloodline gets more polyglot when including his mother, who came to the U.S. from a remote Scottish island to work as a maid. Additionally two of Donald’s three wives were foreign born, one a Czech, the other Slovenian. Only one of his five children had two American-born parents.

Unlike nativists like Trump, a great many of us still cling to the official motto adopted in 1784: E pluribus unum (from many, one), signifying 13 colonies united as one nation. A second motto, In god we trust, was added in 1956, but the E pluribus belief in strength through unity remains a guiding principle.

That notion is elegantly expressed in the poetic words of Emma Lazarus engraved at the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”