Welcome to America?

ED: So guys, that was a pretty heartening story of the way the Japanese families made lives for themselves in the face of all this opposition. But we know there’s more to American immigration than heartening stories. Joanne, if we could get a start at the beginning of American history. Let’s take a sort of a scan of the oscillations in American immigration policy. So what was it like at the beginning?

JOANNE: Well, in the early republic, I mean I guess I would say there’s some ambivalence about immigrants. Because on the one hand, I mean if you look at something like– surprise, I’m going to mention Alexander Hamilton, Hamilton’s report on manufacturers– you could see in there that he’s thinking about in the future there might be a more manufacturing kind of a nation. And he’s excited about the fact that Americans will be able to be working at this.

But he’s also thinking about how that will attract immigrants and give immigrants something to do. So he’s on the one hand, and not only Hamilton, are enthusiastic about bringing people in. And on the other hand, at that same moment in time, you flip that around, and they’re looking at Europe, and they’re looking in particular at France.

ED: Oh dear, not France!

JOANNE: Yes, they are looking at France. And they’re afraid of what they see. They see social upset. They see a King getting killed.

BRIAN: So you’re talking about the French Revolution, Joanne.

JOANNE: I am indeed talking about the French Revolution. So on the one hand they are excited about immigrants and on the other hand, given that it’s a brand new nation, they’re still establishing things like national character, national identity, even just the basic workings of the government. And lo and behold, there is this scary French Revolution happening, and people potentially coming from there to the United States. That’s a scary thing.

ED: Yeah, and they split all this pretty finely. You know Benjamin Franklin worries a lot about what kind of immigrants from Europe are going to be OK. And my ancestors, the Scots-Irish, he’s not so sure about. They seem to be a little bit too drawn to the fighting and to the violence.

BRIAN: That’s why sent them to Tennessee.

ED: Exactly.

JOANNE: You know, OK, this allows me to say one of my favorite goofy things. Actually, I have too many favorite goofy things.

BRIAN: That’s all right.

JOANNE: There’s someone from the time period who actually says that his impression of what America is going to become is a Macocracy, meaning everyone will be named Mac, Mac, Macintosh, MacIntire, Mac. And so he’s–

ED: He’s right, brilliantly anticipating McDonald’s. I love it. Well, it’s interesting, because of course the first kind of crisis in immigration history in the United States comes from a lot of Macs and O’s, the Irish who were coming in because of the devastation of their economy there, by the potato blight. And the United States is not really sure that it likes–

BRIAN: When was this, Ed?

ED: This was in the 1840s, 1850s. And what people worry about is that these fragile structures of government and economy that Joanne’s talking about are going to be overrun by all these people who are poor and rural. But they were also Catholic.

JOANNE: And that’s a long standing thing, right? There’s kind of an ongoing fear of Catholicism and Catholics in America, which I mean, it’s kind of quirky. My gut instinct would be that part of that must have to do with fears about loyalty. Were Americans worried about Catholics being more loyal to the Pope than to the United States? I don’t know. How do you guys suss that out?

ED: I don’t know what Brian thinks about this, but it strikes me that that’s the long running continuity in all this, is that there is some locus of loyalty that’s not America. If it’s not the Pope, it’s somebody else.

BRIAN: It goes back to the early republic, Joanne. It’s about independence. You can’t have citizens who are not thinking for themselves and might they be controlled by others, whether it’s radical French ideology, whether it’s the Pope. And in the 20th century, whether it’s a communist cell that’s telling them how to think.

ED: Yeah, those are really great points. And it occurs to me that what we’re always afraid of is that there’s some group that’s more coordinated, hierarchical, authoritarian than we are. The very thing we love about ourselves, that there’s nobody in charge, is also what freaks us out. There’s nobody in charge.

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: Joanne and Ed, looking at this from a 20th century vantage point, maybe even 21st century, what strikes me is how little the national government had to do with anything. I mean the national government didn’t stop anybody from coming in as far as I can tell.

ED: But there’s another case that driving through all of this is a huge demand, need, for labor in large parts of the country. Not only is the economy growing, but the continent itself is growing. And so whether it’s the West and the Chinese, or it’s the East Coast and the immigrants from Europe coming in, working in factories, there’s a great need everywhere except the American South, where there’s this great surplus of labor, of people who’ve been held in slavery. So as you think about sort of the drivers of American immigration policy, economics is always a key part of it.

BRIAN: And big business consistently throughout American history has been in favor of the free immigration of labor to basically create a larger labor supply and drive down the price of labor.

ED: They’re in favor of it until they’re not. And you think about the railroads, the first big business are in favor of Chinese immigrants until suddenly, no, they’re not.

BRIAN: Until they don’t need the labor. That’s exactly right.

JOANNE: Well, not only do they not need it, but because they’ve gotten it, now it’s scary and intimidating.

BRIAN: And we know when we fast forward the film, we’re soon going to have draconian restrictions in 1924 that really cuts down significantly all immigration, pretty much limits it to a trickle.

ED: Brian, you talked before about labor, after the labor needs of World War I have come and gone, after the Red Scare in which they are worried about Bolsheviks coming into the country have kind of settled down. They said, listen, this is out of control. Here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s pass a new law saying that the new immigrants can only represent 2% of the immigrant groups that are already in the country.

BRIAN: And guess what? Most of them happen to come from Western Europe.

ED: It’s amazing, isn’t it? Just funny how that math worked out like that. And this is striking when we think about the rich ethnic history of much of the United States. The people they were trying to keep out were the Italians, people from Southern and Eastern Europe, and also trying to keep out Jews. So 1924, and then for a pretty long time there, that is the status quo.

JOANNE: Yeah,

BRIAN: All right, Ed, Joanne, I’m going to pivot here. And I’m turning on the flag blower. My dad used to bring me to Rotary meetings when I was growing up.

And not only was there an American flag, and everybody said the Pledge of Allegiance, but there was a flag blower. It was a machine that made the red, white, and blue wave in the breeze while we said that. I’m not– how could one make this up, right?

And you may make fun of me, but when I think of all the immigrants that have come to the United States and have successfully assimilated and have pushed back with new ideas and new forms of labor and even organizing labor, I get teary eyed. I’m really quite moved that we are a nation, for all our problems, that has successfully integrated so many of these immigrants over such a long period of time.

JOANNE: I think that’s true. And I agree with what you just said. And I feel the same way. But the idea of setting up a blower, so that you could have the flag look nice.

It’s so evocative of what we’re talking about here, which is this is what we want it to look like. This is the beacon. This is what it means. But then when you get to the reality of it, it’s not the pretty flag with the blower. It’s a lot more complicated.

But we like the way it looks. We like to think of ourselves that way. It’s so much more complicated when you get beyond that blowing flag.

ED: Reminds me of that ad they had at the Super Bowl recently, in which 84 Lumber for some reason used enormous investment in an ad to show a woman and her little girl apparently coming into the United States illegally, but the little girl picking up scraps all along the way, with which she makes an American flag. You know, I thought that I could not be moved by a Super Bowl ad. But in fact, I was.

JOANNE: But did you go online and see the end of it?

ED: No.

JOANNE: I did.

ED: What happened?

JOANNE: Because I thought, wow, that was really moving. They get up to this wall. And they’re standing there and she’s got the little flag and you think, oh, no, they’re not going to be able to get through.

And they sort of walk a little ways, and there’s a door in the wall. And the door opens and the light kind of streams through, and the mother and daughter sort of hold hands and head off into the sunlight. It was moving and kind of gripping and sort of made me very sad. And then it had that sort of amazingly sort of–

ED: Saccharin?

JOANNE: Yeah, ascending into the heavens kind of, and America opened its doors and let us in. So it was like the moment, but it went right back to the blowing flag.

ED: Well, I was going to say. It makes the analogy in real time. And that you were just making. So we like our flag to be beautiful and blowing in the wind, artificial or otherwise.

We know this is the best of America. We know that we’re the country that has been the Welcome to the World. We also know that sometimes we don’t rise to that standard, and we succumb to our own worst instincts.