Politico Magazine (Opinion)
By Michael Kazin
September 2, 2015
Donald
Trump knows the United States will never deport eleven million
undocumented immigrants or do away with birthright citizenship. But what
if we did—what would be
the political impact if Trump and other angry nativists in the GOP
actually achieved most or all the changes they desire, cutting
immigration back sharply?
We
already know, because something very similar happened once before in
American history. Ninety years ago, two Republican presidents—Warren
Harding and Calvin Coolidge—and
a Congress dominated by Republicans enacted equally harsh policies
against immigrants. Their success helped usher in the longest period of
one-party rule in the 20th century. But it was the Democrats, not the
GOP, who benefited, in one of the most whopping
instances of unintentional consequences in American political history.
During
the 1920s, federal lawmakers reversed the traditional policy of
welcoming newcomers from nearly every land. Fear of foreigners carrying
the bacillus of Bolshevism
from Europe and of diluting the purity of the “Nordic” race led them to
pass the most sweeping restrictions in U.S. history. By large
majorities, Congress enacted quotas that explicitly discriminated
against would-be immigrants from southern and eastern Europe
and banned all Arabs and all Asians except for Filipinos, who were then
U.S. colonial subjects. In supporting the restrictive Johnson-Reed Act
of 1924, one senator proudly exclaimed, “Thank God we have in America
perhaps the largest percentage of any country
in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock … We now have
sufficient population in our country for us to shut the door and to
breed up a pure, unadulterated American citizenship.”
The
new policies were effective: Over 18 million people migrated to the
U.S. between 1880 and 1920. From 1930 to 1960, during the new era of
highly restricted immigration,
only four million made the trip.
But
the political backlash from that dramatic shift in demographics was
fierce. Immigrants from places like Poland, Italy, and Russia who
already lived in the U.S. and
their American-born children deeply resented quotas that barred them
from bringing over their relatives and friends. Most also despised the
prohibition of alcohol, which they viewed as an attack by evangelical
Protestants on their cultures and their right
to imbibe any beverage they chose.
At
the time, big-city Democrats warned that nativists would regret their
decision to bar non-“Anglo-Saxons” from the land. “Suppose they had
their way,” said Rep. Emmanuel
Celler, a Brooklyn Jew, “and we awoke one fine morning and found all
our population of foreign origin had departed. There would be no rolls
for breakfast, no sugar for the coffee, and no meat for dinner—for
practically all workers in foodstuffs are aliens.
Milady would have to wear last year’s coat, shoes, and gloves, as most …
Apparel factories would be closed.”
Instead
of leaving, white ethnics took out their bitterness at the polling
booth. In 1928, many voted for the first time, swelling the total for Al
Smith, the Catholic
Democrat from New York. Amid the prosperity of that decade, Smith lost
to Herbert Hoover. But in 1932, during the depths of the Great
Depression, their votes swung nearly every big state to Franklin D.
Roosevelt. FDR didn’t have enough support in Congress
to get rid of the quotas (most Southern Democrats favored them). But
his party did repeal prohibition and enact programs like the Works
Progress Administration and the National Labor Relations Act that helped
millions of ethnics find jobs and form unions.
In
the decade since the restrictive quotas had been passed, young workers
from the kind of ethnic groups that Republicans derided had become
increasingly “Americanized.”
English was their first language; they had been educated in the U.S.,
flocked to the same Hollywood movies and danced to the same swing tunes
as did other Americans—and they were registered to vote. Despite the
Great Depression, they also felt secure enough
to question the authority of their employers – most of whom were loyal
Republicans, the party in charge when Wall Street crashed and the
jobless rate soared to twenty-five percent.
All
this made white ethnic workers natural recruits for the new unions
established, through sit-down strikes and other forms of pressure, in
the steel, auto, longshore,
aircraft, and electrical industries during the 1930s and 40s. “Go to
hell! You’ve had me long enough. I’m going to be a man on my own now!”
an official of the United Electrical Workers told his members. First and
second-generation immigrants welcomed the ethnic
pluralism of the new labor movement, as did blacks and
Mexican-Americans, and claimed American traditions for themselves. In
one New England textile town, union organizers compared their bosses to
King George III and urged workers to emulate the Pilgrims and
the “wise, hardy, and staunch” pioneers in covered wagons who risked
everything to attain prosperity for their families. Between 1933 and
1945, unions added nine million new members to their ranks. As it
surged, organized labor had become a rainbow coalition—and
a mainstay of the Democratic Party.
In
four straight elections, FDR crushed his Republican opponents in big
cities and factory towns filled with white ethnics and
African-Americans. Their votes also turned
states like Pennsylvania and Illinois, which had traditionally voted
Republican, into Democratic strongholds. The party nominated scores of
Jews, Polish Catholics, and Italians to local and state offices. During
the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, Dwight
Eisenhower and other moderate Republicans won back some of these
voters. But in 1960, John Kennedy – running as a Catholic, pro-labor
liberal – reassembled much of FDR’s old coalition. He was the first
president to owe his victory to a alliance of religious,
ethnic, and racial minorities.
Thus,
by closing the borders to all but a trickle of newcomers they disliked,
Republicans ensured that they would provoke the lasting hostility of
millions of immigrants
and, just as importantly, their children, all of whom had already
crossed those borders. During the 1930s and 40s, Democrats won every
single presidential election, even as the foreign-born population
decreased from 11.6 percent to just over half that number.
The
political dynamics today are not all that different. Latinos and
Asian-Americans already voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in 2008
and 2012—and in the latter year
Mitt Romney paid dearly for his harsh stand against America’s 11
million illegal immigrants, when he declared that he would make life so
hard for them they would “self-deport” (Romney lost the Hispanic vote to
Obama by a stunning 71 percent to 27 percent).
If,
in 2016, the GOP nominee campaigns and wins on a platform that vows to
curb immigration – both legal and undocumented – he or she could be
repeating one of the worst
decisions that party ever made. Even if the flow of migrants to the
U.S. were cut in half, the number of Americans with family members born
abroad will continue to grow as a percentage of the population. And by
2040 or sooner, it is white people who will be
the largest minority group, according to census data. Much as happened
nearly a century ago, a one-time victory based on a nativist backlash
could thus turn into several decades of Democratic supremacy.
Michael
Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University. He is author, most
recently, of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (Knopf,
2011).
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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