Current Policy of European Immigration to the US - Coursework Example

Writer’s name] [Supervisor’s name] [Course title] [Date] European Immigration to the U.S The first immigrants to the United States were from Western Europe. The first big migration started around the 19th century when huge number of Europeans left their homes to get away from the economic hardships which were taken place due to the alteration of industry by the factory system as well as the immediate transfer from small-scale to large-scale farming. Out of the three main waves that came though America, the second wave was the major wave for the Germans, one third of the emigrants were from Germany. Generally speaking, most of European immigrants came over by steamboat. They mainly landed at Ellis Island, a chief U.S. reception center for immigrants from 1892 to 1924 in New York Harbor (David p15). The Past Quarter-Century witnessed remarkable transformations in how the United States governs immigrant admissions and rights. Initially, American policymakers focused their attention in these years on a problem that seemed to highlight the extent to which national borders had turned out to be absorbent and inadequately regulated: illegal immigration. By the close of the millennium, however, the entire structure of U.S. immigration and of refugee and immigrant policies had been recast by significant federal legislation, independent executive actions, and judicial rulings. Sweeping policy changes of this period were achieved in both good and bad economic times, always during divided government, and despite the fact that congressional and White House officials dreaded the issue because of the contentious and unpredictable politics it routinely inspired. We always felt like we were walking across a political minefield when it came to immigration, one congressional leader recalls. But we understood that something which speaks to so many fundamental concerns— jobs, health, crime, racial fairness, civil liberties, trade, foreign relations, you name it—isn't going to go quietly into the night. 1 Indeed, not since the early-twentieth century has immigration reform been such a regular focus of conflict and change in American politics. During the 1980s, Kennedy and other Northeastern politicians were lobbied heavily by Irish American groups to secure changes in legal immigration rules favorable to Irish nationals. An Irish Immigration Reform Movement, backed by a variety of Irish American associations, organized in this period to protest family-based preferences because they were said to disadvantage would-be Irish immigrants who lacked close family ties to U.S. citizens and permanent residents. During the bruising horse-trading over IRCA, Irish American groups won a controversial two-year program to distribute an additional 10,000 visas to foreign nationals of countries adversely affected by the 1965 preference system. In 1987, Kennedy's immigration subcommittee heard from prominent Irish American politicians, including Boston mayor Raymond Flynn and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), on the plight of would-be Irish immigrants. Fairness is at issue here, Moynihan intoned. Invoking language usually reserved for civil rights debates, Kennedy inserted a curious provision in the 1988 bill providing special visa set-asides for Irish foreign nationals (Matthew p12). Under the constraints of a firm immigration cap, Simpson hoped to expand immigration opportunities for immigrants possessing desirable job skills and education. As early as 1982, Simpson expressed sympathy to groups like the Business Roundtable and various firms, who argued that global economic competition made it imperative for U.S. businesses to have access to the world's most skilled workers. International pressures on immigration policy increasingly reflected not only Cold War geopolitics and traditional foreign policy concerns, but also the perceived demands of promoting U.S. fortunes in global trade. In 1988, Simpson called for a firm cap on legal immigration and new openings for immigrants with needed job skills. Kennedy and Simpson merged their interests in Irish nationals and skilled workers under a so-called independent category which would distribute points to foreign applicants based on education, job skills, English language fluency, and source-country diversity—the latter a euphemism for allocating points to foreign nationals from Ireland and others who did not benefit from family-based preferences. To make room for this independent category under the proposed cap, the bill limited the number of visas allocated to the 1965 law's second preference for spouses and minor children of legal resident aliens and restricted its fifth preference to never-married siblings of U.S. citizens. The existing fifth preference provided visas to brothers and sisters of American citizens, as well as to the spouses and children of those siblings. While Kennedy said the new category would promote diversity by setting aside visas for countries under-represented in the existing system, Latino and Asian groups scored the plan as hostile to nonwhite newcomers. But ethnic lobbies had little time to mobilize opposition in the Senate, where the Kennedy Simpson bill passed easily. In the House, most Democrats refused to support the bipartisan compromise that sailed through the Senate. As a key Democratic staffer put it, for generations we only admitted white, European immigrants, and then, after Asians and Latin Americans finally have an opportunity to get in, there's this proposal to limit their numbers. We simply weren't going to support something so racially biased. Instead, House Democrats momentarily appeased Irish American lobbies and other ethnic groups by offering a special lottery for foreign nationals from countries adversely affected by the existing preference system. With the active encouragement of Latino, Asian, and immigrant rights groups, the Senate bill died in the House. The explanatory power of timing as well as sequencing is unquestionable in the path-dependent processes that came up at the start as well as end of this analysis. At the start, as we have seen, national political leaders chose both a tolerant, laissez-faire admissions policy and easy terms of naturalization for European newcomers. Initial decisions were made in a period characterized by low immigration and strong demands for laborers to feed the nation's economic and territorial development. The eventual impact of these policy decisions was an unprecedented flow of new European immigration into the United States. In response, nativist politics blossomed in the form of new anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements. Yet expansive European immigrant admissions and rights flourished throughout the nineteenth century, fueled by the positive feedbacks of business constituencies reliant upon immigrant labor as well as party’s in-government attentive to influential immigrant and ethnic voting blocs. Chinese settlers, arriving in smaller numbers and denied access to the ballot box, were unable to generate the same self-reinforcing processes that promoted expansive policies for European immigration until the Progressive Era. Path-dependent arguments have clear limitations. In their weakest forms, they near the shoals of teleology when they advance a minimalist focus on how certain paths are locked in. Likewise, path-dependent accounts of critical junctures or turning points across history are typically impoverished, pointing to external disturbances and contingencies that offer little analytical promise for our understanding of crucial moments of change. The immigration policy crossroads carefully studied in the foregoing chapters offer some important insights about the nature and underlying processes of major political and policy change in America. In contrast to the neat trajectories of path-dependence, significant turning points in national politics and policy tend to reflect a rather inelegant convergence of forces. This highlights four interlocking processes, changing institutional opportunities and constraints, shifting expertise, international threats, and interest group coalitions that have driven the demise of aging immigration policy regimes and the creation of new ones. Given that the national political system was designed with a formidable set of veto-points to frustrate major political and policy departures, it should not surprise us that those rare historical moments in which new political and policy orders are founded in American politics often require the convergence of several forces at once. One promising means of taming critical junctures for more systematic analysis is to focus, as Kathleen Thelen suggests that, on the breakdown of specific reproduction mechanisms that animate and sustain given political or policy trajectories. In this study, for instance, the rise of the national origins quota system in the 1920s was propelled at least in part by a Progressive Era assault on traditional nineteenth-century partisan and electoral processes that under girded and reinforced expansive European immigration. The breakdown of these processes provided political space for a more insulated policymaking process to emerge, one driven by committee barons, scientific government, and national security imperatives that advantaged nativist reformers. In turn, the capacity of post World War II immigration reformers to use this insulated process to produce policies at odds with the nativist goals of its Progressive Era architects suggests that innovators sometimes can rework the logic of a preexisting system for their own purposes (Alejandro p10). However, it is significant that new immigrants did not sit quietly on the sidelines as these events unfolded. Instead, they employed the most crucial democratic rights that were preserved in the aftermath of the 1996 acts. Their ability to do so could be traced to an older legal innovation never intended to court radical change: The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 removed racial and gender barriers from American naturalization law, considered at the time a small concession to liberal reformers by Cold War restrictionists who expected nonwhite immigration to be negligible in later years. The transformative potential of this innovation, like that which established easy naturalization for white European men long before, became evident only with the large waves of new immigration that followed several decades later. Yet whereas European arrivals were swiftly incorporated into the robust electoral and partisan politics of nineteenth-century American life, contemporary Third World newcomers encountered a modern U.S. polity in which many citizens were politically inactive and distrustful of government. By the 1990s, critics of multiculturalism wrote wistfully about earlier immigrant assimilation traditions and fretfully about low naturalization rates and the diminution of American citizenship. In the wake of Proposition 187 and the 1996 welfare and immigration reforms, however, record numbers of new immigrants sought citizenship and access to the voting booth to recover their former rights. This new generation of enfranchised immigrants, like European newcomers of the nineteenth century, has created strong electoral incentives for national political leaders to adopt expansive policies toward future arrivals. Their political efficiency once more highlights the powerful interaction of politics and policy over time. It also allows us to end on a hopeful note. If we are lucky, new immigrants may do much more than give new life to the nation's troubled cities and graying labor force. They may demonstrate that participatory democracy and partisan competition still have vibrant possibilities in American politics. They may demonstrate that participatory democracy and partisan competition still have vibrant possibilities in American politics. Work cited Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut.; Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (co-published with the Russell Sage Foundation New York, 2001 p 10 Matthew Frye Jacobson.; Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998 p 12. David L. Brye. Santa Barbara. European Immigration and Ethnicity in the United States and Canada: A Historical Bibliography, 1983 p 15. Read More