Immigration is one of those great unifying issues: It brings together hypocrites of all persuasions. Americans who would not be caught dead phoning up the same radio call-in show are in remarkable agreement when it comes to keeping out foreigners. A solid 75 percent of the public, for example, is convinced that curbing immigration will mean better jobs for Americans. President Clinton, with an approval rating of only 43 percent on the economy and 36 percent on foreign policy, knew when he was whipped. His new policy on Haitian refugees is prudently indistinguishable from the old restrictive one.
There was a time when U.S. Marines neatly dealt with problems like Haiti by going ashore to prop up friendly, if unsavory, dictators. But now the Marines stay home, and the dictators know that they don't even have to be friendly. So thousands of Haitians, like millions before who were crushed by despots of everything but hope, have sought a better life in America.
And so the 100 percent Americans are alarmed, as they have always been about immigrants coming from the wrong places. The Haitians are poor and uneducated, they say, if not outright criminals; they don't share America's democratic values; they are ridden with AIDS and other loathsome diseases. The arguments might be impressive if it weren't for their tedious sameness. In the 1870s, it was the Chinese of San Francisco who alarmed the natives: They stole jobs and spread smallpox. In 1916, it was the Italians in New York who were said to infect decent people with polio. Eastern European Jews, a respected American sociologist declared in 1914, were "moral cripples" who played fast and loose with the law and with gentile women. The prevailing early-1900s wisdom even among progressive thinkers was that non-Anglo-Saxons inherently lacked "the instinct for liberty."
Still, the neo-nativists are right about the Haitians: They make poor immigrant material. Almost as poor, in fact, as every other immigrant group once did. The overwhelming majority of ambitious men and women who made the journey to these shores arrived without skills, money, education or conspicuous morality. Half the Italians, a quarter of the Jews and a third of the Poles who came at the turn of the century were illiterate. Since the government began keeping records in 1820, laborers, servants or those with no occupation at all have always far outnumbered skilled workers. It is worth remembering, too, that the keepers of Western values who settled in Jamestown imported women of dubious virtue by the boatload and the Anglo-Saxons with liberty in their genes who settled Massachusetts went around hanging Quakers. Somehow, even they turned into solid American citizens in the end.
There are serious matters to be discussed on immigration policy, in particular the local strains on welfare and schools and health services in Florida and California, now the subject of a federal lawsuit. There are also tired arguments that will not die.
