Integration and Politics

Our History Shows the Costs and Benefits of Immigration

The inflows in the 1840s and 1850s amounted to over 2% of annual population per year. Imagine, if you will, the arrival of between 30 and 50 million immigrants over the next 6 years. This would mean immigration would grow by 300% to 500% from its current rates, to between 6 and 8 million people per year. Imagine they speak a different language, have a different religion, come from a place with radically different forms of government, tend to be poor, and they’re associated with foreign terrorist groups. They try and drag us into foreign wars. It is not shocking that nativists resorted to violence and launched successful nation-wide political movements during the 1840s and 1850s. We should rightly deplore the racism, the violence, the illiberal politics, of the nativist movements of the antebellum period.

But! And yes, there’s a but here. It is reasonable to believe that allowing in 40 million immigrants over the next 6 years would cause even many very liberally minded people to react with intolerance. How many of us, no matter how committed we may be to a more open immigration policy, would really have no qualms over welcoming in 7 million immigrants a year from non-democratic countries with ongoing civil wars (as in Germany in the 1850s) and unfamiliar religions? What if they started conducting terrorist or military operations from within our territory? These aren’t hypotheticals: this is what actually happened in the 1840s to 1880s.

And even though we know how this story ends, there’s an open question: was an open immigration policy a smart bet? In hindsight, letting in all those Irish and Germans won the Union the civil war and energized our nation in a remarkable way, fueling our path to greatness, while also giving us an extremely valuable tradition of openness to migration. But maybe we just got lucky. Those concerned about immigration don’t have to be irrational or hateful to believe that we just got lucky the first time around.

Serious advocates of higher levels of immigration (I count myself as one) have to take seriously the possibility of a 21st century Fenian Raids. We have to understand that when Irish immigrants arrived, many opted out of the public schools and set up schools for their own foreign religion, opting out of a firmly-established bedrock of American democratic tradition. Nativists set fire to churches, and in a series of riots, dozens of people were slain and hundreds injured. Even 3 militiamen died in the fighting. Meanwhile, German immigrants were so successful in pressing their cultural norms on Anglo-Americans that we call the year before 1st grade Kindergarten.

I don’t know of any immigration advocate who argues for bringing in 8 million immigrants per year, equivalent to the inflows we experienced in the 1850s. So it’s highly unlikely any new inflows, say of Arabs or Chinese or Indians, would have quite as resounding an effect. Most advocates of higher immigration favor inflows of maybe just between 2 and 3 million at most, rates that would be much easier to assimilate without major changes to our existing cultural and political structures than the rates seen in the 1850s. But we need to take seriously the political and cultural limits of any policy.